PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows My VSTs are melting!

Well, I had a long and mostly productive talk with the senior tech guy at PG -- I didn't catch his name, but I will next time.

We were able to get to the bottom of the reason why my instruments kept changing, and it was due to two main issues.

Apparently if you ever select a Hi-Q MIDI patch plug-in, BiaB remembers this and keeps trying to set you up with it, even when you don't ask for it. Many of my tunes had this set for the Melody. You can select the Hi-Q MIDI patch plug-in up there at the top of the MIDI listing and it opens a Window of them, but the very top selection is "No Preset wanted (Remove/Clear any current preset)." If you select that, then the Hi-Q business disappears and you're back to your basic MIDI voice. Or at least I am.

The other issue is where I would see, in the Notation window -- usually at the beginning of the piece, but not always, where you have like 1a Nylon String Guitar, for example. And then as soon as I'd hit play, Nylon String would change to something else -- and so would the voice. Turns out there was stuff in the event list after all causing this. I've found that anything in the list besides just the note data can foul things up, so I removed it. Even if it were referring to the correct instrument. Then the program must pick up the info from the instrument shown in the Mixer.

I did manage to stump him regarding one thing, though. That dang file stuck on acoustic piano. I emailed him the file and it's stuck on acoustic piano with him too. He doesn't know what's causing it. I was going through my song files again today, getting rid of all the references to Hi-Q and any instances of bad data in the event lists, and I ran across another file in which the melody is stuck on acoustic piano. I'm gonna email that one to him tomorrow. I also ran into another file that switches patch names after I hit play, but there's nothing in the event list indicating it and no reference to the Hi-Q stuff. That's a puzzler. I'm gonna send him a copy of that file too.

On balance, though, it was a productive day. Here's a tip for you that you might already know, but in case you don't I'll pass it along. Ever wanted to look at or edit the event list for an instrument other than the Melody or Soloist? (Those are the only two whose event lists can be viewed) Well, there's a command under Edit/Copy Special called Copy Move Tracks. Click on this and you get a small popup that has a bunch of stuff checked that you can ignore. At the top of the popup you can select the track whose event list you want to view and at the bottom of the popup you can choose whether to copy it or move it. Then you indicate where you want to move it. Well, I dunno about you, but with me, my solo track is vacant probably 98% of the time, so I can move the data to that track, and then I can call up the event list from the solo track, edit it, then move it back to the instrument it came from. Yeah, sure, you can do this in RB, but it's nice to know that you can do it in BiaB as well.

I'm gonna give him a call tomorrow and bug him some more about these other two songs I found.