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#144371 12/31/11 01:05 PM
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people sometimes compare RB to other DAW apps as though it is less capable. But in my quest to end up with one music app that I use for everything, RB is increasingly the one that never fails me.

For example, I recently bought BFD ECO based on Filketom's recommendation, and my son's good results with it. When I try to use it in Sonar 6.0, Sonar drops out after just a few notes. Even if I unload all other effects and soft synths, I can't get it to run in Sonar without dropouts.

In contrast, RB lets me use BFD ECO even when I have several other soft synths in use at the same time.

Speaking of which, the new ability to have multiple soft synths is very empowering. The ability to use BFD for drums, Garritan for orchestral instruments, SFZ+ for sound fonts and coyote forte or a hardware synth for the rest is the best of all worlds. No matter what sound I need, now it is possible.

True, Sonar 6 is several years old while RB2012 is PGMusic's latest offering... but to me the question is about what products to keep in the upgrade loop. Especially as I approach retirement ands the accompanying fixed income, that's a practical consideration.

From the standpoint of my own needs, 2012 marks the first year that RB does everything I want to do.

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Speaking of which, the new ability to have multiple soft synths is very empowering. The ability to use BFD for drums, Garritan for orchestral instruments, SFZ+ for sound fonts and coyote forte or a hardware synth for the rest is the best of all worlds. No matter what sound I need, now it is possible ...
From the standpoint of my own needs, 2012 marks the first year that RB does everything I want to do.




RB has allowed separate synths for at least 5 years now, probably closer to 10. It's new to BiaB though..

Last edited by rharv; 12/31/11 01:14 PM.

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Quote:

Quote:

Speaking of which, the new ability to have multiple soft synths is very empowering. The ability to use BFD for drums, Garritan for orchestral instruments, SFZ+ for sound fonts and coyote forte or a hardware synth for the rest is the best of all worlds. No matter what sound I need, now it is possible ...
From the standpoint of my own needs, 2012 marks the first year that RB does everything I want to do.




RB has allowed separate synths for at least 5 years now, probably closer to 10. It's new to BiaB though..




My bad.
I didn't HAVE multiple soft synths until now, so I never noticed.

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It IS a cool feature. Having it in BiaB was a huge step forward.. I bet many more people notice it now.
I'd have to research how long RB has had it; I'm thinking since PT8 or so (before RB even became a program) so I guess RB always had it

Now that you've discovered it; have fun! It was very interesting to hear RB handled that particular synth better than Sonar. Due to the nature of forums, we often hear the synth problems instead of when RB is the solution.


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Yea I was about to say RB has only been around since 2008 (?) so a most 5 years (rounding UP) but thought it might sound like I was trying to start a fight - I'm not!

Happy New Year
Larry


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Larry Kehl
I still use PT at one location, but usually have RB handy, so it gets blurred at times.
I consider them the same engine (RB and PT), so once I got to thinking about it I thought I better clarify.

Glad I did so you and I didn't come to blows over it ..
I like your sig, made me smile

Last edited by rharv; 12/31/11 02:24 PM.

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I like your sig, made me smile




+1


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I love the concept of one software does it all, RB is as close as it gets if you want music made and mixed .

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I love the concept of one software does it all, RB is as close as it gets if you want music made and mixed .




Music making branches off in a bunch of different directions. Each person needs to decide for himself which software provides the most bang for the buck. Speaking for myself, I'm very happy with the suite of PG products. They provide more opportunities already than I have time to pursue. Between BIAB and RB, if they never released another version, I'd still be discovering features years from now. But they WILL keep improving both products, and that's why I'll keep upgrading THIS software, as long as I can afford to do so.


Regarding the dropouts I was getting from Sonar:
I went back and changed their audio settings to the same settings I use in RealBand, and it stopped dropping out. I mention this in fairness to Sonar, as turns out not to be a software problem but rather a stupid user problem. But I'm still not going to upgrade it anymore.

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I have Sonar X1 Essentials, nice. powerful, and useful, but I still use RB far more often.

I own Reaper 4.14, Nice Powerful, useful, I still use RB far more often.

I own Multitrackstudio, Nice, Powerful, super stable, and useful, i still use Rb more often.

The above three are all very good applications. MTS is one of the most stable,a nd simple productive DAW software packages i have ever touched. The problem is is does very little in the way of music creation, other than midi note addition thru piano roll or the like, and audio it is a very smooth audio auditor, but does not generate anything that even resembles a RT. If I created everything in BiaB, and did not have RB I would move it there more often than not.

Reaper is a deep powerful app, i love it's routing capability, and the light touch it has in it's footprint. It also is a dream to mix with, but guess what it does not generate a thing. Sure you can add midi notes, and record audio or add looped content, but so can almost any DAW software.

Sonar X1 is far more stable than i was led to believe, and is a very powerful app to mix audio, and process midi in. It is very familiar to me since i started in a Cakewalk app. Once again it does not generate files other than to build with midi, or record audio, and mix.

RB might not have every tool that these other apps have, or at least a few of them are not quite as sophisticated (yet), but it does generate, and it will build and work with midi, and you can record and edit audio, and you can do 99% of what you can do with the other apps. So why switch for just one or two features, that most likely have work arounds anyway. I just keep this updated and watch it grow.


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A craftsman needs good tools. If a person can afford all music apps, why on earth would he/she NOT have them all? They each bring something good to the mix.

My main point is that if you can only afford ONE... the question arises "which one?"

Each person has to answer that question according to his/her specific needs. MY needs are best met with the PGMusic suite... but I fully understand that many people rely heavily on specific features of other products. That doesn't mean they can't also own BIAB and RB to gain the benefits they provide too.

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Biab/RB ! No one else even comes close !

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Biab/RB ! No one else even comes close !




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BiaB/RB if only one! Heck I pretty much use it all the time anyway!


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If I coud only choose one it would RB. Before Reaper, ProTools, Sonar, Biab, et al.

The generating possibilities far outweigh the options found in other DAWs that I don't get in RB. And the track count and flexibility makes it outweigh BiaB, so the choice would be easy here.


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Until one of the other DAWs comes up with a music generation feature, this is apples to guacamole here.... they are not the same tool. The DAW part of RB is comparable, all in all there is no other tool that does everything Real Band does in one package.


I smashed the hell out of my car today. When the cops came I told him "Officer, that guy was BOTH texting and drinking a beer." The cop said "Sir, he has every right to do that. I mean, it's HIS living room..."
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Until one of the other DAWs comes up with a music generation feature, this is apples to guacamole here.... they are not the same tool. The DAW part of RB is comparable, all in all there is no other tool that does everything Real Band does in one package.




depending on how you define "music generation" there are other apps that semi-automate the process of creating music. The Fruity Loops paradigm sees music as a series of looped patterns, and provides a nifty little grid to create the patterns easily and quickly.

Several other programs have a paradigm of assembling pre-recorded audio snippets to build a song.

Both of those paradigms are limited in scope, and start to sound redundant pretty quickly.

But to my mind, what sets RB apart from them is ..
1) the adaptive intelligence that is part and parcel to the building blocks used in RB and BIAB
2) the sheer configurability of the sytem makes it possible to create/automate almost ANY kind of music from classical to bluegrass and everything in between, and have it sound so realistic that most people can't tell it wasn't recorded by real musicians.

In most cases, RB can generate the same song that the other DAWs can generate... but the other DAWs can't recreate most of what RB can do.

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Better analogy would be that while you CAN drive a nail with the handle end of a screwdriver, you are probably better off using a hammer designed to do that job.


I smashed the hell out of my car today. When the cops came I told him "Officer, that guy was BOTH texting and drinking a beer." The cop said "Sir, he has every right to do that. I mean, it's HIS living room..."
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I think the answer to this question lies deeper under the surface than what is being discussed.

If the most important thing to you is to have automatically generated backing tracks, then there really is no comparison, RB/BIAB is the one tool to rule them all.

However, if that is not high on the priority list, and other music production tools have higher priority, then it falls down the list fairly far for some folks.

For me, a great deal of my 'composing' occurs with editing of sound, not necessarily notes. One genre that I play in is 'ambient' music, and for this type of sound, what notes are played is often secondary to the manipulation of the sound after the note is initiated.

In this regard, there are features standard in almost every other DAW software that have yet to show themselves in any PG products.

But I realize this is almost beside the point. The reason 99% of people are here on the PG forums is because backing track generation is a very high, if not the highest, priority as they consider making music with a computer involved.

Autogeneration of tracks is something I haven't been able to grok, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong for others to do so.

When I've been dissatisfied with my midi-oriented bass lines of 10 years ago, I searched high and low for sample sets, sound fonts, etc. and I still got midi-fied sounding bass. I finally sprang for a real live bass, and while I'm not Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, or Jamerson, I find it incredibly satisfying to record my own bass parts. They will never measure up to the virtuosity of Real Tracks. Never.

However, I can hear what I want to have in the song from the get go and get to work figuring out how to play it straightaway, without auditioning auto-generated parts.

Drums, that's a different matter altogether. I have a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time so playing drums on my own is really really crummy sounding.

My compositions tend to use instrumentation that I can play and imagine what it should sound like. I see Eddie's profile pic holding that sax, and since I have no idea what to play on that thing, I never venture there with a composition.

I think this is a key distinction in how different approaches to composing end up. Some think that every song needs horn parts, even though they don't play them.

Anyways, approach to composition lies at the heart of what tools work best. That's my opinion.

-Scott

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Scott, give us an idea what features you feel are missing that other DAW software has?


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