PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Not Buying Another Upgrade Until BIAB is 64 Bit.

Gentlemen,

Not wishing for a pillow-fight with anyone here, but I think I have a new point to make.

I read through this thread fully, to be sure whether my following point – about a very specific, useful, real-world benefit which a 64 bit BIAB would bring, for me and I suspect many potential new users as well – had been dealt with squarely and decisively before posting here.

I believe it has not – although it has been mentioned a few times, sometimes as though it were a settled question.

In summary: Having tested this, I believe – correct me please if you've actually experienced otherwise – that while you can, within BIAB, use jbridge to run a 64 bit VSTi like Kontakt, you cannot load that instance of Kontakt up with more than a couple GB of of libraries, the way you can with a 64-bit host.

In detail...

I have invested a lot in some very nice Kontakt libraries. I am not being snooty here, but they sound simply worlds better, in my opinion, than SampleTank or any of the other things in 32 bit BIAB through which we can play out midi. I think this is the reason that Kontakt is, I understand from other forums, very commonly used as a staple tool by professional composers, whereas Sampletank, well … a lot less so.

Some of these Kontakt libraries are hugely RAM-intensive. I have had multis (or collections, in Kontakt-speak) of orchestral instruments going fine in 64-bit Sonar, where around 9 gb of samples were employed. I went 64-bit, when I got a PC with 16 GB of RAM, so I could do just that.

Yes, when j-bridged, 32 bit BIAB will let me load up and play libraries in 64 bit Kontakt – but only if the Kontakt instruments stay below the memory limits imposed by BIAB's 32-bit design.

But I cannot load that same 9 gb multi into Kontakt when using it as a VSTi within BIAB. Someone in this thread mentioned that they had not “torture tested” this. Well, I have. It triggers “Kontakt out of memory” errors. As you'd expect. Jbridge allows 32 and 64 bit software to communicate, but it does not give BIAB the RAM “heavy lifting” power imposed by its 32-bit design. It doesn't suddenly suspend the memory “law of gravity” which, as I understand it, constrains all 32 bit programs.

I know there are workarounds. For example, I can load the best midi playback device available in BIAB, then start creating a song, browsing styles etc – but in the end, I have to imagine, when auditioning things, how it would sound through my ultimate intended soundset (i.e. Kontakt). If I want to hear it through Kontakt, I have to stop, export my all my candidate arrangements, load them into Sonar, play them, then decide if I'd chosen well … if not, then back to BIAB. This sometimes takes many iterations.

This works, but – apart from being a bit of a pain in the old rump roast – it deprives me of something very powerful – when inspiration strikes, the ability to hear the intended result while composing. Because what you hear in turn affects what you compose (which includes, in BIAB, which styles you pick, what variations you apply, etc). We all know this virtuous feedback loop.

Now, imagine, for some bizarre reason, you wanted to write a Hendrix-style guitar part, but restircted yourself to doing it on an acoustic, imagining how it would sound after being run through the magic pedals and amp and played with a whammy bar.

Or it's just like in Photoshop, you expect to be able to see the changes you've instructed as you make them. Imagine if Photoshop permitted you only to specify changes (for example, adjust contrast by x%, saturation by y%) but you'd have to view the results in other software. You'd do a lot of back and forth, wouldn't you? And maybe murmur “h-e-double hockey sticks, why is this necessary” a few times, I'd suspect.

That is exactly what I do when I want to use BIAB's midi styles for multipart compositions written for my preferred Kontakt libraries. The workaround is not only a pain, but it is just not the same. I lose the feedback loop.

Moreover, as nice as some of the Sampletank patches are, they sometimes sound so different from the Kontakt ones that I'd use, that the Sampletank patches are not a useful guide to me when I am auditioning styles. Sometimes something will sound great in Sampletank but not Kontakt, and vice-versa. For example, I have a Kontakt cello with programming which permits very expressive legato playing. Sampletank's cello (even from Miroslav) will shed little light on what the midi it's playing within BIAB will sound like through the Kontakt cello.

For this reason, I don't use BIAB near as much as I'd hoped to. For RealTracks it's brilliant, and fine in 32 bit. For midi, when using large libraries, it's off-putting. It's a genuine obstacle to music- making, not some groundless whining about 64 bit for its own sake.

It's been mentioned here that it seems most BIAB users don't care about 64 bit. That could well be true, if we are just talking about present users, and we assume they are fairly represented on this forum.

But if you want to talk about additional, new users – you know, the ones who aren't here yet? – well, could it be that they are not here because they never got past the – to many, now ancient historical – “32-bit only” drawback. Outside this forum, it does seem pretty horse-and-buggy, an easy reason for folks to not even investigate.

Think about it. BIAB is so powerful – it could easily could be, say, a professional composer's best friend, or at least one of them. But professionals these days use 64 -bit, and have for quite a while, so they can access the power of Kontakt, UVI and other RAM-hoggy but top-flight virtual instruments which they have come to take for granted. You're not hearing their voices here, because they're not here.