Since various magazines and Arturia have publicly called us out over the launch of our Swing MIDI Controller, we would like to respond and share some facts around the principles of competition and clear up some misconceptions.
Competition is a highly effective tool to drive innovation by empowering Customers to make their best choices and force manufacturers to constantly reinvent themselves. Innovation means progress and this happens on many levels, whether it relates to customer experience, functionality or cost efficiencies etc.
There are 4 established marketing strategies: market leader, market challenger, market follower and market nichers. Here is a great article: https://aytm.com/blog/brand-positioning-for-a-competitive-edge-part-3/
The competition law was designed to avoid companies creating a market monopoly and stifle innovation, which would be detrimental to the rights of the Customers to expect better offerings. The law was specifically designed to encourage everyone to fiercely compete, even when it means over the same functionality and design, provided intellectual property such as utility (functional) and design patents as well as trademarks etc. are respected.
How many Fender Stratocaster or Gibson Les Paul clones are out there in the guitar world and how many SM58 clones are available? How many cars or mobile phones look alike? It is not surprising that Gibson recently lost a substantial legal case trying to prevent others from making V-shape guitars or Fender, who lost all trademark cases related to their Stratocaster design.
The reason is simple: the law encourages competition and provides maximum freedom for companies to engage head-on, all for the benefit of the Customer.
We are spending large amounts of resources on innovation, which is reflected in products such as X32, XR18, Flow, DDM4000, etc. This made us the global market leader for analog and digital mixers and over the years we have built an extensive patent portfolio:
https://community.musictribe.com/pages/intellectual-property
However, we also clearly choose to follow successful brands and products, while adding more features and/or competing on price. Much of our innovation is invisible to the Customer as it relates to our highly advanced and automated design and manufacturing processes and for that we are spending hundreds of millions of US$.
For this reason, we have become strategic partners with Microsoft, Siemens, Adobe and many other Tier 1 companies as we are pushing for extreme digitization and automation.
The follower marketing strategy is a very common business model in any industry, which is enabled by law to encourage competition. With our new Swing MIDI Controller, we followed an established concept, but of course wrote our own firmware with added functionality. However, these unique features will only come to life when we launch our free DAW.
The free Music Tribe DAW will form the heart of an incredible eco-system, where all our controllers, synthesizers and drum machines etc. will integrate seamlessly, thus dramatically improve connectivity and workflow. This will make it incredibly easy for our Customers to create, edit and share their music.
Only our upcoming controllers will feature total integration with our synthesizers, drum machines, digital mixers and other Music Tribe equipment, while also offering standard functionality with all 3rd party products.
For anyone familiar with the industry landscape, Arturia has been cloned for years (Worlde MiniMidi, etc.), while the company has also been “borrowing” from others with their VST replicas of legendary hardware synths, open-source code from Mutable Instruments, the “Expressive Touche” controller or the registration of known “DX7” and “Synthi” marks. Equally, our own analog Xenyx mixers and many other products have been widely cloned.
¬We will absolutely continue to deliver innovative products but also follow our competitors as we expect our products to be cloned - fair play.
We are very cautious when it comes to our follower approach and employ expert intellectual property firms to ensure our products stay within the boundaries of the law; we are committed to never intentionally infringe on other companies’ intellectual property.
Many years ago, we were entangled in bitter lawsuits with Mackie and Pioneer, which we all won. But we also recently lost a case against Yamaha in China related to a simple fader knob design that involved a design patent we were unfortunately not aware of. We changed the design, we will pay the fees and move on. Notably, Yamaha themselves were sued by Dr. Dre over their headphone designs (https://www.cnet.com/news/dr-dre-sues-yamaha-over-headphones/) or entangled in other legal matters (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/musical-instrument-firms-to-pay-millions-after-breaking-competition-law), which clearly shows how competitive business is. The heated Apple versus Samsung disputes are a prime example.
It is our Purpose and Mission to empower Customers who don’t have deep pockets and provide them with the best possible equipment at fair prices. We do understand that we are a fierce competitor and at times controversial as we’re relentlessly push the envelope.
We would like to thank all our Customers who have supported us over the past 30 years. We are absolutely committed to continue to deliver the best possible products at the lowest possible cost.
Question, a bit rusty on midi but I have my TD 303 and trying to sync to Abelton Live. I'm using a FocusRite ScarletIt interface and it seems to work but the sync seems off as I dont know if its the patterns in the 303 but when I raise or lower the tempo in Live it slows and speds up so I guess it's synced?
Can I use midi and will it sync better?
If someone can answer this I have a few kinda newbie questions, plz advize thx RD
Hi everyone!
New member here. I just purchased my U-Phoria and excited to put it to good use. Unfortunately my Macbook doesn't seem to recognize it. I looked for drivers on the Behringer website but only found drivers for Windows. Can you help me find drivers for Mac?
Thanks so much!
Is anyone else having this issue? Connected perfectly to my antiquated MacBook Air but I've finally upgraded and now I can't the new MacBook Pro to recognize it.
Anyone else having this issue with the new Macs with the Apple chips?
Hi there-
I'm attempting to use a bass plugged directly through my Behringer UMC204HD into my laptop (W10 PC). However, I'm not getting any indication of input signal on the UMC device (no green light on 'SIG'). I've also tried plugging into channel 2 with the same result hooking up a condenser mic on both channels with no apparent signal either. I also connected the hardware to a powered USB port, but still no luck. I also have a Behringer UMC404HD, and that is producing the same results. I was wondering if signal was still passing, and attempted to record in my DAW (Studio One), but no signal was recorded. I can confirm that the PC sees the device(s).
Setup for instrument: Bass-1/4" cable to Input 1/2, INST pressed in, tried both pressed in/out for Pad, Gain between 50-100% (I've tried using my guitars, as well as multiple cables too)
Setup for mic: Mic-XLR to Input 1/2, Pad pressed/depressed, Phantom power on, Gain between 50-100%
Drivers have been installed from Behringer's website.
I rarely use the UMC device, and have only plugged it in a few times over the past few days repeating the steps I described above. When I've used it on a mac, it works perfectly. Any thoughts on what might be going on and how I might troubleshoot further? Thanks in advance.
Hi, has any one experiecned this? Using my Crave in Ableton and when I connect it via usb and hit a key, either on the Crave itself or using my launchkey mini, I get a squealing feedback type sound almost immediatly after the note. I have to then switch the Crave off and on again to get rid of this insane noise. This doesnt happen when I go via the midi in, which is ovioulsy what I will do from now on. So it's usable but confusing and annoying! Any ideas?
Thanks
Hi there, I'm a singer and a totally newbie with the TC Helicon Voicelive 2 touch... I played with my band and wanted to mix with some live loops I was making but they got out of sync with the rythm of the band. I've been looking everywhere but I cannot find how to do this, hope someone understands what the problem is?
Hey @Doris,
This is actually a pretty difficult issue when it comes to live looping with a band. You basically have two options, and your drummer might hate both...
Option 1 is to crack the whip on your drummer. Get them to pay attention to your loop, and once you've recorded a loop and have it playing back they'll need to play in time with your loop. Your loop becomes the new tempo master that everyone else slaves to, especially the drummer, or else like you found everything will go out of sync very fast.
Option 2 is to introduce a MIDI click track. Use something like a laptop to output MIDI clock with an audible click track - like a metronome the click track is then fed to your drummer through in-ear monitors (headphones), and MIDI clock is sent to your Touch 2's MIDI input which will quantize your loops to the click track. This is obviously extra hardware and effort but some drummers will prefer this method.
Both of these will require cooperation and extra effort from your drummer, which isn't ideal but really this is only way to loop live in sync with a band. It's a simple problem with a pretty complex and still-evolving solution.
The concept of a "listening looper" is a relatively new one. To have a looper that adjusts to your playing, as opposed to adjusting your playing to the looper, isn't a common thing in the industry yet. TC Electronic just released a listening looper last year, the Ditto Jam, and its beat-detection tech is hopefully going to make it into future TC Helicon products. But for now with vocal looping you'll have to do it the old way (above), or alternatively you could send your vocals out from the Touch 2 in mono and do your looping in a Ditto Jam, that'd make your dummer happy but you'd only have one loop slot as opposed to Touch 2's 6 loop slots.
Well first of all: thank you very much for reacting, this helps me getting to know the options a lot better!!! The solutions you suggest are in my case not possible because we don't have a drummer (we ave a percussion player , the rhythms come form the computers of the keyboard player and the guitarist) so that is a bit difficult.
I heard somenone mentionng Ditto Jam so I will explore this as well although I bought the Voicelive for this purpose. Another thing is that I want to mix in my loop while we are playing, (instead of me starting them an someone else following me) so that makes it even more difficult.
Other options I was thinking about:
1:can the slave option in the settings for metronome do something to this?
2: I heard someone mentioning Ableton push? Is that an option?
Why is it so hard for Behringer to copy the midi setup section,
as part of the X32 edit app, in the Xair edit app?
I like to connect a bcf2000 to Xair edit app, as easy as it is to connect to the X32 edit app.
Bcf connected trough usb to pc, and in MC control mode.
Being able to select fader banks in User1 or User2, and have them be controlled by the bcf2000
Not having to use third party software or other midi configering efforts to be made.
What makes the Xair app different from the X32 app, besides the X32 has more faders...
Anyone?
Any news about Bcr32?