I ordered a BeatBuddy today and am excitedly waiting for it to arrive! In the meantime I’m playing around with BBManager, and have a few questions to which a search of these forums didn’t turn up answers.
I’m very familiar with computers and MIDI sequencing, and have had no trouble exporting a song part to MIDI, importing into a DAW, editing, exporting back to MIDI, then re-importing to BBManager. To edit every part of complex songs, though, this process doesn’t seem to scale - it quickly becomes a ton of manual steps and clicks which would more appropriately be the job of software, not a human being.
Is there any quicker and more efficient way to edit MIDI parts of BBsongs - for example, is there a single command to export all parts of a given song into MIDI files, then later re-import the revised versions, as a batch?
Or do you have any other workflow tips for making the process more streamlined?
Welcome, Matt. There are two groups with differing views. Some like the default multi-part BeatBuddy (BB) songs and as you’ve discovered, it’s tedious to craft songs; the “toe dance” is challenging for live performances and song sections are limited to 500 midi notes but it allows greater flexibility for those that don’t want to be constrained by a rigid format. The other group prefers one-press songs because it simplifies the song-crafting task, reduces the toe dancing and removes the 500-midi note per section limit. This latter group uses the beta version of the BB Manager (BBM) software and firmware 1.8.5 to build, transfer and perform songs. It also allows them to include bass.
Thank you for the reply! Yes, I had gathered that those were the two most common approaches, from reading the forums. The pattern-based approach sounds more appealing to me, especially for songs that have a possibility of an extended solo or jam.
One feature in BBManager that would be very helpful would be an option to export a Song as a folder of individual MIDI files, one per song part, perhaps with an additional XML/CSV/JSON/whatever file that describes where and how each clip is used in the song. Then, after editing the files, that whole folder could be (re-)imported into a Song in one step. Hopefully that wouldn’t be too difficult to implement, and it would save a lot of clicking and mousing.
For now I suppose I’ll be mousing around, though. Thanks again,
Once you’ve had some time to experience the BB system, please submit improvements to the BeatBuddy system by clicking on the smiley face on the left of this page. Other users can weigh in and it gives the developers a sensing for what users want most from their BeatBuddys.
I’ve found that if I connected BB to my DAW (Using BB as the sound source ) via MIDI I could edit it directly (In my DAW) and knowing it will sound exactly the same in BB as when I edit it in my DAW.
I then just export the MIDI files (from my DAW) and transfer them to BB.
