PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Help! Tech S.O.S (Off topic) Open discussion bout best way to help new users with correct settings.

Here are my 2 cents on this subject.

Because BiaB and RB are plenty complex in their own rights, new and not so new users will need help at some point. Add in various DAWs, plugins, operating systems, interfaces, etc. and you have multi-dimensional complexity that changes over time as new releases of hardware and software become available.

The current forum-based help system is useful but not particularly efficient as the postings are difficult and tedious to search. This requires duplicate solutions to be written by those in the know every time a similar question is re-asked. At times I notice these users make various incorrect assumptions that can easily get amplified and re-amplified by others until a poor signal to noise ratio is reached; sometimes resulting in the original question being obscured.

Because of this and other things the half-life of the information transmitted in this way is on the order of a few days rather than months or years. Put another way, no matter how well intentioned the answer to a call for help may be, if it’s “expiration date” is close to that of bananas bought at your local grocery store then there was wasted effort in creating it in the first place; valuable effort that could have been used in refining a more durable solution.

An improvement to this could be achieved if the communicated solutions, tips, insights and knowledge were somehow first vetted for accuracy, kept focused on the subject and then made more permanent.

Think "one and done" or "develop the wheel just once and share what you developed".

One way to increase the half-life of the information is to store it in a series of downloadable “How-To” files rather than re-invent it every time a similar question is asked. I would suggest files in PDF format for this. These files could contain a descriptive title, a file number, the solution on how to do what the user is struggling with and supporting weblinks. We are visual creatures so annotated screenshots should be used where appropriate.

So when a user posts a call for help, he/she can be quickly directed to a solution that has been vetted thereby eliminating the need for much off-topic chit chat, spider webs or rabbit holes.

Here is what I envision:
Joe New User: “Hello, just installed BiaB 2023 on a Windows 12 desktop and I can’t figure out how to add horn shots to a track.”

Fred on the Forum: “Hi Joe, there are a couple documented ways to do this. Go to xyz weblink and look at the following files.
A-3012 – How to add horn shots with external MIDI
A-3013 – How to add horn shots with internal MIDI

Joe New User: “Thanks Fred, A-3012 is most appropriate for me but I’m stuck on Step #4.”

Fred on the Forum: “Hi Joe, yes, I wrote A-3012 and I realize that Step #4 is confusing. I’ll fix it and have it vetted.”

Joe New User: “Fred, your updated document worked and I’m off and running, thanks.”

In order to properly organize the files, some thought should go into a document numbering system; any librarians or data scientists on the forum may have good ideas here. For example, the “A” in my above example could indicate Apple with “W” for Windows. Or “A” for BiaB and “B” for RealBand . . . you get the idea.

Some How-To files could be intentionally high-level with little detail while others could be at the micro level.

I have contributed to such a How-To system for a large complex mathematical/programming software environment in industry that was successfully used by scientists, engineers and programmers. The key is to vet the information for accuracy and organize it for easy search and retrievability.

Just my 2 cents.