Hi! I'm brand new to BIAB. Well to tell the truth I bought BIAB 2016 for Mac a year ago but it was kind of complex and I gave up. Anyway I'm just now trying it again.

I was able to develop a simple 12 bar song. It has an auto-generated ending that I want to turn off. So I went into song settings and unchecked the option "Generate 2-Bar Ending for This Song". The ending (which starts with measure 13a) then greyed out. So I thought I was all set. But when I play the song the 2-bar ending still plays just as if it was not greyed out.

What am I doing wrong?

I fooled around with this some more. It seems if I switch styles or if use use the "Generate and Play" button it will then turn off the ending (or turn it on).

What is going on here? And what does the "Generate and Play" button do? It says it "regenerates the arrangement". I looked this up in the manual but it is not clear what that means or when you are supposed to use it vs just the Play button.

My (perhaps simplistic) understanding of this is that once you have entered a song, it has to be "generated" to play (the process where the program creates all the instrument parts). Once you've done this, if you press "play", the program does not create all the parts again, it just plays what it has previously created - thus saving you the few seconds the computer takes to create all the parts. However, if you press "generate and play", the program again creates all the parts (and it will be slightly different from what was produced before).

So if you've got a song already created (lets call this version 1), and then you enter some changes (like turning off the ending - thus creating version 2). Now if you press "play" the program is going to still play version 1. You've got to press "generate and play" to produce (and hear) version 2. Now once you've produced (or generated) version 2 of your song, you can use "play" to hear it again...

Hope that helps some. Good luck!

Bruce

Bruce's explanation about Play verses Generate/Play is very good. The only suggestion I would make is that BIAB knows if you change chords (or a few other things) and will regenerate the song again anyway**. A regenerated song will indeed sound somewhat different.

**The exception is if you choose to Freeze tracks. There are several ways to do this (write back if you need advice) but if you do that, then it can be confusing because you make a change to the song but do not hear it! This results in many beginner questions to the forum, thinking the program is broken...

Matt and Bruce,

Thanks for your reply. Your explanation makes sense.

I'm finding something true about Band-in-a-box in general. It is confusing to start with, has a lot of "unique" ways of doing things, and a busy User Interface.

But once you understand something the first time then it becomes clear and is easy to use from there!

Very good.

Keep your questions coming. Pretty soon you’ll be answering them too.

Great! I think you're catching on to BIAB, and once you do, it just keeps growing on you. Good luck!

Bruce