Orba by Artiphon | Portable synth, looper, and MIDI controller | iOS, Mac, Windows, PC | Bluetooth or USB MPE MIDI

Great sound, good battery life, easy to learn.

Very cool! Really impressive sound

As a person who collects items that make noise, this is a new favorite. The versatility of the instrument and it's form factor make it easy for brainstorming tunes on the go.There are a few improvements I'd like in order to give this a shining 5-star review:- The app interface is lacking and buggy. The UI is not the most intuitive, and it lacks features such as "favoriting" presets. Settings for the device itself, each preset, and the "song" (which is a misnomer that describes a group of presets) are all in separate places. The app doesn't currently work on Android, and I understand there's been a fix in process for quite some time. Fortunately I have a modern laptop, but any Android users without regular access to a personal computer would be out of luck.- the lead instrument presets are (mostly) pentatonic. This is a feature for plenty, and I enjoy the pentatonic scale. That said, only a few instruments are tuned diatonically, and you can't toggle this per-preset. Since this instrument is primarily a sampler, it should be an easy toggle to implement, but for now melodies are limited to a single pentatonic key at a time.Overall, I love this item and will continue to show it off. I hope the changes I've outlined above are implemented soon.

Perfect present for a loved ont

It did have a slight learning curve, but not much. I found I needed the quantize option to be off or set to 'groove', and it's important to start recording on the first beat and end it after the fourth beat (it's sooo easy to mess up your loops if you don't start/end it at the right time). After a little practice I got better at creating loops that didn't sound messed up. Maybe I'm actually starting to develop rhythm. xDThis thing is a ton of fun to play with, and each time I pick it up I find myself losing track of time. There are tons of different instrument options on the app (which many android users have said don't work for them, but seems ok to me, maybe I'm lucky). The software and app are a little buggy, but not hard to figure out. It's awesome as a MIDI controller too. I've tried it with Reaper and Cakewalk and it's very easy to set up, just have to enable it as an input device. I think people who are more musical may be a little frustrated/feel limited by the scales it locks to, but I like it because it helps you not play any wrong notes. I think it's a bit more for noodling around and generating ideas, or just relaxing rather than for playing specific songs. It's almost meditative to play with. But paired with a DAW it would allow for more control and be a pretty cool production tool.

I'll outright say it, I'm currently learning to do sound design. I'm no master. But I'm also no fool and am often called a tech wunderkind. I had issues getting this working out of the box. I was not able to make any of the function buttons work (meaning holding the menu button and pressing a sound pad, you know...the thing it MUST do to work at all?). After a firmware update, several restarts, and many, many attempts, it suddenly started working perfectly. I'm not sure why, cause I'm not doing anything differently, but I'll take it.There's some ups and downs here. I will list them next, but first off I want to say that this is the Orba 1, not the 2. There's big, important differences. The software for the orba 1 is clunky and looks and operates like it was made cheaply in 2002. The Orba 2 software looks like it was made in 2020. The orba 1 can only have a couple of parallel tracks and they max at 30 seconds. The orba 2 can have many, many tracks of up to 5 minutes. There's other smaller differences like age of hardware, sound quality, bluetooth compatibility, and battery that are all better on the 2, but now on to the pros and cons:Pros:-Inexpensive-Easy to use-Simple design-Excellent entryway to learning to do sound design, DJ, or other EDM (electronic music) experience-tolerable battery-decent audio quality-fair bit of pre-made sounds you can use from the app-customizable-connects to PC/Mac/iOS software like Ableton, meaning you can actually use it to record or perform professionally if you wantedCons:-poor ability to properly execute functions-easy to accidentally spin the device and lose which pad is which-less than professional quality sound samples-pretty bad when compared to the Orba 2-existing "instructions" are laughable and tell you basically nothing. You're on your own-pretty pathetic, sad looking and running software compared to the Orba 2 softwareMy biggest complaint is about making loops. To make a loop you hold the menu button (it's the "A" in the middle) and hit "REC". Not only do the combo buttons not often work, it's extremely hard to time it. You also will have a hard time knowing when your 30 seconds of recording is about to end. the LEDs give you a general idea of timing, but it's very imprecise and makes it very discouraging to use. Things get out of time and messy. Furthermore, it plays an adjustable metronome any time you record. It's nice, but DJs need a flawless sense of timing and the metronome is very hard to set right. When your 30 seconds of recording are up, it goes straight into recording the next 30 seconds. It doesn't stop or alert you, so you can easily go over time by accident and end up with this bizarre, awkwardly timed set of beats or notes that come and go out of nowhere. Getting the right sense of timing on when to stop a loop is by far the most important thing to learn and it's complicated by poor design and being a two-button process that throws off your timing. If you aren't flawless, you'll miss your mark AND change to a different set of sounds in the process without ever realizing it, totally screwing up your recording.Lastly, when it comes to recording, once you record a 30 second loop, it's over. There's no deleting individual loops. You delete all recordings or none. So if you're recording your 5th set of sounds on top of 4 existing loops and you screw up, you gotta start completely over. Good for practice, but highly impractical. A lot of this could have been solved by making the record button a separate, single button you just tap the second you're done.I'm still learning, but if I decide I like it, I'm returning it and ordering an Orba 2. I'll admit it taught me a fair bit about synths and loops, hence why I gave it an extra start instead of the 2 stars I wanna give it. It taught me that this will be harder than I expected. I certainly didn't expect it to be easy, but I was a professional musician for years and thought that'd help me out more.

This little machine is amazing! The things you can do with it and the music you can make is something else. Besides the information on the listing, I went to their website and Youtube to watch videos of what other people had created with the Orba. So cool! The only problem with my purchase was that I got it for my 14 year old niece who plays the guitar and writes music. It was too much for her, meaning I would not buy this again for a kid unless you know that they are tech savvy as you do need to learn how to use it. For now, it just sits on her dresser, but I believe one day she'll use it.