Sorry to be a party pooper, but is that all?

"There are many exciting new features"

Such as?

redesign of the style picker?

Chord sheet enhanced?

No 64 bit, No VST, no bug fixes

If you take the last 1000 wishlist features have any been included?

Perhaps the real tracks are good and worth having, but is there anything really worthwhile? Id the program still littered with bugs and counterproductive, counter intuitive anomalies?

I hope someone can say there is something...

Z

I had a similar reaction but I will probably upgrade anyway to get the new RealTracks.

Hi John,
I just dont think the development team are listeing. I call it a team, but probably its just a couple of old school programmers

that's my opinion, I just don't think they care enough to do the work.

Yes, Music XML for one is a huge improvement for my workflow, and is in direct response to the Wishlist. The enhanced style picker also.

You will see more examples and positive comments in a thread in the main BIAB for Windows forum.

I wonder how many BIAB users will actually use this? I guess if you need the feature it is great!

In that same thread, I explain how one will indeed actually use this. Check it out.

I guess I was interested in whether this is useful to everyone/most users or only those using a music notation program?

Hello Zero,

I think we are underselling it by using the word enhanced ... Both the Chord sheet and StylePicker were actually rebuilt from the ground up so there are likely a ton of bugs and anomalies fixed that aren't documented. It also provides the foundation for adding other popular 'wishlist' requests that would have been very difficult to add before...

The new features video has a good demo of the Chord Sheet:
http://www.pgmusic.com/helpvideo.htm?vidid=8ePhe2qU-JE

We are currently adding to the New Features video, so it will soon have more feature demos.

The new StylePicker is important for the ease of browsing and finding styles and seeing information about them. The entire database of styles has been cleaned and categorized. You can even type in any popular song and it will find the best match - it "knows" the details about many thousands of tunes spanning several decades.

Those alone are significant features... There is also an absolutely huge amount of new material in RealTracks and other content like Artist Video Performance tutorials.

Andrew, thanks for that video! The changes to the Chord Sheet look very cool!! Can I print all of the lyrics and other info along with chords?

Watched the video. My studio is down at present so I can't access band in a box. I go a bit by my (unreliable) memory....

The video does not say too much about style picker, so maybe that's another video

The chord sheet window:

What I see seems very useful for sure. When I casually think of a song - e.g. Amazing Grace, I think of the lyrics primarily, when I play I think of the chords. This new feature in the chord window to display the lyrics is going to help me 'pictorally' memorise songs, so that lyrics and chords twin up - which is not the case in the remaining brain cells I possess - currently. I think that is a big improvement.

But...

Can you yet...

Load a VST, then hear it BEFORE you hit play - for audition purposes?

Is it still true that if you loop a section you can bounce out of it if your mouse moves and you click elsewhere? Is there any way to nail a loop down until you wish otherwise? Is it still such a lot of clicking and pointing to get a loop going and maintain it? Why not the facility to set up multiple loop regions and select and deselect them? Even save these sections with a song? You could have a loop layer, with green and yellow and purple loops - for easy eye location.

Is the recording process still so needlessly arduous and non transparent?

Why can't you see a recording? Either as MIDI or as Audio in a layer?

Even cut and paste different sections of takes, non destructively? IMO we need these facilities in BIAB and not have to outsource to some other program.

What happens if you have more than one verse? Lyric wise in the chord window?

How does this marry into the structure of a song, do we still have to write out all the repeats IF we want say alternate [a. b.)] endings, or lyrics?

Is there any view where you can see all the chords in a song, all the intros outros fills, in a structural way? Colorising these features (in pastel shades) would help them stand out in the mind.

It would be good to see a staff with MIDI on it, on the chord screen, optionally. I did not see that.

I notice in the notation window it's still blocky and unreadable when using lots of semiquaver activity, at one point the left hand side of a note completely disappeared. If the notation screen is like 2015, I found it leaped around in such a way as the eye had to be very nimble. Isn't there a way to show the notes passing your eye like items moving along an escalator - smoothly?

TBH the GUI still looks 1980's to me. Sorry, but I think my opinion is shared by many users. I just don't think that is going to attract new blood - which I wish for PG.

When looping, does the app still give visual anomalies as it jumps around, so the first take of a loop is dissimilar color wise to a second, in some cases?

As I suggested in a post a while back, PG BIAB users are unique in the way they interface with the GUI, because they have instruments in their hand, they might be on a stage in dim lighting, or in a studio with only one had to reach the GUI and a dodgy mouse mat. It just the nature of playing venues, studios, lighting/gear..
Has this been taken into account when redesigning the GUI? If you have to drill down in click land this gets hard to do quickly.

What is there is useful, but I find it hard to shout and scream about 'great new features' like being able to see a chord you type in. That sort of stuff I would take for granted anywhere else but in PG land

Z

Just a quick comment about the VST playing for audition: I stuck a cheap small Akai MPKmini MIDI keyboard on my system so I could check pitches. Once it is selected as my MIDI Input Device in BIAB, it is active the moment BIAB starts. These small keyboards are about $70 new, and there are used ones out there.

Yes Matt, but it should be auditionable after the VST is allocated - before a track starts.

I haven't gone through all your points yet, but on the topic of auditioning a VST, it should work if you are using ASIO drives. "ASIO always on" should to be selected in the audio settings.

Zero, I wasn't attempting to propose a fix, just a workaround by not using the VST. Andrew's post is hopeful, though.

Matt
I would like to know if the implementation of XML is all that we hoped for.

Do all the nuances of the song get transferred? Repeats, DS al coda, chords, note lyrics, text boxes, etc

I am waiting to find out before I buy, as it is my hot-button. The other stuff is nice, but only a better way of getting printed notation without ANY effort will convince me to move to a new version

Funny, I just commented in another thread how you can scan music but not rely completely on the accuracy of what you get, especially with handwritten scores. I've only started experimenting with exporting a BIAB song to Music XML. My regular (but odd) notation software, Encore, won't read the chords. MuseScore does read the chords but I don't know how to prevent complex chord spellings from overlapping. So I can't answer your question positively yet.

PG Music has taken a critical step forward here, one I requested and am grateful for. I think it may need some shaking out, but I don't know which vendor is responsible to do that. You see, my limited experience is that Music XML is NOT seamless ANYWHERE. Like the scanner, there always seem to be quirks.

When I've had a lot more experience with this, I will share it (and continue reporting to PG Music).

I don't usually equivocate on an answer, but I'm not ready to state you can use it seamlessly, especially if this is your critical deciding issue.

And I wish we were talking about this in the main BIAB forum, not here.

Agreed, this is good stuff. Thanks for keeping us informed. I look forward to the rest of the story.

Are there any plans for BIAB to go to 64-Bit???

Sorry to be a party pooper, but is that all?

"There are many exciting new features"

Such as?

redesign of the style picker?
- yes not just redesigned but redone from scratch including an amazing feature where you can type in the title to a song and it will choose compatible styles ordered from best to worst

Chord sheet enhanced?
- yes also completely redone with lots of new features including layers and other requested features

There are other major new features such as 201 new real tracks. This represents over 200 hours of digital studio audio recordings with top-of-the-line studio musicians. This brings the grand total to over 2500 hours of studio musician recordings in real tracks available with the full package

)))No 64 bit,
64 bit plugins are supported and work seemelessly with jbridge ($10). Otherwise the program is 32 bit and works fine on 32 and 64 bit OS`s

)))No VST,
Not sure what you mean there, but VST has been for years.
)))no bug fixes
_ we don't list bug fixes with a new release, but we do list them with the patches during the year. A rough estimate would be 50 bugs/issues fixed between 205 and 2016.

)))If you take the last 1000 wishlist features have any been included?
_ yes, many of the 60 new features came form the wish list.

Regardless of which package you purchase from Pro through Audiophile, the purchase price is worth it for just the Audio Chord Wizard alone.

Regardless which package you purchase, the purchase price is worth it just for the teaching and practice tools alone.

Regardless which package you purchase, the purchase price is worth it just for changing key signatures alone.

Regardless which package you purchase, the purchase price is worth it just for the fact BIAB/RB suite stand alone in the software world in the ease and quality of generating backing tracks.

If you make home movies and need a soundtrack, the BIAB Sound track feature may be the most valuable element of the software.

If you play live, it may be the conductor.

Value is always in the eye of the beholder. The bottom line is regardless of use or what you think the shortcomings of BIAB/RB are, you get your money's worth. For me, the ACW is invaluable.

Charlie: "the purchase price is worth it for just the Audio Chord Wizard alone."

Sorry but I've always had problems with ACW, whenever I had to reanalyze the song, the chords always came out different. The 1st bar is easy, but the beat setting is a challenge. Miss one beat and restart the process, the chord detection is all over the place. Sometimes in my frustration I just say the heck with it.

If I could "slow down" the audio a bit, it might be more accurate.

DE

I always felt this would be a step which would open up BIAB to a whole new demographic and has been in the wishlist and discussed here for a long time.

We are not talking about hosting an application within BIAB (that can be done), but rather hosting BIAB within an application... Making a VST version of BIAB.

Granted, lack of this has not stopped us from integrating a BIAB workflow into our DAWs. But the ability to host BIAB directly in a DAW sounds like a good idea. Similar to the Toontrack products which also are based on a chordchart or sequence which is laid out in the VST itself and provide standalone and VST version.

Peter, I don't believe you have ever commented on the feasibility of this.

As soon as the vst synchronization is fixed this should be achievable like:
https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/flstudio_vst_plugin.htm

http://www.energy-xt.com/index.php?id=0115

http://www.musicdevelopments.com/wiki/doku.php?id=rcwiki:vstplugin
"the RapidComposer VST plug-in is a small, reliable plug-in which does not include the whole RapidComposer application as in previous versions, but it communicates with the standalone application through shared memory, also known as 'bridge'. This results greater stability and flexibility.

When the RapidComposer plug-in is loaded by the host (DAW), the plug-in locates the RapidComposer application, starts it, and connects to the application. If RapidComposer was already running, it will switch to “VST Mode” which means the user interface and some internals will be changed."

The vst controller loads into the host and the play/stop events and tempo are synchronized to the main standalone application that runs outside of the host not as an actual vst.
So, you load the biab vst controller into your daw.
The biab vst controller receives the play/stop events and tempo from the host daw, thus playing in sync to your daw.

But unless multriffs are added it maybe better having real band as a vst as it has multiriffs.
This way you may have your tracks recorded in your daw but need some extra tracks added to the session.
So generate them up, hit play on your daw, real band will play in sync with the daw, whatever sections don't fit you simply multiriff them to fit, now just drag the tracks into your daw.
This way you can fine tune the tracks to fit your session and not have to accept whatever whole track that biab generates.

The ACW may not be a necessary feature for you. I don't use Notation but Matt Finley finds it invaluable. Mario D focuses on the midi capabilities. That was my overall point. Whatever feature you purchased BIAB for, that's its value. As you develop musically and as you learn of all that BIAB can do, the program just becomes more valuable. My purchase was made on what I knew of the program before I purchased it. At the time, the ACW was not in the forefront of features. I didn't know what it was or what it did. It just happened that once I became aware of the ACW, it was an important feature for me.

The ACW is a skill just the same as any skill in any trade. I play guitar but when I attempt to play lead guitar, my music sounds like a song that you have run through the ACW. It's all wrong and all over the place. I know good carpenters that struggle with making dovetail joints, can't properly calibrate a planer and don't know every scale on a carpenter's square. They have other methods to make joints, avoid planers and use the carpenter square for what they do understand about it.

That you can become frustrated and turn to another method to solve determining chords and tempo detracts from the necessary motivation to stick with learning the ACW skills. I had this same discussion with my brother yesterday as we've been discussing working jointly on a project with pre-recorded audio files I made years ago playing with my late brother. We are thinking of adding him along with these existing recordings so all three brothers are playing together. The main obstacle is my brother's lack of mastery of the ACW.

The ACW is a skill that can be mastered with practice. It can be and is frustrating and sometimes is not the quickest way to get a correct chord chart. A speedy chord chart is not its forte. An accurate tempo map/chord chart (usually edited quite a bit) is. Oddly, for me, one day after many hours of frustration, everything just clicked into place. It was as if I learned to throw a baseball curveball. Once I threw curve, it was nearly impossible not to throw one. It becomes mechanical memory. You have to determine for yourself if learning the skill is worth the effort. If you have suitable methods that allow you to bypass the ACW, it may never have much value for you.

The ACW allows very accurate control over RealTracks that provide a realistic live sound to recordings. It is the foundation for projects that include pre-recorded music for me. Being the foundation, it is not unusual for getting the ACW export just right and the work within the ACW is the most labor intensive and time consuming portion of the entire project.

Regarding the beat detection, you can miss a beat and not have to start over. I also use the new Stylepicker to provide me the correct key signature/tempo and feel before I process the audio through the ACW. Knowing a song is 4/4, 110 ev8 beforehand takes a lot of the guesswork out of what to look for during the ACW process. If a song is at 110 BPM, the ACW will be the most accurate at that BPM.

Charlie: wow that is quite a post, thank you taking the time to go into detail in your response. Appreciated.

DE

You're welcome. I was afraid it may have sounded a bit preachy but my intent was to let you know learning the skill of the aCW is not due to natural ability but due to patience, knowledge and practice.

I even use it on occasion with BIAB projects that I start from scratch and that don't have pre-existing audio tracks.

When I generate a BIAB Realtrack song, render it and then process the rendered audio through the ACW, it is not a simple 110bpm generated track. The tempo varies slightly throughout the song. I call it de-quantized. These minor variations make the song much more natural feeling and live than just generating the tracks because the tracks now vary in tempo slightly as the song follows the more precise tempo map created by the ACW.

By the way, I learned that by creating BIAB tracks, running them through the ACW as a way to practice learning and gaining experience with the ACW. I recommend this process as a way to familiarize yourself with the ACW. Going in, you already know the key, tempo and chord progression.

Dave
Welcome to the forums.
No plans have been announced thus far, but often changes and new features are not advertised ahead of new releases.

64 bit has been often asked for. PGM use a different approach to deliver 64 bit connectivity for plugins (JBridge), but who knows, this may ultimately be superseded.

I venture to suggest that nobody outside of PGM knows.

I also suggest lots of people would be very happy to see a native 64 bit version.

Videotrack;

Thought I read (very) recently from Peter that there are no plans for 64 bit as JBridge handles it well.

DE

DE, I don't recall seeing that recently so it's probably in one of the forums I don't frequent. Do you think you could find and repost it?

JBridge provides a way to handle 64-bit VSTs and additional RAM, and that was indeed the major need at the time. But there would be other benefits to changing the app to fully 64-bit at some point.

While I can not point to a explicit PGM statement I can tell you that from my perspective, PGM has been very clear that 64bit is not in the works and not even on the horizon. Likely it took a bit of "reading between the lines" on my part instead of "read my lips", but that has always been the take-away-message when PGM has weighted in on the subject. Anything else is wishful thinking or just politically correct speak (both of which is generally the case when this subject comes up.)

So hate to burst everyone's bubble but being around here a long long time does lead to things other than just being old.

"The purchase price is worth it for just the Audio Chord Wizard alone". I don't use the Audio Chord Wizard ever, because I input the chords for lead sheet I use to play the melody. My main requests for BIAB are these:

1. Cut time
2. 6/8 styles that do note play as 12/8 styles
3. A unison mode in which allow individual parts to play the part of the multi track . For example if you had a horn pad track with multiple instruments, with unison, if you had the individual instrument based on the horn pad track the individual instrument would play their part along with the multi track.
4. A best of Real Tracks option in which any track designed as a background track when inserted and generated would allow you to have three different takes, this when selecting one, it would then save that take as a .wav file for that song only and allow you to play the song with that take and have that take be rendered to .wav when mixing the entire song.

I haven't seen this. In this thread Dr. Gannon said that 64 bit softsynths run in BiaB with jBridge and that BiaB is a 32 bit program that runs on both 32 bit and 64 bit machines. I have not seen anywhere where he said there are no plans for 64 bit.

Perhaps you could point me to that post?

[edit] I see where Matt beat me to the punch about the posting.

Matt: This is the post Peter made on page 2 of this thread.

#358994 - 07/30/16 07:57 PM

)))No 64 bit,
64 bit plugins are supported and work seemelessly with jbridge ($10). Otherwise the program is 32 bit and works fine on 32 and 64 bit OS`s

2014

A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse. Case closed

Hi DE
This has probably already been answered, but I think this is the comment you were referring to. Peter wrote recently:
"64 bit plugins are supported and work seemelessly(sic) with jbridge ($10). Otherwise the program is 32 bit and works fine on 32 and 64 bit OS`s"

I hoped my response to Dave didn't imply that there was or wasn't a 64 bit version on the horizon. My reply was to say that despite many requests, only PGM knew what might or might not happen with a 64 bit version.

my impression was that Peter asked for someone to make a compelling case for specific 64bit benefits and I don't think anyone really did! given that, and the fact that it would be quite an undertaking assuming the team has little experience building 64bit applications, I'd say this has to be pretty low on their priority list.