Before there was RealBand, there was PowerTracks. It was sold separately from BIAB and didn't interact with BIAB at all. When RealBand was introduced, it used PowerTracks as its underlying engine (in fact, until you looked carefully, and even today, it's somewhat difficult to tell the difference between the two). But RealBand incorporates a lot of the song generation features of BIAB. Some of these features were also incorporated into PowerTracks as well.

The biggest difference you see today is that PowerTracks doesn't have the "blue" tracks that RealBand has for generating accompaniment based on MIDI styles, RealStyles, or individual RealTracks. PowerTracks does have the ability to generate a drum track using RealDrums, however.

I own both PowerTracks and RealBand and mostly use RealBand; however, when I don't want to be distracted by all the accompaniment generation features, I'll go back to PowerTracks (for example, when I'm recording my wife for a podcast). Also, both use the .SEQ file format, so you can easily move files back and forth between the two. However, if you read a RealBand file in PowerTracks, all the auto-generated tracks will come across as "regular" tracks and you won't be able to do any further BIAB-type song generation on those tracks.

But if you know one, you will find yourself at home in the other once your realize the few differences.

John

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