I have upgraded from BiaB 2018 to BiaB 2020 for Windows and now when I render a song to a wav file it takes very long. Most of the time it is writing a file DRUMS_TEMP_RENDER.WAV. In BiaB 2018 this was much faster.

Does anybody else have this problem and faound a solution?

Thanks for any proposal of a solution

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Rene Burkhardt

Hi Rene,

There are a number of ways to render a song to wav file.

Can you please explain, step by step, what you do.

Once you explain your process, we on the forum can test it and try to replicate your issue.

In the meantime, go to the link below, download update #728 and install it if your version of BIAB is not up to date.

https://www.pgmusic.com/support_windowsupdates.htm

To see what version of update you are running, have a look under "Help | About Band In A Box". The update number will be in brackets following the version 2020.

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel,
I have Band in a Box Version 2020 (728) and I am exporting with menu 'Audio: Export song as audio file'.

I just have discussed with the Live Help and together with the Supporter I have detected the reason:

When converting a song .mgx file into a .wav file and both files are on a local drive, then the conversion takes about one minute.

But when one of the files is on a network drive, the conversion takes about 20 minutes.

It can not be the speed of the network, the network drive is on a NAS and i have transfer speeds up to 100MB/s.

I just have written a mail to support@pgmusic.com describing the problem.

I have recently noticed that my WD-MyCloud NAS network drive is incredible slow. I have to find sometime to figure out what has changed and why. Just sayin...

Does this mean that the OP’s RealDrums are on a different place that the RealTracks when there is the serious delay?

If I am reading this correctly, it seems the files are on a network drive and have to be transferred over the network rather than being stored on a local or usb drive of the computer.

If this is correct then this is the first time I have heard of a user attempting this.

Rene,

And MGX file means that you've loaded a multitrack MIDI file onto either the Melody or the Soloist track. I imagine that this would slow things down.

Do you need all the instruments in the MIDI file or were you only after the melody from that file?

If it's possible to remove some of the MIDI tracks you don't need in the MIDI file, it would speed things up.

Regards,
Noel

Just a guess, but transfer speed comparisons might not be the same when rendering a song.
As far as I know, rendering involves an 'interweaving' process of the source files. This means requesting small chunks repeatedly from different drives.
A continuous stream of data is much different; so transfer speed measurements itself may be misleading.
I use multiple drives, but all internal, which works well.

Another thing to add to the equation in your situation is other network traffic. That can affect how fast the NAS actually receives the request, and how quickly its reply gets back to the system. Since it is a lot of small requests, this can add up quickly ..
I've often wondered about doing what you are doing (using network storage) so this is interesting, at least to me.

The whole BIAB installation is installed on the local C-drive, I only want to have my valuable source files (MGX, MGU, etc.) on a NAS where I can access them also with the laptop and where everything is backed up.

I render by using menu 'Audio: Export Song as Audio File' or the Icon named 'wav'.

When I copy the source MGX or MGU or SGX file to a local drive and then I start the rendering from that copied file it takes about 1 minute. But when I start the rendering by using as source MGX or MGU or SGX file directly from the mapped NAS drive it takes more than 20 minutes.

Updating, playing etc. of a source file loaded from the mapped causes no problems, its only the conversion to wav which takes very long.

I have now detected that when I only have midi instruments the conversion is always fast. As soon I use for one track a real instrument, the conversion gets slow.

Regards
Rene

Well, Rene this isn't a PG Music problem. You're the first I've heard in 15 years on this forum that somebody wants to render Biab tracks from a network drive.

My suggestion is to keep everything on your local drive or a local external like the PG hard drive or one of your own, keep the files on your local system and then set up auto backups after the fact.

Read the install instructions when you first install everything. Three choices. One, install everything including all the RT/RD files on your C drive, two, install Biab/RB programs only on the C drive but access the RT/RD's from the external drive or three, don't install anything but the small font file and run everything from the external drive.

I've run speed tests and don't notice any difference at all between those three. I would have thought it would be faster to use option one, install everything onto the system drive but when I tested generaton times they were so close that any difference was trivial. Since I have a 256 gig system SSD I use option two because the programs themselves only take a few gigs of space.

There are no references anywhere that I know of that there is a fourth option, run from a network. It's only when people do stuff that is not documented anywhere that they run into issues.

Bob

As jazzmmamal said on his replay, this is not a problem of BIAB itself.

Nowadays it's normal to see professional workflows on many areas, where a lot of important data is handled trough and by local or remote storage systems, thing that a few years ago was a elite thing only for big companies but now is getting to the home users.

Now, why i'm saying this?; There's something that we can't forget and is that All local networks are on constant activity and the performance of the communication and data exchange between the attached devices can be affected by a lot of factors, some of them can be controlled, others not. To be able to control this factors and have a fail-proof system, you need a really strong and capable structure, and then you can think on using it on bandwidth intensive tasks.

By the nature of digital audio, is required an almost instantaneous access to the data chunks of the file being read; This is much more important when comes to rendering and converting files, and beside of the CPU, the main factor that affects the speed and the quality is the available bandwidth for the conversion.

I've been doing NAS and file transfer systems on my local network for some time, and i can give you some technical tips to get the most out of the performance of your network:

• Install and use the best Hard Drives / SSDs you can afford for your NAS.
• Configure you RAID in the most convenient type for the use you'll going to give it.
• If your NAS is being used only by your computer, use a secondary network adapter to communicate with the drives, this avoids any problem caused by incoming or outcoming connections overloading the network adapter, that could slow the data-transfer speed.
• Use the best quality cables, this is vital to have a good connection quality.
• Always use the best rated OS and software on you NAS, this will let you troubleshoot any malfunction with plenty of information.

You have to remember that, even with the best system you can afford, you'll always have the limitation of the speed, because the network doesn't have the same speed that a SATA or M.2 ssd or even a mechanical drive, therefore, the speed and performance of you conversion will fall too.

The best thing you can do, is get a USB external drive and access the RealTracks and RealDrums from there, i wouldn't recommend to use them on a local storage on network.