Hi, all. So I'm new to Band in a Box but one of the reasons I bought it was because of its claims of ease of use. This doesn't seem to be the case.

I was told by tech support that if I want to have a chord play on the second half of a beat, I have to go to the _next_ beat and then push the note backwards. So if I want to have a chord play on the and of 4 (4AND) I have to go to beat one of the next bar and push the note backwards across the barline. I have no idea how BB will notate the chord on beat one of that bar, and haven't even tried. In addition to being completely confusing, it's filling up bars which should be empty.

This is flat out ridiculous in 2016 for a program that costs over $500, especially when Microsoft now has a tablet that can annotate music drawn with a stylus. Band in a Box needs another layer level where users can choose which beat of the bar they want to place their notes on. Wikipedia tells me that BB was created in 1990 (I vaguely remember it in high school), but computer interfaces have come a long way since then. I don't know that I would have purchased this if I had known I needed to enter holds and shots with multiple periods. The days of DOS are over.

Get on it, PG Music.

Love,

An aspiring guitarist

In this respect, it would be an improvement if the program worked more closely to the way musical scores are written and played. If you want a note to occur later, you add a rest for the duration of the required delay, then add the note in the exact place you want it played.

You certainly don't tell the note on the following beat to start earlier.

A lot of this could be avoided if there were 8 beats per bar instead of a maximum of 4 - which has been asked for since the start of time (almost).

+1 from me.

Trevor was this a typo? I'm fairly certain that you meant being able to put a chord on any eight note, that would be a max of 8 possible positions to place a chord in 4/4.

As you know this and supporting time signatures other than just 3/4 and 4/4 have been on the wishlist many times.

Whoops
Yes, I was busy being distracted and didn't pay attention to what I was actually entering. Yes, 8 possible positions, or eighth note resolution was what I should have mentioned.
Thanks Mario for the quick pickup.

Trevor

Yes, that's it exactly. If programs like Photoshop can work in layers, why can't BB? Why can't there be a layer that is a line of eighth notes that lets me click on where I want the chord to go? That alone would be a massive improvement.

This has been in the wish list for many years now. It's hard to imagine that PG has been ignoring this for so long. Implementing 8th note resolution must be presenting PG with insurmountable problems.

Well, it's sure presenting the PGM Users with insurmountable problems.

I just scoot the track over half a beat in a DAW, just posted it on user forum. http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=338677#Post338677

Yes, Tommy, that's one way of resolving, but it would be better if this was able to be done inside BiaB - a one-stop-shop, rather than taking it somewhere else to sort out.

Is anyone familiar enough with the BIAB OS to guess at what may be presenting problems that prevent BIAB from implementing 8th note resolution? Ray

Possibly because all of the existing MIDI and RealTracks styles are currently quarter resolution. If a change were made, only newer ones would work, or all of the existing ones would have to be redone? I doubt if it's a programming impossibility, but moreover the problems it might create with existing material. Only a guess.

My simplistic mind thinks it's really just a math problem, with some logic thrown in.

Obviously, the UI would need to be updated to accommodate 8th note resolution input. But existing BIAB files should be able to be read in and interpreted correctly, because they quarter note resolution overlay nicely on 8th note resolution (would have to handle pushes, but we know today, BIAB can already adjust the math for 8th and 16th notes to support pushes).

I would think that MIDI styles might be able to be converted on the fly, or at least they could provide a conversion routine to do make existing styles 8th-note resolution enabled, and obviously the file format of the MGU/SGU would have to change.

For RealTracks, I would think it would be a matter of adjusting the offsets to the RT audio file, with some logic (for example) as to whether a note is on the beat or off the beat. It's not like the 8th note doesn't already exist in the file. Again, that's just math.

But I could be totally wrong.

Why don't they do this with BBIAB for Mac 2016?

I'm not sure, but when BIAB was invented, it was given a file structure. Back then memory was expensive, a MB was about a grand. I have not yet looked at the file structure, I'm sure with the right tools I could figure out what is what and where and in which size.

I just believe that the four beat per measure resolution is written into the file structure. That is two bits of information, eight beats would be three bits of information. Some of our wishes seem to turn everything in the file structure topsy turvy like more than 256 measures (eight bits of information)(, more than eight.three digits for style names, etc. The file structure seems very rigid, as it was state of the art in the 1980s. I bet, there is much more information that could be expanded to make a lot of things more flexible.

At the same time, PGMusic needs to make sure that old files are still recognised, be read and played and could be saved that way.

Thanks for the input.