PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production ADVANTAGES OF REALBAND OVER PG's COMPETITION.

I'm another one who uses RB all the time for the reasons described above. I think the comments from the few in this thread who thinks it's crap is based on the fact they never used it enough to get familiar with it. The common refrain I've heard from people who say that boils down to crashes and sugglishness. Many times over the years I've challenged them to post examples of these issues and treat them like a beta test. If there's a crash, document exactly what you were doing when the crash occured and then post it so we can test it and fix it. What was the response? Crickets. I pushed and pushed and never got them to post anything. This goes back over 10 years now.

Saying RB is sluggish is more difficult because what exactly is sluggishness? Again I had asked people to at least describe what exactly happened. In detail. Again I got nothing in response. IMHO if all you're doing is trashing the program with these comments without trying to be helpful by posting whatever problem your having so we can try to fix it, that makes you nothing but a troll.

One point that was made earlier is the crashing every 60 minutes thing. That's true and I've posted about that many times. If I'm doing a lot of midi editing in the piano roll window or audio editing in that window and it goes on for 45 minutes to an hour the program will start doing strange random things and eventually it will lock up and you're forced to do a hard close and reopen. You could lose what you hadn't already saved because a forced close doesn't give you the opportunity to do a save.

The solution I figured out is to recognize that issue and do normal close/reopen before it locks up and it's good for another hour or so. An example of that is if I'm doing midi edits and it's going great but suddenly I'll move a section of midi notes but they don't paste correctly or some notes changed. I'll see that, look at my watch and go oh yeah, it's been almost an hour so I'll save, close and reopen. Should I have to do that? No. That is a glitch with the program and it is reproducible but the problem is a developer has to spend that time with edits before it shows up and I'm assuming they don't have the time for that.

One possible cause of people thinking RB is sluggish is years ago I was using the old Adobe Audition for audio editing. It was great and very fast. But it did something at the end when you went to save your project and move on to something else. It did a "flushing temp files" thing with questions about if I wanted to keep them or not. This went on for 15 to 20 minutes in some cases. RB doesn't do that but the audio edits are not as fast as Audition was.

I surmised the reason was RB was creating and deleting temp files in real time as you're doing the edits while Audition was letting those temp files just pile up in the temp directory thus making the edits seem almost instant but then you had to go through this long delete process after you're done with it. That could be the reason RB seems sluggish with edits. It's a case of "pay me now or pay me later" sort of thing. Or, this could have nothing to do with anything, I'm not a programmer.

Pipeline, I really like some of your suggestions and appreciate your continued efforts with them. I agree most of these things look like they should be fairly easy to implement and it's the reason I said when the VST was first created they should have put all that effort into updating RB instead of creating that stupid thing. When the VST first came out it was a dogs breakfast and stayed that way for two years.

Bob