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Help! I just spent (wasted?) three hours typing in music notation for a song using the BIAB editor. I had the edit window open when I did so, and could see the notes and the guitar tab appearing when I entered each note. For safety I did a save after every 4 bars and every time I clicked on the icon to the left of the entry I could see the notes I had entered. I also saved my song after every 4 bars just to make sure. After finishing I closed the song and reopened the saved song and all of my entries were gone, nothing there! I could only see the chords that I had initially input. Is there any place where those notes are saved? Or did I just lost 3 hours of my life that I willl never get back?
Last edited by Andrew - PG Music; 12/06/23 03:06 PM.
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I haven't heard of a bug that's associated with your issue.
What year version of Biab are you using?
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
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Yes, that answer will be helpful: what version and build of BIAB are you using, although I don't recall seeing this problem before either. Could you clarify what you call the "BIAB Editor" and what exactly you were entering?
Please do not delete any files until you have contacted PG Music Support. It might also be wise to keep the BIAB window open.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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I'm using Version 2023 (1013).
Here is what I did in more detail, nothing fancy. My goal was to compose a jazzy version of Feliz Navidad for my local jazz group's Christmas party. So I hit File New and started from scratch. I first entered the chords into the Notation window, 48 bars with intro and ending. I then clicked "Notation" to get the window that has the treble and bass parts with the chors on top. At this point I clicked the small icon two to the right of the Print button and that shows vertical lines where you can click and it makes a note at the spot where you clck. I then entered notes in all 48 bars, doing a File Save every 4 bars just in case. A couple of times I made a mistake and went back to correct it by retuening to the notation chord window, clicking on the bar I wanted to see, then returning to the bar I wanted to change. It was all there with notes and tabs because I have tabs on. I also played the chords I had entered several times just to check and it played through. I did all 48 bars this way then did a final Final Save Song. At this point I don't recall but I think I opened another song and then closed it and openned the one I made. It shoudn't matter becuase I had saved the song I was working on multiple times. The last time I opened it all I got was the original chord sheet, no notes, no tabs. That's it.
The window is still open but I have no time to redo it now. I have to perform this soon so I'm just going to a capella the song by guitar only and just jam around some chords. Too bad, I really wanted to use BIAB for a nice latin backing track.
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Thanks for the detail. Nice job.
The work process you describe is perfectly normal, right up to where you discovered the song missing. You saved multiple times along the way. So, I don’t know how to help. To my knowledge if Edit, Undo doesn’t help, I don’t know how to recover an earlier version.
The first thing we wanted to rule out is that this was not a bug introduced by the new BIAB 2024.
I believe you should report this to Support, even if it won’t help this particular project.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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I called PG Music. They couldn't help me getting the file back but they told me that unless I hit the "freeze" button, which looks like an asterisk after the instrument on the Mixer window, whatever I input is subject to not being saved. That's news to me.
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"freeze" button, which looks like an asterisk after the instrument on the Mixer window, whatever I input is subject to not being saved. That's news to me. Unfortunately BIAB 101, the first thing you have to learn is BIAB wants to control the content of each of the five legacy tracks so it can continue to change things each time by regening when ever it can. Freezing stops that. So sorry for your lose.
BIAB – 2026, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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"freeze" button, which looks like an asterisk after the instrument on the Mixer window, whatever I input is subject to not being saved. That's news to me. Unfortunately BIAB 101, the first thing you have to learn is BIAB wants to control the content of each of the five legacy tracks so it can continue to change things each time by regening when ever it can. Freezing stops that. So sorry for your lose. Dan, I’m puzzled by this. I agree with you if he enterednotation into the guitar or piano track or any track except melody & soloist. However, unless I misread the question, he entered chords into the Chordsheet, and saved the song regularly. I don’t know what he could have done to lose the chords. Npac, just in case, do you understand what Dan was saying about regenerating a BIAB song, and what will be overwritten and what will not?
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Dan, I’m puzzled by this. I agree with you if he enterednotation into the guitar or piano track or any track except melody & soloist. However, unless I misread the question, he entered chords into the Chordsheet, and saved the song regularly. I don’t know what he could have done to lose the chords.
Npac, just in case, do you understand what Dan was saying about regenerating a BIAB song, and what will be overwritten and what will not? My question would be where did you save those files? Did you try to search for them? I have had some weird things happen when Windows updates like changing my audio and sometimes messing with where I save BiaB files. Now the first thing I do is to save as thus I know where it is going and where it is supposed to go. Also if you save a file to a different folder than the one you usually use then BiaB thinks that is where you now want to save all of your files. YMMV
The bumper sticker said "I'm a veterinarian, therefore I can drive like an animal".
Suddenly I realized how many proctologists are on the road.
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
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Dan, I’m puzzled by this. I agree with you if he entered notation into the guitar or piano track or any track except melody & soloist. However, unless I misread the question, he entered chords into the Chordsheet, and saved the song regularly. I don’t know what he could have done to lose the chords. the OP says... and could see the notes and the guitar tab appearing when I entered each note and the title of the thread is "...lost tabs" (tabliture?). So not the chords, the OP is losing the notation and tab he is entering.
BIAB – 2026, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud.
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Thanks, Dan. I don't work with Tab so I'm sure I'm confused. I did not think we could enter Tab into BIAB; I assumed it was generated by BIAB. I think you might be saying he entered chords and melody on the Guitar track, and that could explain what happened except that he left that song and went to another. I'm still confused.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Perhaps the song file(s) are saved in a different location to where the O/P is searching.
Consider starting BiaB, and pressing function key <F2> (or File > Save) and see which folder opens up to save the song in.
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
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Thanks for all the replies. To clarify, I entered both the chords and the notes but only lost the notes and tabs. The tabs just show up when I enter a note, I can't enter the tabs directly. Also, I entered the notes on the guitar part of the mixer, not the melody. But this was a new file with nothing on it, so there were no notes in any instruments.Should I have entered the notes into the melody?
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Yes!
In BIAB, all the named tracks regenerate by default (unless the track is frozen), except two: Melody and Soloist. You get a different backing track each time, and that’s by design. Anything you entered into the Guitar, Bass, Piano tracks would be wiped out. It is possible to freeze any of those tracks but that’s living dangerously.
Normally you would enter your chords on the Chordsheet. Then you should go into the Melody track and enter the Melody. Regenerate the song (Play) and edit until you get those working right. In the Melody track, select a guitar patch to hear that sound.
For safety you can copy that track to Utility Track #1 if it’s ‘finished’.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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I suspect that the notes were entered on one of the other tracks in BIAB - Soloist, Utility, or one of the Style tracks. Can you check ALL of the tracks in BB to see if your notation is there?
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He would not lose anything from the Soloist track; it's not overwritten.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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He would not lose anything from the Soloist track; it's not overwritten. I meant more that they could be looking at the wrong track, however if there's a Realtrack on the Soloist track and it's not frozen it behaves like any other track, and will regenerate over anything that's there.
Last edited by Simon - PG Music; 12/08/23 05:21 PM.
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He would not lose anything from the Soloist track; it's not overwritten. I meant more that they could be looking at the wrong track, however if there's a Realtrack on the Soloist track and it's not frozen it behaves like any other track, and will regenerate over anything that's there. True.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Anything in C:\bb\AutoSave ?
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