Jim.... man..... have you ever heard of the KISS principle? Keep it simple ..... and of course Murphy's Law that says if something can go wrong it will?

You have only yourself to blame and not Band in a Box.

Notes Norton's first post on page one is the advice you should have been following.

I volunteer in SAR.... search and rescue. Regarding our essential gear like radios and flashlights.... we have a saying. Two is one and one is none. Things quit and if you have a spare you can keep going. If not....as you discovered, things can end badly.

Never play live with an application program like from a DAW or BiaB. I have done a few musical gigs (since I stopped playing in bands) and for my backup I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS made mixes of the songs and never even once considered running them through my laptop DAW feeding the PA.... nope, not even once. I always burned them to an audio CD, checked it in multiple devices, made duplicates of the disk and then went to the gig. With the application DAW or BiaB, your computer is trying to process multiple wave tracks and possibly even softsynths and it's working hard to do that whereas a music player running an MP3 is nothing to the processor. Less work generally translates to a more stable platform and less chance of a crash.

If I was ever to start gigging for fun and profit, I would have my stuff on laptops in the MP3 320k format and have duplicate computers as NN said.

This is one of those things you might not ever forget. Hopefully, you will have a chance to talk to the manager at the place where you blew it and see if he'll give you a second shot at playing there again. Of course, move all your tunes to MP3 and get 2 computers and be ready for the inevitable SNAFU when .... not if, but when it comes again. Next time, you can switch computers...... make a joke about it and finish the gig with the other machine.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.