MIDI & sync.

Orbeat listens as well as it talks: play its lanes live from any controller or app, share tempo and the bar line with the room over Ableton Link, lock the whole groove to an external MIDI clock, and drive it from a piano roll inside your DAW. No setup screens to hunt through — plug in and hit something.

Orbeat connects to every MIDI source automatically — USB controllers, Bluetooth devices you've paired in iOS, and other apps. It also publishes a virtual input port named “Orbeat”, so any app with a MIDI output can target it directly. Note input is always on; velocity comes through exactly as you play it, whether the transport is running or stopped.

Every lane starts on a General MIDI drum note, so most drum controllers and DAW drum maps line up out of the box. The first six are the circle's default lanes; the rest arrive as you grow the kit onto the second page of rings:

Those are defaults, not limits. Open the MIDI tab under the circle and each lane can take any note from 0 to 127 and any channel — which is what lets Orbeat drive a sampler mapped some other way, or a synth you want to play melodically, rather than only a General MIDI drum machine. The same mapping works in both directions: change a lane's note and playing that note is what triggers it.

A note belongs to the lane slot, not to the sound sitting in it — swap a lane's voice for one of your own samples in a custom kit and the same note still plays it. All twelve stay live even when the circle is showing only six lanes, so you can drum a voice you haven't added to the pattern yet. Notes that aren't mapped to anything are ignored on purpose.

Set the notes your lanes send once, name it, and recall it when you change gear, instead of re-entering the same table every time you move between instruments.

The Preset menu at the top of the MIDI tab holds the maps. General MIDI, Elektron Analog Rytm, Roland TR-8S and Arturia DrumBrute are built in, and your own maps sit alongside them under Yours. Save As… stores the note and channel of all twelve lanes under a name; Manage… deletes one. The menu shows a map's name while every lane still matches it, and Custom once you change something.

A map holds notes and channels only. Choke groups and sounds stay as they are. Where a drum machine has no voice for one of Orbeat's lanes, its built-in map points that lane at the closest one it has. MIDI maps are free for everyone.

By default Orbeat listens on channel 10 (the GM drum channel). If your controller sends on something else, open Settings → MIDI → Note-in channel and pick its channel — or Omni to accept everything. Connected sources are listed right below the picker, so you can confirm Orbeat sees your gear at a glance.

A beat holds eight patterns, A to H. Send a program change, or a note, and Orbeat changes pattern without you touching the screen.

• Program change 0 to 7 selects A to H. It always works.
• Notes can do it too. With Settings → MIDI → Select patterns by MIDI note on, eight notes in a row starting at the Base note select A to H. Out of the box it is on, with the base note at 0, so notes 0 to 7 (C-2 to G-2) switch patterns.
• Both listen on the note-in channel, or on every channel with Omni.
• The switch lands when the pattern bar says: instantly, on the beat or on the bar.

If a lane's own note falls inside that window, pattern select wins and the lane's MIDI tab says so: Conflicts with Pattern Select — this note switches patterns instead. Move the lane's note, or the base note. Patterns B to H need Orbeat Pro.

Orbeat publishes a MIDI source, also named “Orbeat”, and plays your pattern out of it whenever the transport is running. Connect to it from another app, or from a hardware interface, and the circle sequences whatever is on the other end — each lane sending its own note on its own channel. Nothing to switch on: it's there as soon as the app is.

The notes are timestamped to land with what you hear, not with the moment they were worked out, so a hardware synth stays in time with Orbeat's own drums instead of running fractionally ahead of them.

Link keeps Orbeat in time with every Link-enabled app and device on the same network — Ableton Live, AUM, Loopy, a friend's iPad across the table. Tempo follows the session, bar lines line up, and nobody touches a cable. Link is free for everyone; it isn't part of Orbeat Pro.

While Link is on, tempo belongs to the session — nudge the BPM in any app and the whole room glides with it. Play stays in your hands: with Start Stop Sync enabled, pressing play (or stop) anywhere starts and stops everyone together; with it off, you come and go on your own while staying phase-locked to the shared bar. Orbeat's transport is aligned to a one-bar quantum — its sixteen steps, four beats — so every peer's bar line is the same bar line.

Running hardware or another app as the master? Orbeat can follow its MIDI clock — tempo, transport, and song position — so your groove stays welded to the rest of the rig.

While syncing, the sender is the boss: START, STOP, and CONTINUE drive the transport, and a song-position locate in your DAW lands Orbeat on the same bar when it resumes. The play button dims (the clock owns it now), but the pads stay live — you can keep drumming over a stopped transport. If the clock disappears — cable pulled, app closed — Orbeat stops within half a second and the badge flips to NO CLOCK until ticks return. Switch Sync back to Off and the manual transport is yours again, keeping the last synced tempo.

Inside AUM, Logic, GarageBand, Drambo, or any AUv3 host, Orbeat is an instrument that speaks MIDI both ways: sequence into it from the host's piano roll using each lane's note (any channel — the host does the routing), and let its sample-accurate MIDI out sequence your other instruments, lane by lane, on whichever notes and channels you've set. The plug-in carries the full circle — up to twelve lanes, custom kits and your imported samples included. Neither clock sync nor Link is needed there: the plug-in follows the host transport natively, and the host is usually the one talking to Link.

In the plug-in, the Preset menu on the MIDI tab offers the four built-in maps; saving your own maps happens in the app. Program changes and pattern notes switch patterns in the plug-in too, and hosts can automate its Pattern parameter.

Something not working? Troubleshooting covers a silent controller, Link with 0 peers, the NO CLOCK badge and a greyed-out play button.