This transcript of a chat I had with support outside office hours tells my story. The support person's name has been changed to protect their innocence...
Hi, I'm Support Person from PG Music. How may we assist you today?
Chat is now being translated from Hungarian, to English
Hi Support Person I recently upgraded to BIAB 2024 I'm trying to audition styles in the StylePicker. I'm on a Mac BTW. In previous versions we could scroll thru the styles using the up and down arrows, click on the green play button and instantly hear what the style sounds like. Now, when we click on the green button, BIAB generates the backing for the whole song. Is there a new way to audition styles quickly? Or has that feature been removed?
Do you mean it imports the style? Or it lets you hear what it would sound like in the context of your song? Because if the latter, yes, it changed to play the chord sheet.
The latter. However it's become extremely time-consuming to audtion a style. Is there a shortcut to avoid generating the whole song?
Support Person I am not sure - I can ask and find out for you. Is biab@andrewscottmusic.com an OK email to contact you at? The people I can ask have gone home for the day already.
Yes please, do ask. The forum is rife with this topic. Hardly anyone was aware of the audition feature on previous versions. And now that it's gone....!!! ??? Why would they take away such a handy feature?
Support Person I will definitely ask and follow up with you.
It's like you ask someone to clean your house, which they do, but also permanently remove a door, so that everyone who lives there has to go around the back.. Very unhappy customer. Words cannot express my frustration. It's not only your company that does this, Support Person. Finale and Cubase, etc are all famous for removing features that users know and love.
Support Person I understand your frustration. I will ask as soon as I can tomorrow.
I'll stop now, before I make both of us too depressed. Have a great evening. I'll sit by my inbox.
Support Person Have a good evening! Bye for now Operator Typing
Have I missed something? Does anyone know a way to get the StylePicker to play a sample of a style immediately?
Hello, We are following up to let you know that next to the green play button there is a little plus symbol. When you click on it, you have additional options. One of these included what the green button does. You can change it here to demo the style without the chords.
To which I responded: Hi AAA,
thanks for getting back to me promptly.
The options provided by all those controls are numerous, and not exactly as you described.
Unfortunately, none of the options equate to the previous functionality.
Usually, when we are looking for a style, we need to audition many, maybe 20 styles before we find one suitable.
The style description is not sufficient.
We can tell within 2 bars if a style is going to work for our song or not.
We used to be able to flit down the list and hear very quickly a portion of the demo song, which would load instantly.
Now it takes up to 10 seconds to load, and only does so after multiple mouse clicks.
So to audition 20 styles takes 4 or 5 minutes, whereas it used to only take half a minute or so.
Is there some page where I can make a feature request for this functionality to be restored?
To make it work like 2023, click on the [+] button beside [Demo], and make sure that the "Double-click plays chordsheet, not pre-made demo" is NOT checked - see attached screenshot. Then, when you double-click on a style, it will play the pre-made demo. This has the exact same affect as clicking the green play button in 2023.
In 2023, there were two play buttons - one for playing the style in your song (play chordsheet), the other for playing the pre-made demo. In 2024 there is just the one play button which has the function to play your song with the selected style. Since 2024 generates tracks much faster than 2023 it makes sense that this would be used more often than it was previously. So in 2024 there is just the one play button, but as mentioned you can still double-click the style to hear the pre-made style demo. Is there a reason that double-clicking is not convenient for you, or did you miss that you needed to uncheck that "[+]" item?
This button is too well hidden, everyone got caught at the beginning.... What bothers me is the fact that if you want to pre-listen to any style with your grid, it is "destructive", it is not a bad word here. It means that you must be the king of backup if you want to find your little ones there.
I admit that I really missed this little table in the first weeks of 2024, but Andrew's arguments are serious, apart from this "destructive" side.
My only complaint is for both styles and RTs when you demo using the chord sheet it replaces the previous style and i feel that is not a demo it is a change. I would prefer to hear the demo but not have it change it yet. this keeps me from losing what i already had. sometimes i forget which i had before a couple back.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
My only complaint is for both styles and RTs when you demo using the chord sheet it replaces the previous style and i feel that is not a demo it is a change. I would prefer to hear the demo but not have it change it yet. this keeps me from losing what i already had. sometimes i forget which i had before a couple back.
See attached screenshot. (This is build 803, which has a new menu item to restore previous style)
A) When you demo a style with chordsheet, you can still see on the main screen what your style is. This has not changed.
B) If you right-click in the StylePicker, you can choose to set the selected style back to the previous ("remembered") style. That is also available by pressing the Options button.
C) If you cancel or close the StylePicker, no change is made to the selected style.
How else would you like it to work? For me anyways, this seems to be working as expected.
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