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.
Play the pads live
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.
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.
Send MIDI out
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.
Jam with the room (Ableton Link)
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.
- Put every device on the same Wi-Fi network and allow Orbeat's local-network prompt the first time it appears — that's how Link finds its peers.
- Open Settings → MIDI → Sync and choose Ableton Link.
- Tap Link settings for Ableton's own panel: it shows how many peers are in the jam and carries the Start Stop Sync switch.
- Hit play. Orbeat waits for the session's next bar line, so it enters on the downbeat with everyone else.
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.
Follow an external clock
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.
- Open Settings → MIDI → Sync and choose External MIDI Clock.
- Start the transport on the sender. Orbeat starts from step 1, right on the downbeat.
- Change the sender's tempo and watch Orbeat glide with it — the BPM display turns read-only and shows an EXT badge while syncing.
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.
In your DAW (AUv3)
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.
Troubleshooting
The wrong instrument plays, or nothing does
Check the lane's MIDI tab. A lane sends exactly the note and channel shown there, so if the instrument on the other end is listening elsewhere, that's the first place to look. Every lane starts on the General MIDI mapping in the table above.
My controller triggers nothing
Check Settings → MIDI → Note-in channel — if the controller transmits on a channel other than 10, match it or switch to Omni. Also make sure it's sending notes in the map above; notes outside the twelve are ignored on purpose.
Link says 0 peers
Every device has to be on the same Wi-Fi network — and on iOS, Orbeat needs permission to talk to it. If you dismissed the local-network prompt, switch it back on in iOS Settings → Orbeat → Local Network. Guest networks and setups that isolate clients from each other block Link discovery; a personal hotspot shared between the devices works.
My device isn't in the Sources list
For Bluetooth MIDI, pair the device in another app or iOS Settings first — Orbeat picks up every source the system knows about, and reconnects automatically when devices come and go. For USB, try re-plugging; the list refreshes live.
The badge says NO CLOCK
Orbeat is in sync mode but no clock ticks are arriving. Make sure the sender actually transmits MIDI clock (in most DAWs that's a per-output “send clock” switch), not just start/stop. The moment ticks reappear, Orbeat locks back on.
The play button is greyed out
That's MIDI clock sync doing its job — the external clock owns the transport. Set Settings → MIDI → Sync to Off to take back manual control. (Link leaves the button in your hands — it shares tempo and the bar line, and the transport only if you switch on Start Stop Sync.)
Something else? Email zhi@digilog.tw — we read every message.