PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Combo w/2011 audiophile?

Hello out there.... The other day I clicked on the combo button and found that area is in midi speak. Are the real tracks still run by some midi engine? It that why the vibes and electric piano's have a fair amount of smeary attacks.

Have they made any changes to the trade off list of things you give up to have real tracks? i.e. change style @ any bar. etc?

Are there any organ tracks w/o bass pedals yet.

Ron

Ron, RealTracks (and BIAB/RealBand) have come a long way since 2011. You're 4 1/2 years and 6 versions behind current development. A lot's happened since then.

Yes, you can now change styles at any bar and there are organ tracks w/o bass pedals. With newer versions of BIAB, you now get both with and without.

And RealTracks were never run by "some MIDI engine", because they are audio. Not sure what you are getting at there.

For the smeary sounding attacks, you would have to provide an example so we can hear exactly what you mean.

Someone like Matt Finley may also want to comment, as I know he uses the audiophile version.

Good luck, and remember PGMusic offers a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

John's answers are thorough and correct.

Ron, I haven't heard anything I could call 'smearing' but if you could post a song file and an audio recording, we could run it in 2015 and compare.

Thank you John but as you noticed, my 30 days are up. {;^)>

About the time real tracks came out someone said that the midi part runs in the background. I don't remember if I tried to find out if that was true or not. I usually like to do that.

Ron

Some (most, now?) RealTracks have MIDI parts, but those are for notation purposes only. They were added after the fact and are not used for sound.

Hi, Ron -

My 30-day comment was not directed toward your current version, but that if you purchased the newer version (BIAB 2015), you could get your money back in 30-days if you were not satisfied.

I'm not sure what you mean by "MIDI parts run in the background".

As I'm sure you know, BIAB gives you a limited number of accompaniment tracks that you can use, traditionally called bass, drums, piano, guitar, and strings. Along with those, you also have a melody and solo track on which you can record your own melodies/solos/etc (or use RealTracks, as well). BIAB also has a separate audio track you can use.

Traditionally, the accompaniment tracks were populated with instruments and riffs based on style file definitions. And styles could have variations, so that every time you generated the song, it would sound a little different. This was accomplished via PGMusic's proprietary song generation engine.

With RealTracks (and RealDrums), you can overlay a RealTrack on top of one of the accompaniment tracks, however, the generation of the sound you get is done differently than MIDI and it has no relation at all to the underlying MIDI track (from the style). You can overlay all the tracks with RealTracks/RealDrums (on the drums track), but what you hear will sound nothing like the underlying MIDI style that you started with. If the original style is swing, and you insert a straight RealTrack on the piano track, it's going to play straight.

The cool thing is that you can mix and match MIDI and RealTracks, but you can't play both on the same accompaniment track at the same time. It's one or the other.

Yes, you can remove a RealTrack from a RealStyle and you you may (or may not) get a MIDI rendition of something when you do that. But it's just the generation of that part from the underlying style that the RealStyle (or hybrid style) was based on. There is no correlation between the two.

I'm not really sure what you are looking for with BIAB, but please ask more specific questions and I (and I'm sure others) will be happy to try to answer them. Just keep in mind that most of the folks posting are running BIAB 2015 (maybe some 2014), and haven't used 2011 in quite awhile, and the capabilities of the older versions start to blur over time.

Additionally, there have been a lot of updates to the RealTracks since then. Remember, 2011 was the first version that introduced the Elastique Pro time/pitch stretching feature, so a lot has been improved since that first implementation to make RealTracks sound better.

Just let us know what you are trying to accomplish and we'll see if we can help.