Well, once again, I find myself calling upon the Forum Mind to help me solve a BiaB problem. Y'all never let me down, so hear goes again.

I have a bunch of BiaB songs I've collected over the years. When I browse through the songs using the songpicker, over to the right there are columns with one-letter abbreviations. One of the columns is "L" and I've been assuming the "L" is for lyrics and that if there's an L associated with this song, it has lyrics. Is this a valid assumption?

When I load one of these songs, on the bottom right I get the message in the subject: Line based lyrics have been converted to bar based lyrics. It doesn't matter if I have the song set up to show just the chords or if I have the Notation window toggled, where just four bars are displayed at a time.

Problem is, lyrics are never displayed. Now I can recall in the past that lyrics would be displayed -- by "in the past" I mean with earlier versions of BiaB. The last version I upgraded to before 2017, which is installed now on my Win7 machine, was -- I think -- 2014. And I can recall as recently as a few months ago -- with 2017 -- seeing songs in which lyrics were displayed. But now none are being displayed.

I've clicked on that message that displays on the bottom right -- like it tells you to do -- which generates a pop up window, Overrides (also found at Options/Preferences/Overrides), to see if I had something set screwy, but it doesn't appear that I have.

I even went to Options/Preferences/Big Lyrics and clicked on "Auto open lyrics window for songs with lyrics." Didn't make any difference.

So what am I missing? Is there a control somewhere that I got set wrong such that lyrics aren't being displayed anymore? I'm assuming that, of the literally dozens of songs I've loaded that indicate they have lyrics, at least one of them would have lyrics to display. Yes?

According to the user manual, the "L" column in style picker indicates that "Line Based Lyrics" were found in the file. The "N" column means that "Note Based Lyrics" were found. I don't believe that SongPicker has been updated to include the presence of "Bar Based Lyrics". (Wishlist item?!?)

The user manual also states:



So it looks like you need to do the conversion, but it also appears that the Songpicker might need updating accordingly to indicate Bar Based Lyrics instead of Line Based Lyrics.

Not sure why your lyrics don't display if you do convert them, however.

Hey John, thanks for your prompt reply. I have my system set to the default, which is always auto-split.

Not sure what you mean by updating the Songpicker. I've looked through the commands and don't see anything like this. Unless -- by update do you mean I should rebuild the song list?

I just tried rebuilding one song list that included a couple of songs with lyrics that supposedly got converted. I saved the songs, then rebuilt the list. Nothing is appearing in the N column and when I load a newly saved song, there are still no lyrics that appear.

I tried right-clicking on the screen (chord and notation) and tried a couple of things there, but couldn't find anything pertinent.

The only other thing I've found is the Lyrics position in the Notation window: Options/Preferences/Notation. The Lyrics are set to "7" which is probably the default, since I haven't changed it.

This is really puzzling. I used to see lyrics with 2017 BiaB and then I noticed one day that I don't see them anymore -- and this is with song files that I've had lyrics appear before. I still think I have probably toggled something somewhere that's causing this. But I have no idea why or where.

I think you misunderstood me; what I meant is that PGMusic probably needs to update the songpicker to reflect the use of bar based lyrics instead of line based lyrics.

If it did work before, then I would try backing out one of the updates (or perhaps installing the latest update if you are not) and see if you get it back.

My problem is the assumption that everyone now wants bar-based lyrics. We don't! All the people I know who use the program want to use note-based lyrics because this is the proper way to produce a lead sheet. All the pop-up notes about converting to bar-based lyrics are a bloody nuisance and I have been asking for them to be removed since this new version came out.

However, I too have a problem with the fact that I have several hundred of songs with line-based lyrics. My usual solution is to redo the lyrics from scratch. I suppose it is too much to ask for a 'convert line-based to note-based'. There used to be such a function, from memory, although I realize it is a difficult bit of programming to get right, because the lyric syllables don't always match the notes. Especially where you have more than one verse or slight changes in lyrics for different choruses. But that is okay because one can edit the new note-based lyrics if they are put attached to the wrong note.

PG marketing must realise that there are still huge numbers of people using Band-in-a-Box for creating lead sheets, rather than those that use it for playing live, where they only need the chords and lyrics. Frankly, I think we note-based lyric types are still the majority! Perhaps PG Music should do a survey to find out the real customers numbers using each method and make sure that the future development at least caters for all user requirements. It is great that the program works for all types of users but I just think there has been too much emphasis in the last two years on providing play sheets for the strummer/singers.

First of all, BIAB has never been able to convert line based to note based lyrics. I use note based exclusively, so switching over requires re-entering. Lyrics are a pain even with dedicated notation programs.

There are a number of folks here who love the bar based lyrics, so I imagine it's here to stay, but it would be nice if there were an easier way to do note based lyrics.

I guess I need to admit up front that I'm not 100% sure what bar-based and line-based lyrics are. I've always assumed that bar-based lyrics are those you see when the notation window is open, where you're reading four bars at a time, and that line based lyrics are -- well, I'm not real sure what line-based lyrics are.

But yeah, if what I just described above is actually notation-based lyrics, then that is what I prefer. Also having a leadsheet with both notation and lyrics would be acceptable as well. And I'd of course want to be able to print out these leadsheets showing both notation and lyrics.

Now, what I used to see that I don't see anymore is the four-bars that scroll across the screen, showing both the melody and lyrics. Whatever you call this is what I want back.

Line based lyrics go back to the days where BIAB would display four bars per line in the grid. You could enter lyrics as continuous text represneting lyrics for that whole line of four bars. You would put in new lyrics for the next line of bars. Nothing lined up properly, but it was really there more to jog your memory as to the lyrics. They also tended to print pretty horribly.

Note based lyrics came next. With note based lyrics, you could assign each syllable to a specific note on the melody track. Obviously, you would need the notes there to do that. The lyrics would line up properly to the music you were playing, although long words didn't always print very cleanly all the time either.

Bar based lyrics are basically the replacement to line based lyrics, where you can enter a continuous text representing the lyrics for a single bar. Again, they don't line up to a melody line, but you have a new set of lyrics every bar.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the clarifications, John. Now if I could just figure how to get them back!

There's more info on lyrics here:
Easy Lyric Syncing

User Tutorial - Lyric Techniques

Note-based lyrics: Aligning syllables with notes (manually)

Shifting Bar Based Lyrics when inserting new bars in a song.

Bar-based lyrics

Thanks for the links, Pipeline. I'm sure they will be very useful. But my main problem is finding the lyrics that used to be there and that are no longer displayed at all. Until I figure out what happened to them, the above links aren't gonna do me a whole lot of good.

Ultimately, I reckon it's gonna be easier and quicker to just re-enter the lyrics to the songs that I remember having lyrics with them. And move on.

I haven't read through the above posts so I don't know if this has been mentioned or not. Just in case it hasn't...

On your chordsheet, has the bar lyrics layer been activated so that the bar-based lyrics are visible (see the 1, 2, 3 on the upper image below)? If your chordsheet view is different from mine, use CTRL+T to switch views.

When bar lyrics are made visible, they will show up above the chords on the chordsheet (see the lower image).