What a great thread!!! I just spent the time to read it from head to toe. My dime.

A lot of what is being discussed here is not FUNCTIONALITY as much as EDUCATION. Allow me to be the guinea pig for my own example.

I was at a friend's house earlier this year. He had just purchased the newest version of BIAB. At that point he did a fast demo. I accepted his offer to bring the old one home and play with it. I used it for 3 days and then ordered it. That was maybe 3 months ago.

(Education and guinea pig references start here.)

To this day, June 24th, I have NEVER clicked the Real Band icon. Never. I just didn't/don't really know what it even is, and I have a lot of writing work to do and not time to play. As I read this thread I have a better idea what Real Band is, and will play with it some tonight, but when I load a song already written in BIAB, am I essentially loading it into a DIFFERENT program or BIAB on steroids? Is it going to change the assigned instruments? Erase the solos? And where would I go to read about this? Do I take a week of vacation to try and sift through EVERY ITEM in the help files until I guess correctly on what my issue is called in the helps? That's like trying to pick a style. Yesterday, just so I knew, I kept track. I looked at (get ready for it) 87 styles before I found one I liked. (What is a style called "cnty_tim" supposed to mean? Is that a shuffle, a stomp, a ballad, a hoedown.....? What is "standard"? And who the hell is "Tim"?) Can those styles not be arranged by "Ballad" - "Shuffle" - "Stomp" - etc? Brent Mason's name in a style may be a good thing for "measuring in the shower" value (Look everybody! We got Brent Mason to do samples!) but it doesn't describe the groove in any way. I was looking for a groove kind of like Terri Clark's tune "Now That I Found You". Some of the styles have "example songs" listed that are not even CLOSE to what the groove of the style is.

When I bought this program, I bought it because it was going to be a fast, easy, quick and dirty back up band to do demos to send to players who will be playing on my CD. I didn't know that I would have to spend 80-100 hours reading help files when I wanted to learn something that I would expect would be clearly defined if not absolutely intuitive. I bought it so I could STOP using Sonar, STOP programming drum machines, STOP playing in take after take to fix my clams, STOP playing with MIDI routing so the right tracks played on the right keyboard (of the 5 I use).

I would like to see the styles offered with JUST a drum groove, but in addition to what they are now. I would like to be able to pick a groove, pick the bass sound, pick the piano, pick the organ, pick the guitar.... from a SIMPLE LIST of instruments, and where the guitar parts play under the guitar tab and the piano plays under the piano tab. In fact I would like to see empty instrument "tabs" so I can designate that maybe tab 1 will be chunking rhythm, tab 2 will be pedal steel, tab 3 will be piano... etc.. rather than a style assigning parts that are close to impossible to change. So with all of that, does what I just said I would like to see constitute my wanting a "DAW"? (Which, just FYI, I consider as "oh please - call it what it is" as calling a used car a "previously owned automobile" or a second mortgage as a "home equity loan". A "DAW" is a multi track sequencer. Let's not play acronym bingo. I mean, VSTi? I have called that "soft synth" for years. Must I change to "Virtual Studio Technology instruments" now?)

The requests about changing the icons I understand again because of the learning curve. There is a huge asterisk on my toolbar. Only recently and by complete accident did I discover that the huge asterisk is supposed to be a big snowflake that indicates the option to FREEZE a track. (How about people in Florida who have never seen snow? Do they know that is supposed to be a big snowflake indicating "that cold white stuff that falls from the sky and freezes stuff"? I toured a lot in Canada so I KNOW you folks up north know about the big snowflake.... LOL!) Would it not be at least AS effective to print the letters F-R-E-E-Z-E instead of a picture of a snowflake? There are so many icons that have nothing cognitive about them that I have had to sit there and hover the mouse over them until to caption bubble opened. And THEN I had to try, at my age, and remember what they all meant because 3 seconds after the caption bubble closed it was erased from my brain's memory bank.

This really is more about education. I really think that is at the bottom of this whole debate.