More new features in RealBand 2011.5!

Tracks are "painted Red" during recording, to confirm that recording is occurring in the right place.

You can "freeze" a track, which prevents it from being regenerated by functions like re-generate all tracks, or the [BB] button. To do this, right click on the track and select, "Freeze track from Generation."

Default track type for new songs is now Audio, instead of MIDI. Since typical projects are mostly audio, this saves time setting the track types.

Copying and Moving selections is easier with Drag and Drop. You can drag and drop highlighted regions of a track by holding the Ctrl key and then dragging the region. When you drop to a new track (or the same track), a dialog appears with options to move or copy.

Video Help toolbar button added. This launches the RealBand videos webpage.

The Audio Edit window now shows events with background colors, and has a gray background instead of white.

Auto-hook-up to Coyote GM Wavetable MIDI synth when running RealBand for the 1st time: When the program is run for the first time, and the MIDI Driver Setup dialog is popped up, the Coyote WT, if present, will be automatically loaded into the default DXi Slot .

Support for loading frozen tracks from Band-in-a-Box MGU files has been added. When loading a Band-in-a-Box song, frozen MIDI, frozen RealTracks, and frozen RealDrums tracks are loaded into RealBand.

When loading in a new style, the tempo of the project will be changed to the typical tempo of the style.

Other GUI enhancements:

• The mouse scroll wheel in Tracks window will zoom in/out if hovering over the overview section. It will still scroll horizontally if hovering to the left of the overview section.
• Horizontal Scroll bar on Tracks win now redraws the window as you drag the scrollbar, not waiting until you lift the mouse.

Hotkeys added:

• Ctrl+NumPad Plus hotkey for "Zoom In" in the Tracks/AudioEdit window.
• Ctrl+NumPad Minus hotkey for "Zoom Out" in the Tracks/AudioEdit window.
• Shift NumPad Plus hotkey for "Zoom Selection" button in the Tracks/AudioEdit window
• Shift+NumPad Minus hotkey for "Zoom Whole" in Tracks/AudioEdit window
• Ctrl+Shift+N hotkey toggles through the notation modes of Notation window

Sticky buttons added

• Sticky buttons on the Tracks window like the [Snap], [L] (lock), and [Z-Whole] buttons will display font in bold when pressed in.
• Mixer F/X buttons will appear sticky "pushed in" if a Track strip, Aux strip, or Master strip has any non-blank F/X slots.

You can apply a custom color (foreground and background) to a track, or all tracks, using right-click menu items "Current Track Event Colors" and "Default Track Event Color Setup."

When playing audio via MME, and a track contains volume changes, these will be heard at the scheduled time rather than with a delay.

In the Chords window, a [Bar] button has been added on the top tool bar, to launch the Settings for Bar dialog.

Easier change of tempo when song has audio. Now, when you change tempo and the song has audio, the audio stretching happens without a confirmation dialog required. You can Undo the changes if you want to restore the original tempo.

In the Track menu the Merge command now has an option to "Always merge to audio."

"Auto-convert MIDI track to audio track" now has the ability to convert to the same track. This function is accessed by right-clicking on the Tracks window, and will convert a MIDI track to audio. Now it can keep the audio on the same track.

The program no longer needs to show a "checking soundcard" function when being used for the first time. This speeds up starting time.

No warning dialog is displayed if no MIDI Drivers are installed. A less intrusive yellow fly-by hint message displays instead.

[Reset Bar] and [Reset All Bars] buttons have been implemented in the Settings for Bar dialog (F5). Canceling the dialog will restore the original. These allow you to quickly remove settings that apply to the current bar or all bars.