TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd's Sake Pick a Friggin' Word!

BeatBuddy Help, Questions and Bugs
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You BB guys are killing me.

You got songs, beats, folders on the pedal.

You got songs (not the same as pedal songs), projects, folders (not the same pedal folders) in the software.

And never the twain shall meet, apparently.

File extensions don’t match from hardware to software. There is nothing on the SD card that seems to be importable into the software. And this is all way more confusing than it needs to be.

All – ALL – I want to do is create a couple of folders (or projects or sets or frogs named Dave – I really don’t care what you call them, as long as you’re consistent) the each represent my sets in order. I can find no way to do that past creating a new folder in the Songs tab.

Now, I know this is operator error, but a little consistency in naming things, and maybe a tutorial beyond how to build new drum sets would ease my pain.

Are you feeling my frustration?

Someone out there MUST have figured out how to do this. But…

  • Song Import is looking for *SNG files – WTF is an SNG file?
  • Import Folder wants a *PBF file – WTF is that?

A step-by-step, save-the-newb tutorial is required here.

HELP! PLEASE!!

Thanks!

Joe

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Yes, it’s a mess. My first impressions matched yours almost exactly :confused:

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Maybe so, but you got it to work. Care to share how you did that?

:slight_smile:

Joe

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Fire Up BB Manager. Go to any folder (Say, ‘Rock’). Export a song. Go to your ‘Set 1’ folder. Import the song that you just exported. Mess around with it at will, move it up, move it down, whatever. That’s all. It’s easy.

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED: The Start of a Solution

The Start of a Solution

It’s completely counter-intuitive, but if you are trying to import content from the Beat Buddy to work with, this seems to work:

TO IMPORT CONTENT
[list=3]
[]From the Import/Export menu, select Import Project from Pedal. “Project” means “All Content on SD Card”
[]In the dialog box that appears, SELECT NOTHING (!!!) and click Select Folder.
[*]Choose where you want the new material stored in your PC. I recommend accepting the defaults, because I don’t know any better.[/list]
Then just keep clicking Ok, Yeah, Go, Whatever, Do It Now, until the entire SD card appears in the Songs tab on the bottom left.

TO EXPORT CONTENT YOU CAN WORK WITH
We’ve already established that “Project” = “All Content on the Card”. It may be more subtle than that, but for our purposes, that will do. Our next trick is to fix an issue in the naming convention that will prevent you from using some of the preprogrammed songs, by getting rid of the illegal characters:
[list=3]
[]Open one of the style folders that contains songs with illegal characters
[]Rename the offending songs:
[list]In Blues, remove every “/”,
In Brushes Beats, remove every “/”,
In Drum & Bass, remove every “&”,
In Jazz, remove every “/”,
In Latin, remove the parentheses “( )”,
In Odd Time, remove every “/”,
In R&B, remove every “&”,
In World, remove every “/”, and
In Metronome, remove every “/”
[*]Save your project[/list] [/list]

Note: The software seems to only allow you to “Save As,” and I’ve had issues even saving as to the previous name, so you may have to save to new names as you go along and delete the old ones afterwards.

When you’ve done all of that, I gather you have to Export to the Pedal. If that proves more interesting than it should, I’ll post more instructions here.

Joe

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Yeah, it’s a giant oversight on the part of the designers that file names have SLASHES in them…how’d that get past Q/A? In any case: rather than go through all that renaming, I choose to hex-edit any songs that I need to import, before importing. It’s easy, but not for the total non-techie. Each .sng file has two occurrences of the file name, so two characters need to be replaced–say, change the slash to a ‘_’. Then it works.

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

I’m not entirely a Luddite, but I thought maybe I wasn’t the only one trying to figure this out, so I thought I’d post the procedure using the bits that came with the package. I like your idea better – if folks are comfortable with the HEX editor, that is WAY quicker.

Quicker still, assuming the file successfully exports to my pedal, I’ll post the fixed file for people.

Unless you want to do that…?

Joe

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

I think that the designers will quickly come out with new correctly-named versions of the files, because it’s an easy and necessary fix. In the meantime, I’ll just say that I had never used a hex editor before, but got a freeware one, opened the file with it, and made the changes in a total of about 5 minutes. Am I gonna do it for all the songs? Nah, I’m kinda busy. Disclaimer: I am a software engineer, so this stuff isn’t rocket science for me. My grandma probably couldn’t handle it without a YouTube instructional video.

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

I am so happy i haven’t tried to use this as from the sound of it it’s no a lot of fun.

Hex editors? You have got to be kidding.

Actually, I took one look at it and figured life is just too short.

Nice pedal though :slight_smile:

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Guys please
It is a beta so by definition there will be bugs, the idea is that you help the designers find them.

Any software has a learning curve, this one is far from steep but it certainly needs to be simpler

Hang in there post like these will result in fixes and make the next versions better.

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Beta? LOL

try Alpha

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Yeah maybe

I do think there are a lot of obvious bugs and omissions But it is actually functional once the bugs are understood so yeah it is a beta

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

I finally found time to get the software up and running tonight and immediately stopped with complete confusion at the terms used in the menus:

song
project
single file project
instrument
drum set

I don’t have a clue where to start as there doesn’t seem to be an intuitive flow here. I mean, I know what a song is but everything else is just an assumption as to what it is and what its related file type might be. Do I load drum sets fist? If so, from where? A projects collections of songs? Etc…

Some basic term definitions would really help me right now. Any kind of flow to this would help as well.

Can anyone explain it for me?

Thanks!
(love the pedal btw)

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Some terms actually stun me as well.
But I’ll try to explain them for you.

song (in a context of being a BeatBuddy song) - is a compiled package that is ready to be played by BeatBuddy. This consists of an optional intro, optional outro, and one or more main parts each consisting from an obligatory main loop, a set of zero or more fills, one optional transition fill and one optional accent hit.

project - a strong hierarchy of one level of folders that contain songs.

single file project - same as project, but packed into one huge file for convenience.

instrument (the most counter-intuitive term) - it is simply a MIDI note that is being covered by a selected drum set.

drum set - a compiled package of samples that will be used to play BeatBuddy songs. This consists of a number of MIDI notes (instruments) that is each covered by a set of WAV samples together with volume threshold levels that control whenever that sample should be played. For every MIDI note encountered in a MIDI pattern from a song, BeatBuddy chooses the WAV sample based on the volume of this note. If there are several suitable samples, a random one of them is chosen to create the illusion of human playing and kill that machine sounding.

This should probably get (if not already) covered in the user manual.

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Re: TUTORIALS NEEDED - And for Gawd’s Sake Pick a Friggin’ W

Thanks so much - that helps. I’ll give it another whirl when I"m fresh tomorrow.

Thanks again!