Hi people!
I am wondering if somebody can share their technique on navigating timeline in BIAB. I make most of my music in DAW and that is what I am used to. I am sure, most of musicians here are familiar with common DAW interface. You have your tracks lined horizontally and you can navigate through timeline, zooming, cropping, copy/paste and other thousand features. However, I am a bit lost at BIAB navigation. I can get around, but it feels like working in the dark using only "tactile" approach. Especially this gets frustrating when changing realtracks and styles at certain bars and reverting those changes later in the song. In my opinion, it would make a lot of sense to have a simple visual navigator, where you can see how everything is lined up in correspondence to timeline of the project and be able to change
realtracks on the navigator itself instead of guessing where things are. This is my primitive rendering of what I am taking about:


Most likely something like this would never happen, but I am curious what are alternatives to navigating timeline (if any) to sort of see what is playing where?

Thank you,
Mike.

Hi Mike,

The "Print Summary" button in Bar Settings is a useful tool that I think a lot of users miss. It gives you a list of every Bar Settings change in the project, and is the first thing I do when a customer sends a song that they don't think is playing the way it should.

Also, if you open the song in RealBand, you can easily see where tracks come in and out.

If keeping track of everything in BIAB is confusing, you could open the song in RB before putting in Bar Settings changes, and just delete measures out of different tracks where you want them to cut out.

Cheers
Kent
PG Music

Kent, thanks, but not what I am looking for.
This is actually echoing frustration even louder.
What you are suggesting is clicking and pocking around at random not intuitive places, even opening another software approach... You can call it anything, but it is very far from "navigation".

Today I discovered "Chord Picker" by Pipeline. It is a great tool! Something like that should have been in BIAB from the start. Or at least developer should have been compensated and his fantastic work should have been integrated into BIAB.

Kent, if developers at BIAB can not do proper design or simply not trained for it or simply too frugal to hire somebody bright, maybe they should consider some sort of API that allows third party customization and features to be implemented. And I am sure there will be some enthusiasts that will take the challenge to do good things, maybe on crowd funding basis?

Maybe it is just me talking to myself...I love all the power of BIAB and fantastic Realtracks, but at the same time I hate it for two major reasons: Horrible, not user friendly design (including navigation) and not being 64bit.

P.S. Sorry Kent, you are PG staff, that is why I spilled this, the way I did I hope that even if you are not allowed to confirm such limitations and shortcomings publicly, at least you are aware of the points that I am trying to make.

Mike

This could be a good item for the Wishlist?

Mike,

Another navigation tool is the progress bar. Each of the squares represent one bar. If, you use the default of three repeats the progress bar will show all the bars. If you add a part marker the progress bar square will change to the color of the part marker.

I agree with VideoTrack I'd love for you to make a wishlist request; I'd support it.