Hello all! I'm a relatively new user. Have read the forum for a couple months and must say it is very informative and a pleasure to read.

Today I ran into an issue that searches have not help to answer. I'm using 2018 BIAB on a Windows 10 machine. I've done two songs with mostly no issues at all. But today changed all that.

I put a lot of time in perfecting my third song. At some point in the project I noticed that when I hit the stop button the "cursor" would jump well past the end of the song, don't know if this relevant but never have seen that before. Anyway now when I export to .wav (individual files) they do not contain the count in although it is checked in the song export screen. Time is left at the beginning of each file but no count in is heard. I've unchecked and rechecked the box several times with no joy.

Again not sure how relevant this is but during the second "take" (regenerated) BIAB gave a write fail error then locked up. I run BIAB from the USB drive but write the wavs to an internal hard drive. Also the computer is less than a year old and a powerful machine. This happened once on one of my first two songs and I had to reboot before BIAB would allow me to do anything else. But on this reboot the computer sat at the "restarting" prompt forever. Nothing would happen until I unplugged the USB drive then reboot went as normal.

Gave it another shot and on "take 4" the same error forcing a reboot happened. But this time Windows said it had to repair the USB drive (chkdisk). Said all is well after the process.

Each time I did a new take I did a save as so I have 6 song files. The part that confuses me most is that the crash did not happen until take 2 yet none of the files from the first take have a count in either???? I did a test by exporting the default startup song (just a C chord) using the same style with the same instruments I changed, that export indeed had a count in. But if I load any of the 6 songs files I saved no count in!

So lastly I was going to copy the chord sheet from one of my song files into the default startup song but I could not select and scroll down my song. I could go from bar 1 but when I hit the bottom of the visible page it would not scroll for the rest. Tried it in reverse, bottom to top, but again no scroll.

So I'm seeking advice. Is it corrupt and beyond repair? Does this write fail lockup happen often. Can I do something different to avoid it?

Sorry for the novel but wanted to give as much detail as possible. Thanks in advance!
Mike

Welcome to the forum.

You write a very clear problem statement.

Yes, BIAB files can be corrupt. No, it's not often. I would say, quite rare.

In your case, since a problem occurred on writing the file, your odds of the file being corrupt went higher.

You can go to the display options and give yourself many more rows (I think the default may only be 12) so you can see more of the song to highlight and copy.

I take it you are running BIAB from the USB drive and did not install it to your PC. It works fine, but it would be faster if you installed at least the program to your internal drive.

When BIAB doesn't start, there are two files you can delete (BIAB will rebuild them): intrface.bbw and mysetup.dk I may have the spelling wrong by memory, but that first one really is spelled wrong. BIAB should then start. And always Run BIAB As Administrator.

I have had problems with some USB drives keeping my laptop from booting, but then never any problem with the drive itself.

We have also seen instances of where the connection inside the USB drive comes loose and operates intermittently.

I run my BIAB/RealBand locally on the internal hard drives; however, rather than run from the USB drive PGMusic sent you, I would probably opt to copy everything to another USB drive and put the master away as a backup. But that's me.

The good news is that if you find your BIAB is corrupt (and it's possible that since you had to run CHKDSK, there may be some files that didn't get fully repaired), as long as you have registered your serial number in your account on the main page, you can log into your account and download the complete BIAB 2018 package (should it come to that).

Thank you for replying gentlemen.

I haven't had anytime in the studio since posting. I do believe that my BIAB usb drive is fine? As stated I opened a new song and exported and all seem to be fine. Good ideas on installing the program on my local drive and getting another USB drive to house the rest.

Would this require a uninstall and reinstall? Would I have to reupdate everything?

Fortunately I downloaded everything off the website and made a copy of the USB drive when I received it.

The write failure stumps me? All "save as" went fine, no errors. The audio export that had write failures was writing to my local drive. Seems odd?

Lets assume that these failures were separate from the main problem. Can anyone think of any reasons why there would be space for a count in but no actual count in on this export?

Thanks again
Mike

Welcome!

By default, when exporting tracks Band-in-a-Box insets two bars to account for the count-in.

You may be able to eliminate the two bars by changing some of the count-in options available at Options > Preferences > Count-in/Met. The Help file indicates these options affect playback, not exporting so these options may not change exported track files.

It's not likely that the program is corrupted. The problem can occur in the process of working on and saving/writing files.

I had this happen one time and nothing I seemed to do would fix it. My fix was simple. I first copied the chords in the song..... highlight the entire song and select copy.....

then I opened a new project and simply pasted the chords back in and the new one worked perfectly. Give it a slightly different name and save it. Reopen it to test. If everything is fine, simply delete the old file from the computer.

Thanks a ton.
Glad to know I'm not the only one to experience this.

I was going to copy into a new song but could only select what was visible on the screen. Was going to try (I believe Matt suggested) but I just took it into Cubase and made my own count in.

Thanks again and any other suggestions are welcome for future challenges!
Mike