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What are your thoughts on Artiphon Orba?
What do you all think of the Artiphon Orba?
Fun? Awesome? Gimmick?
- Would you buy one for $100?50 votes
- Want to buy one26.00%
- Don't want to buy one50.00%
- Meh, undecided24.00%
Comments
I funded it and have been waiting patiently for months for them to ship. It's affordable, super-portable, and--well--cute, so I haven't regretted this for a moment. Even if it turns out to be a bust, it looks like something you could give away to a child so that they can amuse themselves for 5 minutes.
haha
I wouldn't spend $5 on it, but that's just me. I have so much more power on my ipad--why would I want something like this that sounds so basic?
I kickstarted as well and feel similarly to blipson; I think it’ll be a fun little instrument for the family and potentially a cool portable controller.
I also funded one. Even if the features would turn out to be shitty, it can still act as a great mpe controller. It’s low level entry music making is appealing for my kids.
On the strength of their original Instrument I also funded. Solid company and good tech.
It's a really significant entrant to the MPE controller space. The onboard looper functionality is clever but a bit of a distraction from its real power as a multidimensional controller. Check out the manual at https://artiphon.com/pages/orba-user-manual and scroll down to Gestures. They've figured out a way to send out an insane number of MIDI expression messages with intuitive gestures in a tiny device. Obviously to get the best from it you need a sound source that can respond to them, which basically means Equator or (better, because of the MPE drumkits) Noise, but when you first connect it to something like the Floatation pack in Noise and move it around in the air your ears will levitate right off your head.
The principal limitation is that with only eight separate pitches plus a non-frictionless octave shift you're not going to be able to play Chopin on it; it's a device for musical creation, exploration, and performance rather than for playing existing tunes, and works best with either a loop-based beatmaking or a drone model. But for expressive fingerdrumming alone it's the best thing on the market. I hope it does well for them; as with the Instrument 1, they've designed the hell out of this thing and it's quite a big roll of the dice whether the instant-gratification features are sufficient to build a casual-user market for what's actually a very deep and sophisticated controller.
That's a fun idea, thanks for posting!
Somehow it reminds me of TriqTraq, different concept but same immediacy.
There's no reason why this couldn't be an iOS app.
An expert Lemurist might even be able to do this using Lemur.
I feel this is the case of:
‘Look, this looks so cool in the video, I wanna be like those guys’ then getting it and wondering WTF was I thinking.
Basically your phone is Artiphon pro plus ++.
TBF to the company they haven’t priced it too high and as gadgets go this one seems well put together and well featured its just one has to decide whether they want to carry an extra object in their pocked on top on their phone that can already do these things and more.
As for live use, when you’re on stage nobody’s gonna know whether you’re tapping an egg shaker, phone or whatever.
You can tell I’ve been burned in the past 😬
@supadom Also TBF if this gadget doubles as a rubber ball that bounces back when trowing it on the floor, that's probably something that won't work too well with your iPhone 🤪
Erm, no coding necessary, I've just seen Lemur's factory template called "Radial StepSeq".
I imagine passing BLE MPE gadgets around at gigs so the audience can participate in the audio/visual experience. One of these days the dream of audience participation will be realized...
If humans are able to congregate anytime soon, of course. But yes, I think the future of music is in collaboration and participation instead of passive listening.
I got an Orba to add MPE to my iPad experiments. Great in theory. As of today, 22nd Nov, dead in practice. The move to 14.x broke something critical in the vital companion app, and the Orba cannot currently connect to iPad or the Orba app at all. Been this way for over 3 weeks with Orba pointing at Apple as the fault. Probably true, but doesn’t make me feel any better about a gadget effectively dead on arrival, a £95 paperweight...
Ouch
Thanks for letting us know. I feel so bad about it haha from musician to musician to hear that, that really sucks bud. I’m updated on all my devices, and was so ready to get one.
@Weareroses : well, I’m keeping my fingers crossed they can fix it, sooner or later. It works fine via USB with the Mac version of the app, and it is a cool, fun, thing, but I didn’t get it to play slightly naff synth sounds tethered to a laptop while I sit at the same desk as my Ableton/VST/multiple hardware synth & controller set up, but specifically to use away from the computer with the iPad. So: we’ll see.
iOS 14.2 broke BLE MIDI (not just for the Orba but generally). Fixed in the 14.3 beta, apparently, and a wired connection should still work if your iPad supports it (mine doesn't, but it's five years old and can't handle the power draw). I've been using it with Equator 2 and it's mindblowing; I don't think even a Linnstrument has this many dimensions of expression. You can't exactly play tunes on it, but for MPE drones and percussion there's nothing like it.
I've got one. I think it's great.
Faff around and record into your favorite DAW or midi sequencer and adjust until hearts content. I hate playing on glass, at least chords and rhythms with any accuracy, so this frees me up to play anywhere I have my iPad or phone and not have to rely on a more bulky keyboard.
I wouldn't try to use it to do a whole tune. As others have mentioned some of the fun comes from mapping to synths filter cutoffs etc. and waving it around.
The built in synth is meh, but fun. My only wish is that they would have but a rocker type switch on the side to shift up and down the octave instead of using a gesture that stops you playing.
I got one last week and I‘m a little torn. Luckily my Phone and iPad are still on 14.1 so the BLE connection is still fine. 🤗
I find it hard to play at times, because it plays notes before you actually touch the pads (it’s to compensate latency afik). So you cannot let your fingers hoover over the pads too close without triggering notes. Though it’s probably something one gets accustomed to. I also couldn’t get my head around the tilting sending out CCs. It seems to always snap back somehow. Gotta experiment more with that, I guess. And as stated before, the octave switching could be much smoother.
Nonetheless I recorded some nice melodies and chords into LK before LK started to freeze (fixed in the upcoming LK update). It’s a nice concept.
Where I‘m really disappointed is the internals of the device. There’s no quantized recording yet and I‘m really bad at hitting any timing (never really played an instrument 😑). The sounds itself would probably be ok, but I get a very high noise floor when I plug my Headphones in. 😤
That said, in standalone mode it’s practically useless to me right now.
I guess some things will get patched later on. I‘ll probably keep mine, but I wouldn’t really recommend it at this time.
I also have one. The apps are a piece of crap. The orba is stuck on two scales (maj/min). The buildin synth is not as good, only a few synth presets are available which are not in my genre. Now it is just a ble midi controller, not the cool all in one 4 track looper with awesome sounds. My kids still love it, I went back to my Roli Block.
I've just bought one and intended to use it as a MIDI controller so I'm not that bothered about the limited synth sounds. It has it's its good and bad points. As far as MIDI goes, I've got the Rozeta suite so that gives me more scales to use and it works well enough on my iPad Pro. The Orba app was easy to install under iOS, but the firmware can only be updated from a Mac or (allegedly) a PC. I don't know whether it's possible to update the firmware on a Mac, but the app doesn't work on a Windows 10 PC unless the Orba is switched off, so in other words it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. As soon as the Orba is switched on the app quits and it's impossible to check for an update.
Of course I only found that out after initially not even being able to download the app on my PC because Microsoft tried to block it. My anti virus software checked it and confirmed it was safe, but Microsoft weren't having it and it was frustrating until I found out how to get round it, only to be further frustrated when I found that I can't update the latest firmware. I'm now wondering whether I've just wasted £99.00 on something that will soon become a plastic paperweight.
That doesn't sound right; definitely something to open a ticket on with [email protected]. I can't figure out whether it's the same issue as reported in this thread on the Artiphon forum, but are you on the latest app version (0.14.34) and firmware (0.14.15)? There was a new version a couple of days ago. Note also this bug & workaround just posted.
Is this an app?
It’s part of the factory content that comes with Lemur
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/lemur/id481290621
Meet Mr Bounce
I wouldn’t bet on orba working after a metre drop. It is well built but also quite heavy, aiding acceleration.
Anyways, good for the price just not for me. I’d pay double for a bigger version though
Ah, I remember seeing this app now. Would you recommend it as a midi controller?
Imo, it’s the most capable one, but depth comes at a price of steep learning curve.
It has probably the most substantial patch base, but it is fading now. All in all I can’t recommend buying in now, as it looks abandoned, but nothing else can replicate many of its features.
I got an Orba but straight out of the box it's usability is quite limited. I have used it with a few synths (Synthmaster 1, Moog Model 15, Nave). What works is note imput with velocity and mod wheel when tilting the controller. All the other advertised functions like sliding on the buttons and more advanced movements/gestures are not obviously mapped to any of the parameters.
There seem to be some options to manually map it but overall I find the device to be a bit limited. So I am again on a search for an expressive Bluetooth controller.
I really wanted this to work but it seems as though it hasn't lived up to the maker's feature list. Is that your experience, @israelite?