You Asked, We Answered

Meredith Schmidt
Sep 20, 2019
4 min read

We’ve gotten some great questions and feedback in our Facebook group, BeatBox Backers. We want to thank everyone in it for showing interest in the BeatBox, we are so excited about the successful launch of our Kickstarter! Thank you for getting us fully funded in 11 hours!!Here we have pulled some of the answers we have given in it and put them in one place so you don’t have to scroll through comments to get one nugget of information. If there is something that you still need clarification on, let us know!

STANDALONE STATUS:

It is not a standalone, however, we have an iOS/Android app that is going to be offered with the hardware so you can connect it to your mobile device and have a “standalone” like experience. We’ve found it is way better for workflow with the phone’s superior touch screen.

YOU CAN DAISY CHAIN:

It will have a USB hub built in so you daisy chain another instrument to the BeatBox. We are intending to release a suite of instruments in the future and you should be able to daisy chain everything so that they only take up one port on your device.

IT IS A MIDI CONTROLLER:

The unit itself is a MIDI controller that sends MIDI signals to your DAW or phone and the phone or software sends audio signals back to the USB sound card built into the box which in turn plays on the built-in speakers.

WHY THE CARDBOARD EXTERIOR:

We like the maker look of the cardboard, and it is eco-friendly as a bonus. We have gotten good feedback on it, but are looking into other material options for the future.

WILL THERE BE BOXES MADE OF OTHER MATERIAL AVAILABLE?

Short term, no. However, we will be releasing a template for the box base if users want to make their own out of a different material. We are open to the idea of a base made out of a different material as a possible stretch goal on our Kickstarter campaign.

1. We will sell replacement boxes for low, and we are thinking about doing a plastic chassis as an add-on. We are still trying to work out the costs with our manufacturer, we don't want to make this add-on box ridiculously expensive, but looking at how the Pocket Operator's case is like $40... I don't know. We'll try our best. 2. Another concern we had with the replacement boxes is international orders, you'd probably have to pay international shipping for those, and that's kind of just out of our control. 3. That being said, we ARE releasing both .ai cutout files and .stl 3D print files so you can make your own boxes. Might not be as sturdy as our cardboard boxes, but you can totally just make it on wood, MDF, or what not. We want YOU to customize and build your very own BeatBox, our kit is just a starting point

SOME BUTTON INFO:

To be honest, they are just typical arcade buttons. You can get them on Amazon even. It's a bit difficult for us to offer full customization right now, since that'd mean we'd have to keep a stock of arcade buttons in all sorts of colors somewhere and it'd be hard to break even on that. Maybe later if we get a better idea on the demand, we can work something out.

They are just generic arcade buttons with .110 terminals. We are also going to offer SANWA OBSF-30 buttons as an upgrade.

WHEN CAN I GET MY HANDS ON ONE?

If everything goes SUPER well, we'll be able to get our inventory by the end of the year. That being said, if we learned anything from this whole venture is that things never go well, plus shipping during Christmas/New Years is just unreliable, and we don't want to ruin anyone's Christmas here. Realistically we are looking at shipping by March 2020.

LOOPER:

We are actually building a 4 layer looper in our app, with BPM and loop length setting and all. Still a work in progress, we just got recording/playback/exporting and playing on top of an existing recording to work last week, but it's coming!

ALL ABOUT THE CASE:

The case is made of cardboard like the box and has an opening for the handle to go through so you can take your Beatbox with you anywhere. We are considering offering a plastic housing at this point as an add-on, but we need to work it out with our manufacturers first. We'll see if the costs justify the cause! For example, the Pocket Operators chassis cost $40, and that's kind of ridiculous for such a small little plastic case. They might have their reasoning though. Manufacturing is weird.

THE APP & ANDROID:

We have an Android version of our mobile app. It's still in development, and Android development has been a bit troublesome compared to iOS, but we fully intend on releasing it. We actually teased our iOS and Android apps at Makerfaire Bay Area and they were functional.

HOW TO UPLOAD SOUNDS:

The hardware is just a MIDI controller, all the sound processing is done on our mobile DAW app. It works kind of like a stripped down version of MPC. You can upload and edit your own samples either from local storage or iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox.