PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Is it time for Virtual Tracks for the BIAB Mixer?

There is an important distinction between a Virtual Track concept and adding additional tracks to the BIAB Mixer regardless if the additional Channels can be Midi or audio. Additional Channels and 64 Bit processing and other processing deep code limitations lost in the word proprietary to PGMusic software is not the issue to this wishlist item.

Adding additional channels to the BIAB mixer may be an impossibility for whatever the reason may be. I don't think adding Virtual Tracks is a coding impossibility. Here's why. First, if you think of the BIAB Mixer Channels as physical channels being the same as any stand alone mixer or digital multitrack recorder, the following makes sense.

There are several ways to implement the Virtual Track availability.

Virtual Tracks can be any number and the number is a design feature limitation determined by physical memory of the device's storage media whether it is hard drive, SD card or similar.

Virtual Tracks can be Channel assigned or an entire bank of Virtual Tracks can be accessed from any channel. Tascam's 24 track multi channel recorder that preceded the current DP-24/32 series was the 2488neo. The 2488 series had a 250 Virtual Track limit on a 80GB Hard drive. Any of the 250 VT's could be assigned to any of the 24 physical channels. At any one time, one of the 250 tracks were assigned to one of the 24 channels and VT's could be moved freely between the physical channels of the unit. The DP-24/32 models designed Virtual Tracks to 8 per Channel based on a 2GB SD card. The DP-24/32 can utilize much larger SD cards but ships with a 2GB card and I suspect the design, which had to have a fixed amount of memory reserved for Virtual Track storage, that was the minimum compromise Tascam engineers decided on.

All of the Tascam model Portastudio based recorders have at least one Virtual Channel - The Master/Mix accessible by a physical button where the users final mixdown is stored on the memory media. If it's a single channel, it is overwritten each time you Master or Mixdown.

As you can see from the DP-24/32, the physical limitation of Channels have nothing to do with how many Virtual Tracks a device can have or how the Virtual Tracks are allocated.

The physical limitation of channels is determined by the device. So, if the BIAB Mixer's 8 channels are for whatever reason a 'physical' limitation, that has no bearing on whether Virtual Tracks may be an option for BIAB. There may be other physical or coding barriers, but the current track/channel limitation should not be the issue.

I think Virtual Channel track count and Channel allocation would be limited the same as Tascam and other manufacturers have done and limit the maximum to the smallest common denominator of physical memory medial the product line has available for shipping. For instance, the unused memory of the DVD product that ships.

Virtual Tracks don't increase the channel physical limitation of a device, whether it is software based or a stand alone device like the Tascam DP-24. Likewise, the physical channel count has no bearing on the amount of Virtual Tracks that are ultimately available to the end user.

Virtual Tracks are a work flow benefit to complex projects allowing quick, easy and uncumberson access to additional audio when you're working on your piece. Virtual Tracks also give you access to choose from many saved Tracks when you make your final mix or render of the 8 physical BIAB Channels. For instance, say PGMusic designed either 64 tracks that are available to from any of the current 8 channels or likewise, created 8 VT's per each of the current 8 Channels, regardless how the VT's are allocated, the end user would have a choice of 64 tracks to choose a final 8 for the final render from within the program.