Over the past thirty years BIAB has added many features, audio, VST’s and so much more until today, BIAB is one of the prominent music software suites in the world. It can handle anything from a grade student’s simple accompaniment to a very complex orchestra arrangement to commercially viable productions. Just as BIAB has grown more complex over the years, so has the BIAB user and the uses of BIAB in every aspect of music composition, arrangements and productions have become more complex.

With more complex projects comes the ever increasing need for more space to hold snippets of audio, an alternate take of a solo, more instruments, sound effects and more channels to mix down to a final Stereo Master WAV file. Real Band has 48 Tracks and many DAWs have unlimited tracks. It is not unusual for a project to have 60 to more than a hundred tracks any more. All these tracks will be mixed down to a single Stereo Master Track.

Is it time for Virtual Tracks for the BIAB Mixer? First, what is a Virtual Track? Where would one find a Virtual Track? How do you use a Virtual Track? Good questions. Let’s watch a short video and find out.

Virtual Tracks

While the video obviously does not reference BIAB Virtual Tracks, they don’t exist yet, the concept should work with BIAB because the BIAB Mixer functions quite well as an 8 track digital mixer. So, when the video references Track 5 on the digital multitrack recorder, exchange the BIAB Legacy Channel (Bass, Piano, Drums, Guitar, Strings, Melodist, and Soloist) for the Track Name.

Imagine creating a project with each BIAB Mixer Channel providing 8 opportunities to choose from to render to your final Mix…. Take 3 of the Bass Track. Take 1 of your Piano and so on.
But you don’t have to wait until the final mix down to use the feature. You can build a final Track by instrument as well. Create and export a mix of 5 piano tracks (place and mix Real Track piano’s, midi piano’s and Supermidi Piano’s on the BIAB mixer tracks Bass, Piano, Guitar, and so on). Mix, pan and set levels for each track and render that to an Audio Wav file. Import that WAV file, convert it to a Performance Track and move the Performance Track to the first Virtual Track Slot of the Bass Track. Mix an alternative mix of the piano instruments, export as audio, import it, convert it to a Performance track and place it in Virtual Track 2 and so on. Then repeat the process for guitars, soloists, fiddles so that you have all of your ideas for each instrument placed on a Virtual Track. Of course, you could use a different instrument altogether on each Virtual Track or a combination of up to 10 instruments on each Virtual Track.

For your final mix, go through the Virtual Tracks and select your favorite take from the various Virtual Tracks for each channel and render your final version from the selected Virtual Tracks.
As projects have become more complex over time, I’ve seen where the Virtual Track system could greatly simplify and speed up the work flow. It is already possible to do this in BIAB today on a more limited and cumbersome basis as I explained to Mike in this thread: Mike hit a snag on a complex file . But this is a feature that as it’s explained in the Virtual Track video, might not be an insurmountable hurdle for the PGMusic programmers. It is a quite common feature on current standalone digital multitrack recorders from Tascam, Zoom and others and is simply a method of utilizing the available disk space on the recording media of the device.

Hopefully I’ve explained the idea sufficiently but feel free to ask questions, add your comments and maybe even your support.










Last edited by Charlie Fogle; 09/21/18 02:27 AM.
BIAB Ultra Pak+ 2024:RB 2024, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.