Tony, there is a very good chance that use of ASIO sound drivers, such as the free ASIO4ALL.exe, coupled with using a DXi MIDI synth, regardless of whether the songs involved are all Realtracks or not, may solve your problem.

Use of the Microsoft synth and the standard windows MME sound drivers is a recipe for all kinds of huge latency problems. I don't know what's under the hood inside Band in a Box, but have "been there and done that" regarding the kind of issues you are having. My theory, and that's all it can be without getting deep into the compiler, which we don't have and is precluded legally by the licensing agreement anyway, is that whenever the program has to "call" the very slow Microsoft synth, which I think happens every time we start a song, the doggone thing takes too long to get ready and the internal timing of whatever is happening "under the hood" causes that pesky playing of one note beforehand.

The fact that it is rather random as to when and which song it happens on seems to add credence to that theory. Sometimes resources and timing of CPU, etc. are available and ready and able to process in time, other times not.

Anyway, when I'm using Band in a Box on my laptop and don't want the extra hassle of hooking up one of the USB afermarket "recording" sound devices I have, which have their own ASIO sound drivers, I just use the ASIO4ALL driver, permanently installed on c: drive, and it has worked very well over the years, eliminating problems such as this one before they can rear their ugly head, also eliminating *other* problems, such as long latency when trying to play keyboards, softsynths, even hardware synths to some extent (hardware MIDI itself is very fast, of course, but still can succumb to Interrupts and other things in the Windows System and PC timing scheme on occasion, creating a hiccup. ASIO sound drivers attempt to create an Audio Stream that does not get interrupted by such OS and CPU calls. That's why Steinberg designed ASIO sound drivers in the first place.


--Mac

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