Over the past thirty years BIAB has added many features, audio, VST’s and so much more until today, BIAB is one of the prominent music software suites in the world. It can handle anything from a grade student’s simple accompaniment to a very complex orchestra arrangement to commercially viable productions. Just as BIAB has grown more complex over the years, so has the BIAB user and the uses of BIAB in every aspect of music composition, arrangements and productions have become more complex.
With more complex projects comes the ever increasing need for more space to hold snippets of audio, an alternate take of a solo, more instruments, sound effects and more channels to mix down to a final Stereo Master WAV file. Real Band has 48 Tracks and many DAWs have unlimited tracks. It is not unusual for a project to have 60 to more than a hundred tracks any more. All these tracks will be mixed down to a single Stereo Master Track.
Is it time for Virtual Tracks for the BIAB Mixer? First, what is a Virtual Track? Where would one find a Virtual Track? How do you use a Virtual Track? Good questions. Let’s watch a short video and find out.
While the video obviously does not reference BIAB Virtual Tracks, they don’t exist yet, the concept should work with BIAB because the BIAB Mixer functions quite well as an 8 track digital mixer. So, when the video references Track 5 on the digital multitrack recorder, exchange the BIAB Legacy Channel (Bass, Piano, Drums, Guitar, Strings, Melodist, and Soloist) for the Track Name.
Imagine creating a project with each BIAB Mixer Channel providing 8 opportunities to choose from to render to your final Mix…. Take 3 of the Bass Track. Take 1 of your Piano and so on. But you don’t have to wait until the final mix down to use the feature. You can build a final Track by instrument as well. Create and export a mix of 5 piano tracks (place and mix Real Track piano’s, midi piano’s and Supermidi Piano’s on the BIAB mixer tracks Bass, Piano, Guitar, and so on). Mix, pan and set levels for each track and render that to an Audio Wav file. Import that WAV file, convert it to a Performance Track and move the Performance Track to the first Virtual Track Slot of the Bass Track. Mix an alternative mix of the piano instruments, export as audio, import it, convert it to a Performance track and place it in Virtual Track 2 and so on. Then repeat the process for guitars, soloists, fiddles so that you have all of your ideas for each instrument placed on a Virtual Track. Of course, you could use a different instrument altogether on each Virtual Track or a combination of up to 10 instruments on each Virtual Track.
For your final mix, go through the Virtual Tracks and select your favorite take from the various Virtual Tracks for each channel and render your final version from the selected Virtual Tracks. As projects have become more complex over time, I’ve seen where the Virtual Track system could greatly simplify and speed up the work flow. It is already possible to do this in BIAB today on a more limited and cumbersome basis as I explained to Mike in this thread: Mike hit a snag on a complex file. But this is a feature that as it’s explained in the Virtual Track video, might not be an insurmountable hurdle for the PGMusic programmers. It is a quite common feature on current standalone digital multitrack recorders from Tascam, Zoom and others and is simply a method of utilizing the available disk space on the recording media of the device.
Hopefully I’ve explained the idea sufficiently but feel free to ask questions, add your comments and maybe even your support.
Well explained Charlie, and this is an excellent idea.
This could be done internally using linked-lists, where each record for a physical track just points to a set of records at one of the items in the linked list. This way, virtual tracks could be inserted, moved or deleted with little effort.
Definitely +1
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Although this is an excellent idea I will only support it after BiaB opens all 16 actual tracks. With all of the tracks open for the user it would alleviate a lot of the frustrations with BiaB IMHO. YMMV
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Although you used two terms, virtual tracks and take lanes, the term take lane seems to be more popular with software DAWs so that might be the better term for a software based program.
I also support 16 tracks and virtual tracks, with the ability to export each individually, a select few, or all at once. This would let a lot more work get done inside BIAB before moving to a DAW.
It might be just my hypothesis, but it is very likely that PG made limited tracks available, because "average" user computer which is likely an older i5 machine together with outdated code of BIAB would render "extra" tracks at painfully slow speeds. I think the more balanced idea is to have same amount of tracks as it is now as default and ability to add more tracks as needed manually.
There is an important distinction between a Virtual Track concept and adding additional tracks to the BIAB Mixer regardless if the additional Channels can be Midi or audio. Additional Channels and 64 Bit processing and other processing deep code limitations lost in the word proprietary to PGMusic software is not the issue to this wishlist item.
Adding additional channels to the BIAB mixer may be an impossibility for whatever the reason may be. I don't think adding Virtual Tracks is a coding impossibility. Here's why. First, if you think of the BIAB Mixer Channels as physical channels being the same as any stand alone mixer or digital multitrack recorder, the following makes sense.
There are several ways to implement the Virtual Track availability.
Virtual Tracks can be any number and the number is a design feature limitation determined by physical memory of the device's storage media whether it is hard drive, SD card or similar.
Virtual Tracks can be Channel assigned or an entire bank of Virtual Tracks can be accessed from any channel. Tascam's 24 track multi channel recorder that preceded the current DP-24/32 series was the 2488neo. The 2488 series had a 250 Virtual Track limit on a 80GB Hard drive. Any of the 250 VT's could be assigned to any of the 24 physical channels. At any one time, one of the 250 tracks were assigned to one of the 24 channels and VT's could be moved freely between the physical channels of the unit. The DP-24/32 models designed Virtual Tracks to 8 per Channel based on a 2GB SD card. The DP-24/32 can utilize much larger SD cards but ships with a 2GB card and I suspect the design, which had to have a fixed amount of memory reserved for Virtual Track storage, that was the minimum compromise Tascam engineers decided on.
All of the Tascam model Portastudio based recorders have at least one Virtual Channel - The Master/Mix accessible by a physical button where the users final mixdown is stored on the memory media. If it's a single channel, it is overwritten each time you Master or Mixdown.
As you can see from the DP-24/32, the physical limitation of Channels have nothing to do with how many Virtual Tracks a device can have or how the Virtual Tracks are allocated.
The physical limitation of channels is determined by the device. So, if the BIAB Mixer's 8 channels are for whatever reason a 'physical' limitation, that has no bearing on whether Virtual Tracks may be an option for BIAB. There may be other physical or coding barriers, but the current track/channel limitation should not be the issue.
I think Virtual Channel track count and Channel allocation would be limited the same as Tascam and other manufacturers have done and limit the maximum to the smallest common denominator of physical memory medial the product line has available for shipping. For instance, the unused memory of the DVD product that ships.
Virtual Tracks don't increase the channel physical limitation of a device, whether it is software based or a stand alone device like the Tascam DP-24. Likewise, the physical channel count has no bearing on the amount of Virtual Tracks that are ultimately available to the end user.
Virtual Tracks are a work flow benefit to complex projects allowing quick, easy and uncumberson access to additional audio when you're working on your piece. Virtual Tracks also give you access to choose from many saved Tracks when you make your final mix or render of the 8 physical BIAB Channels. For instance, say PGMusic designed either 64 tracks that are available to from any of the current 8 channels or likewise, created 8 VT's per each of the current 8 Channels, regardless how the VT's are allocated, the end user would have a choice of 64 tracks to choose a final 8 for the final render from within the program.
I frequently record using a "vintage" Zoom MRS-8 digital recorder. I attached a photo so you can better visualize what I'm saying.
Looking from left to right there are eight playback / record volume level control faders. The light gray fader is a dual purpose fader that controls playback playback volume level for the stereo drum machine or mono bass machine. The first four dark gray faders control input and output for four mono audio tracks. The next two dark gray faders control input and output levels for two stereo audio tracks. The red fader on the far right is a dual purpose fader that controls input level to a summed, stereo master track and the main analog audio output. All that to get to the fact that the recorder has eight audio tracks you can record to and a master audio track.
Now, here is the biggie; each audio track and the master track can have 10 track lanes (virtual tracks) so I can record (4 mono X 10 tracks) 40 mono tracks, (2 stereo X 10 tracks) 20 stereo tracks and create 10 masters per song project! The gotcha' is that only one at a time of the ten take lanes for each track can be selected for audio playback. So even though there are a total of 60 recording and playback tracks, the mixer can only playback 8 of the 60 at a time. I can playback all ten take lanes but only one at a time of the take lanes can be heard (playback). However I can cut, copy and bounce between all 60 tracks.
What Charlie is suggesting is the program doesn't need a bigger mixer, instead increase the program's capability to manage more audio.
Last edited by Jim Fogle; 09/23/1811:12 AM. Reason: (hopefully) make the concept less confusing
Charlie, Jim. Your intentions are good and your explanation is more than fulfilling, but I doubt there is a limit of how many BIAB mixer tracks can have. I strongly believe it just comes down of rendering time and your computer speed. I do not see a reason why PG is not making possible.... to add more channels on demand. Virtual or not, they are all "virtual" They probably do not want to tinker with "Bar options" and few other places.
True pity that people who are making this soup do not post occasional replies here. They should be thankful that people are doing their homework.
Actually, in my experience, it does not take any longer to render a track with 10 instruments than with one. It makes no difference to the BIAB generation engine what the RealTrack instrument may be, it simply is reading pointers to audio. I personally think there is a correlation between the current limit of mixer channels and midi. This was already an old subject when I joined the forum years ago. PGMusic has come forth and stated there is no benefit to having 64 bit over 32 bit in BIAB functionality but have never to my knowledge commented publicly about the mixer limitation. I have also noticed on occasion when a RealStyle generates, a midi instrument will show on a track but doesn't load and play out. This indicates there may be underlying midi control. I've noticed that if I erase a RealTRack, a message appears asking if I want to erase the underlying midi data. I think the mixer channel limitation has to do with PGMusic proprietary programming. I think it's the secret sauce. You may be right, who knows? You are correct I think that all tracks are 'virtual' which to me makes this wishlist item quite viable and PGMusic has just never connected the dots to the similarities between the BIAB mixer and a digital stand alone mixer.
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because the BIAB Mixer functions quite well as an 8 track digital mixer.
Actually it doesn't.
Just one BIG reason why not: Whenever a track is hosting a virtual instrument plugin - the VOLUME fader doesn't actually control the eventual AUDIO output from the plugin - but instead seems to rely on sending a GM MIDI volume message to the plugin.
So for example whenever I use the superb SynthMaster plugins - that volume fader in the mixer currently does PRECISELY NOTHING.
I've mentioned this bug months ago but clearly updates to BIAB are glacial - maybe one two a year. Thoroughly unacceptable. Particularly given just how powerful BIAB could be. if their developers actually got around to fixing things.
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Back to the wanting of all 16 channels to be 'opened up', that would break a lot of functionality. Some don't think all 16 are in use because they don't realize some are reserved for harmony and individual guitar strings. Right or wrong, that's how it was designed.
Rather, the approach I would like to see is to open up a second bank. MIDI supports two banks of 16. This could still be backward compatible.
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Matt, a second MIDI bank opening would be a nice addition.
When I say I would like to have BiaB open all 16 tracks I don't mean it to be mandatory. BiaB could come with an A/B switch. BiaB would naturally come as A, in other words as it is now. One could choose to change it to B where all 16 tracks a open.
When BiaB started GM was the rage. GM was very simple to use. BiaB based itself on keep it simple with GM (which is still needed IMHO) and the harmony and guitar settings.
But, again IMHO, those days are over. We have users that only use GM and that is fine. However a number of users are using SFZ, Kontakt, ST3, etc for their sounds. They have learned how to assign BiaB tracks to MIDI channels. They could learn to assign harmony tracks. The same goes for guitar MIDI controllers. YMMV
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They probably do not want to tinker with "Bar options" and few other places.
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