For BB owners that have an iPad, here’s a MIDI Designer pro layout to control your BB from your iPad.
Note: you’ll have to purchase the minimum version of Midi Designer pro on your iPad, but you won’t need the extras package or StreamByter plugin to simply load and use this plugin… unless you want to redesign (customise) the layout.
A huge advantage to using this is the tempo slider I have created (myself), as well as testing various songs, etc (based on Fretnomore’s earlier work).
I deliberately limited the tempo slider from 50 BPM to 177 BPM, because I just don’t need anything outside that range. I’ve embedded ‘StreamByter’ rules into MDP to re-interpret the slider data and send this to the BB via MIDI. If someone was really keen to have a broader range I could probably get StreamByter to do that now that I have come this far.
The plus/minus 10 BPM buttons rely on a fairly recent firmware upgrade and might not work if you’ve staid with the older version (yes - I avoided the playlist version as well until they sorted out the bugs!)
The other compatibility is your “MIDI in” settings. If you’ve turned off some of the MIDI control of your beat buddy not all of these features will work. If you don’t know what I mean (ie you haven’t fiddled), things will prob work okay out of the box!?
More Detailed Description
Left hand pages:
Left hand side pages in this layout control the BB by going next/previous or by section numbers directly. I use a BlueBoard pedal board to control this layout and a neat trick in Midi Designer Pro is to pair your pedal board with the hidden ‘pedal board’ buttons… which control which ever layout is currently on screen. You can switch left and right between these two screens with the little arrows on the left of the screen. The pedal board buttons will control the buttons that are coloured (and won’t control the greyed out buttons). If you’re going to use a pedal board to control this layout, press a blank space on this left layout and slide upward with two fingers to expose the pedal board buttons behind the left screen. You might need to edit these to make them learn the MIDI controller/note/PC that your pedal sends out - then you can control your Beat Buddy by foot.
Right hand pages:
The right hand tabs in this MIDI Designer Pro (MDP) layout allow you to preview various songs (and drum fills within them). There are too many songs to fit on one screen, so I scrambled them to a main page with ones I like… and a second page with songs I’ll probably never need. This RH side also has arrows to go between these song banks quickly. This right hand side of the layout is based on an earlier layout by Stressnomore (which was great), so if you don’t agree with or like my song scrambling, look at his and you might decide to mix and match (eg his layout one side, my BB with tempo control the other?)
Generally:
The great thing is how customisable the BeatBuddy is… and the bad thing is how customisable the Beat Buddy is. If you’ve changed the order or content of your song folders, these song folders may not line up with yours. All I have done, though is to create a Gary (user) folder as the first folder (done with the BB Manager). If you create your own Tom, Fred or George folder as the first in the BB Manager… then you’ll prob align? If not, you can edit these song lists - happy to give guidance on that.
I’ve also bought a lot of custom drum kits, so that drum list (control at the furthest top right) may not line up with yours either?
Happy to take comments and make simple changes (if it’s a complex list of changes I’ll point you in the right direction to change it your self?!)
Last comment: iOS has a small handful of dedicated music app developers. If you find this software helpful, it’s probably not a bad idea to reward the developers by 1) buying a licence and 2) give them a great review wherever you can. I’m thinking of Dan Rosenstark (MIDI Designer Pro) and Nick from Audeonics (StreamByter/Midifire). My whole setup is based on Loopy Pro on iPad.. so I also worship Michael Tyson (Loopy Pro - a tasty pixel).
Great people and all hard-working developers, worthy of your recognition!
