Artiphon

I just purchased this, following all the reviews and documentation and examples of it as a wireless device, and you only have ONE line in ONE place that basically tells you it is completely useless as a wireless device on a majority of people's machines, who are Windows users. Has it ever occurred to you that this is why you may be missing a lot of adoption?

Or am I missing, something, and is there indeed a way to use this wirelessly with windows?

The built-in Bluetooth support is for MIDI over Bluetooth which allows you to use the Orba as a wireless CONTROLLER for other synthesizers that support Bluetooth MIDI. It is an extremely complete powerful implementation of Bluetooth MIDI.

They have addressed the lack of Bluetooth audio streaming in other threads. The issue is that the current implementations of audio streaming Bluetooth all have so much latency that the Orba becomes unplayable. I imagine the latency is even worse with stereo and the Orba sounds great in stereo through headphones, so doing Bluetooth audio streaming would probably take that hit as well. Too much latency & lower sound quality = not worth it.

I might be projecting my own frustrations here, but I think Rob is talking about midi, not audio. There is indeed exactly one line on the website somewhere saying that midi over bluetooth doesn't work with Windows. It also says this is because of Windows not supporting midi over bluetooth, but from what I read on the midi website, I believe that is no longer the case. I also bought this to be a wireless midi controller for my DAW on Windows, and will be returning it for a refund if this truly turns out to be impossible.

Hi there - yes, that is correct - I did not specify that I mean MIDI. I bought this only to use as a MIDI controller via Windows. This is specifically where it makes no sense as you guys are losing so much adoption!

In the past I've been frustrated with Bluetooth MIDI on Windows, and with the Orba...but I recommend the CME WIDI Bud Pro. I've got this set up with a Windows 10 PC and it just works. Once you've installed the CME dongle it picks up the Orba automatically, and it works great as a MIDI controller with low latency. Very happy with this setup.

https://www.cme-pro.com/product/widi-bud-pro/

(Some quick messing around just now...though the benefit of this is that you can run it into something like Ableton Live and escape from those pentatonic scales...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN5LFPexixI

Hi BJG145,

Thanks for chiming in! I had indeed read about the WIDI Bud Pro elsewhere, and judging from what I read and your video, that does seem to be a viable workaround. But isn't it a bit bitter that you need to buy an extra piece of equipment over half the price of the Orba itself just so you can use it as you intended? That's like buying a $600 guitar only to find out later that you need a special $300 cable to actually get to hear it through your amp.

Thanks for the clarification. I've been trying to solve this problem myself, not just with Orba, but with other systems I have. When you do an interwebs search for this, you can quickly see that all of the big names - Yamaha, Roland, etc, have had this problem and that Windows 10 (and now 11) apps are just starting to come around to using the Bluetooth MIDI features that have been exposed in Windows 10 for some time, but the problem was primarily with the programs running on Windows, not with the devices' MIDI implementations. I'm glad you mentioned WIDI Bud Pro, however because that helps me with other MIDI problems I was hoping to solve. The same company makes something called WIDI Master that plugs right into an old-style MIDI port and converts it into a wireless MIDI port. Very, very nice. $60 isn't too high a price for a tool that solves a problem so well, and I'm betting if you had problems connecting the Orba to your Windows app, you were going to have problems connecting some other Bluetooth MIDI devices as well, so it's probably money well-spent. I agree that it's annoying, but I don't think it's Orba's fault because lots of other much more expensive devices are having the same issues being able to work with Mac and iOS, but not Windows.

I think the "WIDI-Uhost" does the same same trick for any class-compliant USB MIDI controller, turning it into a wireless controller.

https://www.cme-pro.com/widi-uhost/