To put this in writing, we are experiencing a delay issue on the board input ONLY with Android devices. We really didn't see this coming, since the hardware prototypes along the way worked fine with Android, except this latest version, and late 2020 we had a major rework on the UI of the app, which we only tested on iOS, so we haven't given the Android side too much testing until December. We think the issue lays in the firmware, and we are talking to the manufacturer on getting an older version of the firmware to see what's been changed. We might need to do a mass recall on this board from Android users. If you are on other devices, this issue shouldn't affect you at all.
We had to hold off on international orders before this issue can be resolved. Now that we are sure that it's only on Android, we should be able to ship out all others. We will be sending out a mass email today and tomorrow (we still have to figure out how to send emails to all of you without bouncing), with a survey on what platform you are on, so definitely get back to us by this weekend so we can get your unit out. We have to do this since we can't possibly afford doing recalls internationally. For US backers it's a matter of less than $10 on shipping, but internationally we might as well go bankrupt. I'm very sorry and disappointed in how we missed this issue.
The app on Android otherwise works fine, other than file importing. Android file management is massively different from iOS, which we need to change a lot of structures over. Meanwhile, all Android users can try out using either Cakewalk by Bandlab (https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk), or Roland Zenbeats (https://www.roland.com/us/products/rc_zenbeats/), both are free on PC or Mac, and both work with the BeatBox. Although they are not made for the BeatBox, which makes the usage not ideal, they are both very functional and you should at least be able to get some beats going.
Other than that, most Kickstarter shipments should have been out. We still have about 40 packages in the office ready to go, just need the UPS pickup person to swing by. A lot of your units are on the road, especially if you are in a further state. We've been having a TON of emails from everybody lately asking where their units are, since they've seen others already getting the BeatBox, and to be honest, with everything going on, there's just no way we can reply to all of you on time, so just bear with us a bit longer.
Although the app functions on iOS, it's far from perfect. We have an iPhone 11 pro, iPhone 8 and iPad air in the office to test with, and we haven't been seeing too many crashes, however we have noticed that a lot of the iOS testers have had crashes all over the place. Definitely reach out to us if you are able to pinpoint a surefire issue that'd cause a crash, and email us at [email protected], since otherwise there's no way we'd know what the issue really is. This would help us speed up our debugging process a lot. We've been posting this email address in our facebook backer group this entire week with everybody talking about app crashes, and we somehow haven't gotten a single email on bugs... Help us out here, please.
There's been about 4 of you that got back to me on missing parts. When we are dealing with this amount of parts and orders, it's bound to happen, since the packing list is a lot more significant than most electronics (think about a cellphone, there's really only a phone, cord, charger, manuals, that's it; we have a packing list of over 30 items). If a part is really missing or dead on arrival, reach out to us and we'll get it replaced for you.
Anyways, in the next few days we'll post video tutorials on basic functionalities on the app, as well as Ableton mapping. Since it seems like not all of you are checking updates, we are also looking into setting up a membership system on our website, that'll only send you emails on crucial updates without any marketing.
First BeatBox units shipped! Here's what to do after you've received the BeatBox.
almost 4 years ago
– Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 09:33:27 PM
Hi all,
Sorry if we've been a bit slow on responding to messages and comments lately. We've been exhausting all the productivity here on inventory management and shipping.
So far, we've shipped around 300 packages. It seems like some of you have already received your packages. We are working at a rate of around 100 packages a day, since we have to do some quality control check on each unit, and UPS pickup can only handle so many boxes a day. We should have all of the US backer units shipped out within this week, both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Some of you should already have tracking numbers available on Backerkit, and most of you should have a tracking number sent to you by UPS upon pick-up (we forgot to enter some of your email addresses when we created the shipping labels, so some of you might not be getting any, but they are on the way, we'll upload all tracking numbers to backerkit/indiegogo after we finish all of the packages).
For those of you that got the package, you might notice there isn't an assembly manual in the package. That's because the assembly tutorial is in an interactive video form in our app. The app is still currently in beta, since we are still making changes on a daily basis. Developing a mobile DAW was a lot harder than we imagined at first, but we fully intend to finish all functionalities envisioned and give you a great product to play with. As of right now, the app is fully functional on sample loading, triggering, volume control, sequencer recording and playback, and basic sample edits like trimming and slicing. Over the next month, we'll be adding functionalities like note playing, quick effects, sequencer layering and more(these are all features that is already mostly developed, just not live on the build yet before we finish and test them thoroughly). We are also talking to a number of beat makers regarding changes/improvements to be done on the app workflow, so chances are a few months later this app will look very different than it does now. You can sign up for the beta invite at: https://www.rhythmo.io/get-started. After you sign up on the site, we'll send a testing invite to you within a day. Also, feel free to send us any feedback on the app workflow, and we'll see if it makes sense to implement changes.
If you don't want to follow the tutorial in app, we have the entire assembly tutorial in video and PDF form in the download link as well. We've had a few cases where a few parts are missing in the box. If you are seeing parts missing throughout your assembly process, send us an email on our website contact section, and we'll send you the corresponding replacement parts. Try to finish installing all that you can before you reach out to us though - some of the parts might be placed in other bags, and sending replacement parts can be pretty expensive on our already thin margins.
You should also have a code on the sheet for some free lessons on Melodics, courtesy of our friends over at... well, Melodics. Melodics is definitely one of the best ways to learn how to fingerdrum, impress everybody and get all the people that say "button pushing is not real music making" to shut up once and for all. Head over to https://melodics.com/ for downloading the software. Now, unfortunately there's another workaround involved in this process. Melodics has agreed to make a custom mapping for BeatBox, but they haven't started on it yet, since they got their BeatBox unit not too long ago and far as we understand, a large portion of their team is currently on vacation, so they can't implement this change until January. Melodics offers a tool for you to map your own controller. For Mac OS, this works without a problem. For Windows, for some reason Melodics doesn't detect midi inputs from the BeatBox in the hardware mapping screen, which wasn't the case with our older prototypes. In order to get this to work on Windows, you need to download the mapping file we created, at the bottom of our Get Started link: https://www.rhythmo.io/get-started, as well as the guide from Melodics on uploading your own mapping file. Save the .json file included here in your Melodics local data folder as the instruction states, and Melodics should be functional. I know this sounds very complicated, and here's a video instruction below, honestly the whole process shouldn't take you longer than 5 minutes:
With our promo code, you have access to some of my favorite lessons from Melodics. I highly recommend signing up for their full subscription for a month and really focus on practicing. A lot of you have seen my finger drumming performances on our social media pages. Prior to starting the company, I barely even dabbled in controller performance; but within 4 months of on-and-off training with Melodics, I was able to produce the contents you've seen on our social media. We'll make another video in the future regarding what we think is the proper way to train with Melodics.
We are working on shipping for the rest of the world right now. A slight issue at hand is that SANWA couldn't package the button upgrades - they could only send us all of the buttons individually, and our logistics partner isn't going to be able to bag the buttons either, so we have to find someone in China to bag all of the button upgrades. We'll try to get all the other units without the button upgrade to ship first this week. The challenge here is really because we are so understaffed, when we focus on one issue, in this case inspecting and packing all the units for US backers, we kind of just don't have time to do anything else. I'm very sorry about the frustration we have caused for all of our international backers, and thank you very much for your patience.
We finally got units in hand!
almost 4 years ago
– Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 01:40:33 AM
Hope everyone had a great holiday! Good news: our inventory started coming in on the 24th!
We were supposed to have everything shipped to us on a dedicated truck, but again, due to shortage of workers, we decided to send our shipment to FEDEX and they decided to ship everything to us in batches. On the 24th, we received around 500 units. Everything else should be coming in on the 28th, which is the next day shipping services return to normal.
We are currently working on packing all the orders to start shipping out on the 28th. It's a bit of a time consuming process to pack - we are processing all of the orders ourselves, plus we are giving all units a final quality inspection before we ship. We should be able to finish packing and shipping all US orders by the end of the year.
Oh, and I finally got to take a look at the "glossy" white boxes. I have no idea what kind of atrocious camera setup our manufacturer representative had, but in person this glossy box doesn't look half bad. If anything this finish would be more dirt and liquid resistant. Take a look:
Shipping Update - More Delay Unfortunately
almost 4 years ago
– Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 09:34:23 PM
Hi all, got some bad news again this time. In our last update we stated that we were getting the inventory on the 18th, and it didn't turn out to be the case. On the night of 17th we were told that the shipment was still held at customs. It had cleared customs at the time, but due to the increased amount of shipments this month and shortage of workers, our shipment wasn't unloaded on time.
This threw our entire shipping plan off the path. We had worked all week to prepare all the boxes and shipping labels, and packed all the add-ons, organized the boxes in colorways, just so we could expedite packing close to 800 packages over a weekend so the majority of you can get it before Christmas. The idea was once the shipment arrives, all it'd take would be putting the actual unit in, seal the package, and done.
We were told last night that the shipment is now loaded to the truck and en route to us. Unfortunately this delay means just about no one is going to get the BeatBox by Christmas. We ended up wasting a lot of time on pre-packing these boxes, and sending out emails to our further backers to offer express shipping only to go back on the offer. It really wasn't our intentions to ruin anybody's Christmas, and we really hope we didn't do too much harm. We had informed all of the backers that we offered express shipping to regarding the issue, and it's really heartwarming to see all of our backers being understanding regarding current circumstances.
Good thing is we are expecting the shipment is arriving in our office this week for sure, and you should be able to get it in hand by the end of the year, so it's a slight delay that just happened to be on the most important week in the US retail wise. We really hate to go back and forth on shipping promises - we get quoted an exact date, and we come back to you with the exact date, only to find out the date isn't all that exact after all and have to go back on our promise. I understand that this really isn't a good look on our creditability, but honestly there's just not much we could have done about it.
Ugh, some not so great news
almost 4 years ago
– Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 09:25:45 PM
We got some not-so-great news last night. Basically, the inventory got to customs in Dallas on November 30th, we were supposed to get our inventory two days ago and we still hadn't heard anything about it. We called up our customs broker to see what's going on, turns out the whole shipment is getting held up at customs and isn't getting released until the 18th.
This makes everything incredibly complicated for us. We basically will only have one weekend to pack everything and ship them out on the 21st. Now, with UPS ground, most of the states should get it in by the 24th. Here's our UPS ground map:
So in this map, if you are within the 3 day mark, you are 100% fine. For everybody in the 4 day mark, we'll pay for UPS 3 day shipping out of pocket so you get it by the 24th. It's about $10 more for us per unit, but we really don't want to ruin anybody's Christmas. For the little orange section in Nevada though - I'm afraid we can't do much there. Would have costed us over $100 to ship this to you on time.
This is definitely some stressful news to get out of the blue. We honestly thought this would be a breeze but clearly, if we learned anything this year, it's that if something can get delayed, it will get delayed. We have been pre-folding and labeling all the boxes so we can cut down packaging time, since we basically only have about two days for that. It's good that we chose to fulfill this ourselves this time so we can at least work overtime to get these all packed.
Some good news for international backers, your inventory was finished two days ago and it's now awaiting pickup to go to Hong Kong for distribution.
