Beat Thang delayed?

have any of the beat kangs designers/developers and beat kangz supporters actually used an mpc? an mpc other than the mpc500?

and if you have, do you make sample based music dj premier, j dilla, rza, or 9th wonder style? i.e. actually flipping/chopping samples with the unit, not just "importing" samples?

The reason i ask is so far it sounds like everyone on this thread (well those who support or are a beat kang) sounds like software users, "keyboard" beat makers, or "sample mp3s and chop on computer import to playback sampler users", and not true vinyl hiphop heads.

Nadir said "If you prefer to do your sampling on an MPC, you can do that, and still drag your files over to the Thang. No fuss." fck that, if you've used an mpc and sample vinyl you would realize that statement is pointless-why would i sample on mpc to just drag it into the BT, why not just directly sample into BT?. its not just about recording/sampling sounds, but the workflow with how you chop those samples and how you interact with chopping and sequencing. a good beat machine/sampler is more about chopping than anything else, chopping is whats important, dont call it a mpc competition if you cant chop on it in an intuitive way. im worried this might just be a playback sampler....if thats the case, im out.

and people who actually chop and sample dont really want some autochop bullshit. yeah, autochop detection is nice, but there is more to chopping than slicing up shit evenly or by threshold......BEAT KANGS PLEASE take some hints from jjos on the mpc2500, watch some boon doc videos, and learn up on chopping on the mpc..............

FINALLY, im not posting this thread to be a naysayer/hater/dick, im posting because i really hope BT could be a step up for us samplerists/choppers/vinyl heads/diggers/hiphop heads.

but you got to beable to sample and chop on it like a true sampler, and hopefully as good if not better than the mpc.

good points cyrus.

personally, the way I'm chopping on the virtual right now is like some old school asr stuff.

I just copy from pad to pad and set the start/end points on each sample

I'm not really an "autochop" person either, but I do want to see some manual slice points, letting me see the whole
wave and make my slices, then push those to the pads.

I've already made this request to their support/dev squad.

Explicit- wrote:

inflict3 wrote:yo, i finally got that update working rite... now it dont crash all the time, the thang still needs much work though.. a step sequencer would be nice, and a few other things, only time will tell...

it doesnt even have a step sequencer?

nope...

cyrus wrote:Nadir said "If you prefer to do your sampling on an MPC, you can do that, and still drag your files over to the Thang. No fuss." fck that, if you've used an mpc and sample vinyl you would realize that statement is pointless-

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read it

yes, the ovewhelming population of people here do hip-hop, but that was not what the mpc was originally created for. The beat thangy wang is aimed solely at hip hop, runs offa software, and aint a sampler/sequencer. Its a beat thang, thats it! And if I hear one more person call this forum a hip-hop forum..............

Tapuno wrote:The beat thingy

Corrected, good sir

Tapuno wrote:BUT the beathingy IS a software based sampler............................
The MPC, ................... the beathingy.......................... outperform a beathingy..............................
The Beat Thang(beathingy, new name for it) is in a catagory of its own. minus alot of features an MPC has, plus alot of others that it doesnt. It really is unfair to compare them, especially as we have no user reviews from the general public.

b.read wrote:

Tapuno wrote:The beathingy

Corrected, good sir

Just an FYI, one of the Beat Kangz used(uses) an MPC 2kXL, 3000 and a 4000. I know because I did some work with him and the guy is a dope producer and an ever better engineer (check album credits). I am not a name dropper/bragger but from what I know about "Da Kangz", "Da Beat Thang" should be an interesting production instrument. Not sure if it will "replace" the MPC or not?

well I dont think that using the point saying that the beat thang is running on software is an important one, because every mpc, asr, sp, or what ever... they all run on software.

apparently people claim that it is running on software code that they didn't write from scratch... which might sound bad, however if it works then so be it. You can say the same about apple to a certain extent since they run an OS based on unix... the same can also be said about linux and all sorts of software we all use and embrace.

The real thing to be said is... as of late, it appears that the beat kang program is unstable, it lacks basic features, and it is nothing new.

I am not an ableton fan or anything, but I watched a video that was released about ableton and it was about how the company opperates. One thing one of the ableton programmers mentioned is how their primary concern is that they write good solid code and how they test thoroughly to make sure everything runs bug free. That is a value I can appreciate in a company. It seems that the virtual is tossed together and released so eagerly that they wound up losing 3/4s of the people who at one point were interested in their products.


the fact is, we will only be able to really confirm that the beat thang is trash once somebody besides a fanboy or a BKE employee gets one and tries it out in person... the question is..... will that ever happen and if so, when?



for me, if I had a grand to blow on another machine, I would get an mpc4000... or a new computer... or screw that, I would get those JBL monitors that pound da problem has.

There is a huge difference between the MPC "software" and Beat Thang. Think of a calculator or watch. Those run software too, but is it anything like your PC running Windows/OSX/Linux? Not at all. Your calculator is on instantly after pressing the on switch. It is tiny. It runs on a processor nowhere near the speed of your PC, and yet, it responds faster than your PC GUI.

The MPC boots up in 10 seconds, the Beat Thang is unlikely to be ready before 30 seconds. The MPC has how much latency? I don't know, we should measure it. The Beat Thang is unlikely to have less than 2-8ms. Is that more than the MPC? Maybe. Does the MPC have a tight clock? The Beat Thang might have a sloppy clock, we don't know, but it seems more likely.

It could be unimportant to you, but it's certainly different. Most hardware synths today use software too. Does that make them the same as PC soft-synths?

Jamon wrote:There is a huge difference between the MPC "software" and Beat Thang. Think of a calculator or watch. Those run software too, but is it anything like your PC running Windows/OSX/Linux? Not at all. Your calculator is on instantly after pressing the on switch. It is tiny. It runs on a processor nowhere near the speed of your PC, and yet, it responds faster than your PC GUI.

The MPC boots up in 10 seconds, the Beat Thang is unlikely to be ready before 30 seconds. The MPC has how much latency? I don't know, we should measure it. The Beat Thang is unlikely to have less than 2-8ms. Is that more than the MPC? Maybe. Does the MPC have a tight clock? The Beat Thang might have a sloppy clock, we don't know, but it seems more likely.

It could be unimportant to you, but it's certainly different. Most hardware synths today use software too. Does that make them the same as PC soft-synths?

all your points are speculation. that is my point... you cant predict how much latency it will have when the beat kangs haven't even settled on the hardware yet (from what I gather).

and yes, your mpc does run on software like a computer. It is a main board, cpu, ram, sound card, video card, scsi/ide/floppy controllers, and control surface... a computer has the same components basically. with out an OS to boot to, POST, cmos (probably, for things like saving the primary removable media device) and other basic things... it would be a pile of chip board. The difference is that the mpc OSs are designed specifically for the hardware... and we dont know about the BT, but it seems that it will be a collection of software tweaked and altered to run that machine. You cant judge milliseconds of latency on things like that... you have to wait untill you can personally test them.

No, it runs embedded Linux. I've built multiple systems using it so I have an idea what to expect. It also uses Juce, which was used to code the SoundSurfer app, and the multitrack recording software I've used for years. Aja told me already they can't get it below 2ms latency. That usually means 1-way, so you have to double or triple it, which would be 6ms total. Once you use 960ppq with FX maybe it'll be higher. He also said 30second boot time. Did he use a stopwatch to check? Probably not, but we know it takes time to boot, and there's latency.

They couldn't even get an update for Vista to work right. What are the odds they understand how to optimize Linux for realtime audio applications? Even if they could, or they open the source code so we can do it, there are minimum performance levels one can achieve with that type of system. Aja said there's no fan, which means a slow CPU. Even with top-speed workstations today and the fastest audio cards you still have milliseconds of latency. You need to get lower level and use dedicated audio processors to be able to have power and fast response.

I don't understand the electronics in the MPC, so for all I know that system is slower. But I'd assume that these audio companies with a long history have built up their own optimized OS' for dedicated DSPs that can, theoretically at least, provide better performance with less energy consumption than something using the PC architecture. I'd be really surprised if the microSAMPLER uses Linux and/or is slower than the Beat Thang. One would hope that the microSAMPLER will have near-zero latency, but at most no more than 1.5ms total. Beat Thang can't compete with that.

Most people don't care, so it doesn't matter much to their business. It matters to me though. If someone measured the MPC and found that the MIDI sequencing isn't rock solid, and there is >2ms latency when hitting a pad until you hear a sound, that'd bother me. I already found that the audio tracks in JJ OS seem to have considerable amount of uncorrected latency in the recordings. I haven't verified yet, but once I do I'll be emailing JJ until it gets fixed. Timing is very important when it comes to music. Recording on slow PCs with high latency is like trying to run on Jello.

okay so you know in that case the exact specs of the beat thang. Then can you explain what the issue is and why they decided not to release it? Obviously they are fixing something. And if you cant deal with 2ms of latency, then you must have the timing of a computer yourself. I guess we will see... we cant really speculate anything untill the machine is out.

even if the machine's system is based on the things you said... we dont know what they tweaked and what they changed. We have no clue.

But seriously, you do have a bunch of valid points... however I dont think latency is at the top of the concerns list. hell, having your monitors a yard away is probably a millisecond or two of latency.

There's other oddities I've encountered with PC audio, like inconsistent timing. That's worse than solid latency. At least with a digital hardware synth you can hope it has a consistent latency. If my virtual analog synth has 4ms latency, it's not perfect but since the OS is so dedicated I expect it is something I can adjust to. It's like a guitar, you can naturally account for that latency, but if the amp starts randomly moving closer and further from you, it becomes disorienting.

With PCs, since there are other things going on, and buffers, sometimes there's moments when things don't go through as planned, and get delayed. But you can't predict when, so the timing shifts, and you get that weird elastic feeling.

Configuring Linux to act like a realtime OS is an art. There is constant development, and no easy to follow guide. It is complicated and different for each system. It depends on so many factors, it's difficult to optimize fully. Did they write the drivers for all components from scratch? If so, do they know what they're doing? If not, did the manufacturer take the time to optimize? Even if they did, does it all fit together perfectly with their specific combination of hardware and software?

It's very complicated. That's a main reason why I haven't built my own custom audio system yet. I guess that these established manufacturers with career engineers who use dedicated electronics and custom firmware that took decades to build are going to give me something better than I can slap together right now. In reality, maybe that's not the case. We recently measured latency in all the dedicated multitrack recorders and none so far have programmed in auto-compensation.

Maybe PC is the way forward. But do you really think the Beat Kangz developers are the ones who will get it right first? This is new territory, it will take time and multiple attempts. Then in 10 years we'll have solid dedicated audio devices built on Linux. But now, the MPC is peaked, it's mature. It has low hardware specs, but in theory it should be a more solid tool to use right now. Beat Thang still has a chance, you'll just have to wait. Not a month, more like at least a year.

By then we'll have even more developments, and more options.

very well said.

And we can only assume that they wont do to well after seeing the issues they already had/have with the virtual. Who knows.