What's new.

All of these came from your emails.

Put two lanes in the same choke group and a new hit silences the other — a closed hat stopping an open one, exactly the way a real kit behaves. Until now every lane rang out on its own and hats piled up on top of each other.

Choke works everywhere sound leaves Orbeat: the built-in kits, samples you imported yourself, and the MIDI Orbeat sends out, where the choked lane gets a proper note-off so your hardware stops too. Set it per lane, up to four groups. Free for everyone. (Choke groups)

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. General MIDI, Elektron Analog Rytm, Roland TR-8S and Arturia DrumBrute are built in, and your own maps sit alongside them. Free for everyone. (MIDI maps)

Every project now holds eight patterns instead of one. Switch by tapping, or from a controller — send a program change, or a note, and Orbeat changes pattern without you touching the screen.

You choose when the change lands: instantly, on the next beat, or on the next bar. The sequencer never restarts, so a switch mid-phrase stays in time with everything else you have running. Patterns share your kit, your samples and your MIDI setup — only the rhythm changes, so switching stays instant and never reloads a sound.

Pattern banks are part of Orbeat Pro. Choke groups and the MIDI maps are free. (Patterns)

A sample longer than one step used to be cut dead the moment its lane fired again — every hit restarted the file from the top with no fade, so on a busy pattern you got a click per hit and never heard the end of the sound. Now the previous hit fades out under the new one, in the same five milliseconds a choke takes, and a long sample can be retriggered as fast as you like without the chop. A player sent a screen recording of it happening; that recording is what found it.

Orbeat also stops holding on to every sample it has ever loaded. Switching kits used to keep the old audio in memory until you quit; it is now released the moment nothing is playing it.

Thanks to the three players who wrote in — between them, they are this whole update.

You asked for this one.

Every lane now carries its own MIDI note and its own MIDI channel, so Orbeat can drive whatever you point it at — a sampler with its pads mapped some other way, a synth you want to play melodically, six instruments on six channels at once. Until now every lane sent a fixed General MIDI drum note on channel 10: perfect if you were driving a drum machine, and a dead end if you weren't.

You'll find it on a new MIDI tab, per lane. Pick the note — shown as a name and a number together, so it matches whatever your instrument's manual calls it — and pick the channel.

It applies everywhere notes leave: the AUv3 output inside your host, and the MIDI file export. What you hear in the session is what lands in the file. And it works in the other direction too — play a lane's own note from a controller and that lane fires.

Nothing moves unless you move it. Every lane starts on exactly the General MIDI note it has always sent, so existing projects, saved host presets and any hardware you have already mapped keep working untouched. Free for everyone.

The app used to receive MIDI but never send any — playing other instruments meant loading Orbeat as a plug-in inside a host. It now appears as a MIDI source in its own right, so you can open Orbeat on its own and drive a synth, a sampler or a piece of hardware straight from it, with the same per-lane notes and channels. Nothing to switch on.

Thanks to the player who wrote in about this one — it is the whole update.

You asked for these.

Bounce the pattern out as a MIDI file and drop it straight into your DAW. Every lane lands on its General MIDI drum note, so it hits the right pad in whatever you open it with — and your swing, probability rolls and polymeter phases all come across exactly as you hear them here. Sitting on a polymeter groove where the lanes only line up every fifteen bars? Pick Full and the export runs one complete cycle, so the loop actually loops.

A new Sound tab gives every lane a tune control, four octaves wide. Pitch a kick down until it's a sub, tighten a hi-hat, or take a sample you imported and play it high and short. Your own one-shots resample properly, so a vocal chop or a found sound becomes an instrument you can play across the circle. Free for everyone.

Every bounce used to land as orbeat-4bar.wav — the same name every time, so the third loop you saved turned into "orbeat-4bar 3.wav" and you were left opening files to work out which was which. An export now carries the beat's name, its length and its tempo:

orbeat-Midnight-Drive-4bar-124bpm.wav

A WAV file has nowhere to keep a tempo, so the filename is the thing that tells your DAW — and you, three months from now — how fast the loop runs.

A new button beside the tempo sends the pattern back to the first beat, so you can audition a change from the downbeat instead of wherever the circle happened to be.

Orbeat now plays in time with everything else in the room.

Switch Sync to Link and Orbeat locks to every Link-enabled app and device on your network — Ableton Live, AUM, Loopy, a friend's iPad across the table. Tempo follows the session, start and stop are shared, and everyone stays in phase without a single cable or a moment of setup. You'll find it in Settings under Sync, with a panel showing how many peers are in the jam.

If you loaded your own audio into a custom kit and it came back distorted — that was us, and it's fixed. Your samples were being pushed through the drum kit's character processing: the saturation and bit-crush that give Glitch and 8-bit their bite. Wonderful on our synthesised drums. Ruinous on a hi-hat you recorded yourself. Samples now take a clean path straight to the output, while the synth lanes keep every bit of their kit's personality. Nothing to re-import — your existing kits will simply start sounding right.

A custom kit's synth lanes used to borrow their tone from whichever built-in kit you'd touched last, so the same kit could sound different from one session to the next. Each custom kit now carries its own voicing and sounds the same every time you open it.

Bouncing a beat built on a custom kit quietly swapped your sounds back to the built-in ones — samples missing, lanes you'd silenced suddenly audible. Exports now render exactly what's playing.

Thanks to the player who wrote in about the distorted imports: that one report is half this update.

The circle grows — Orbeat now goes up to twelve lanes.

You asked for more voices, so here they are. Tap + to grow your kit past six: the mandala opens a second page of rings so every lane keeps its full size, and you flip between pages with the corner chevrons. Page two glows in its own electric color set, and the new voices land ready to play — Noise, plus a second Kick, Snare, Hat, Tom, and Clap. Works standalone and as the AUv3 in your host, with existing automation untouched. The first six lanes stay free; growing the circle is part of Orbeat Pro.

Your drum kit moved up beside the tempo — a small chip that names the active kit and opens the full picker in one tap. Below the circle, editing is now a single tidy card: two clear tabs (Velocity and Generator), a taller velocity panel with real room to draw, and a lane strip that follows the circle's page — the lane you're on expands, the rest tuck in tight. Twelve lanes, way less scrolling.

Orbeat now listens: this update is all about MIDI.

Hit the 8 lanes from any MIDI controller or app — GM drum notes with full velocity, standalone and inside your AUv3 host. Other apps can play Orbeat directly through its new virtual "Orbeat" MIDI port. Note input is always on; pick a channel (or Omni) in Settings, under MIDI.

Set Sync to External MIDI Clock and Orbeat follows the master: START, STOP and CONTINUE, tempo changes, even song-position jumps land on the right bar. The tempo display mirrors the clock with an EXT badge — and tells you the moment the clock disappears.

The play button's face now dresses for your kit — blissed-out for Acoustic, glitchy for Glitch, pixel-perfect for 8-bit. It pops its mouth on every kick and breathes with how loud you play.

New MIDI guide on the website — note map, channel setup, and a clock-sync walkthrough: MIDI & sync.

This update grows the AUv3 plugin into a full instrument and makes Orbeat bigger and easier to play everywhere.

Orbeat's AUv3 now carries the full circular sequencer inside your host. Tap the rings to place hits and edit by hand in Manual, Euclidean, and Probability modes — plus a per-step velocity strip, the kit switcher, and Random + Clear. On desktop and iPad it opens into a roomy two-column layout. Buy Orbeat Pro once and it unlocks in the plugin too.

Random and Clear now work on one lane too, not just the whole kit. Reshuffle or wipe the voice you're editing while the rest of the groove keeps going — the controls follow your selected lane.

Fixed a subtle drift between the spinning playhead and the audio — the light and the beat are locked together now.

Chunkier step dots on the mandala and a larger iPhone sequencer with bigger tap targets. On iPhone, switching between Velocity, Generator, and Kit no longer resizes the circle — your beat stays put as you work. The iPad layout is rebalanced too, including a new landscape view with the circle as hero and a controls rail alongside.

Welcome to Orbeat 1.0 — a drum machine in the round.

• A circular, six-lane sequencer you play like a mandala
• Four drum kits: Classic, Acoustic, Glitch, and 8-bit
• Euclidean and Probability generators, plus a one-tap dice roll
• Swing, per-step velocity, and polymeter
• WAV export and an AUv3 instrument with MIDI out