i) I make a simple piano bass & drums number with RTs & MSTs & Render it. ii) I listen to it again the next day: Oh that's nice....Which RDs & MST's did I use? iii) I re-open the SGU file to check. Nothing! All info has disappeared. PB&D Tracks have all gone vomit-Orange. The Mixer says "Stereo 32 bit" for all three tracks. The Plugins column says "None".
In short: All useful info about how I made the track has vanished. And I've just wasted ages failing to find a way to get it back.
It appears you have BIAB 2022 or 2023 since you have Utility tracks. Could you tell us which, and which build you are running? It could help diagnose this.
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; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
i) I make a simple piano bass & drums number with RTs & MSTs & Render it.
Dont do that! When you render, you have converted you tracks to performance tracks (orange). No need for that and you see what the downside is.
BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud (Tip: No need to create a SC account to hear music - just hit ESC ).
Dan is correct. There is no need to render unless you want audio files. When you render you replace the RealTracks (which is data) and MIDISuperTracks (which is more data) with audio files.
If you like the the arrangement, use the snowflake button on each mixer track to freeze each track. Then when you save the SGU file and close the SGU the same RealTrack and MIDISuperTrack data will be loaded to each track.
"Don't Render" Sorry: How do I send an MP3 to my pal without rendering ?
I guess I need to save the SGU without rendering it. Then make a duplicate SGU with a new name before rendering to the WAV I want.
How I wish PG would stop messing with the basics which worked perfectly well, simply in order to make something worse to market as "new" each December. None of the other software I use does this.
Ok, so you’ve confirmed you are rendering the song to audio. I wasn’t sure.
I never render within BIAB but I do make MP3 or WAV files of my songs. The reason is that the MIDI sounds come from an external MIDI synth. I use a third party stereo audio editor (Adobe Audition) and record my song playing in real time.
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; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
Matt: Previously the BIAB Render function would perfectly. You could go back and alter things and re-render as much you liked.
I fail to understand why PG scrapped this - and replaced it with the new vomit-orange post-render rigidity, requiring a PITA work-around for those of us that need to amend arrangements over time.
I understand, and I often go back and revisit my compositions to adapt them to new ensembles.
I can only guess. It is my hope that the introduction of Utility tracks is being done in stages, and that eventually there will be no difference between legacy and Utility tracks. But I’m just a fellow user like you.
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; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
You think it's easy to add 50+ new features every year.
BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud (Tip: No need to create a SC account to hear music - just hit ESC ).
I'm not sure what you did, but rendering your song to a wave file doesn't change your song. The function you want is in the File panel of the toolbar --> .WAV --> Export Song as Audio File (or "Quick Export). Or, Audio menu | Export Song as Audio File.
If something's not working for you still, let us know exactly what you are doing.
I just tried rendering a short Test SGU. Exactly as I did yesterday, and have done for decade, using the WAV toolbar button. This time the SGU re-opens every time as it did in past years, with the chord-chart unchanged.
That is not what happened yesterday. And - see posts above - Music Student & Jim Fogle advise against Rendering. The former says: <<Dont do that! When you render, you have converted you tracks to performance tracks (orange). No need for that and you see what the downside is.>>
So it's not just me.
I now no longer know if rendering a SGU will work as it has done for years (and did again just now) and re-open cleanly. Or whether it will do what it did yesterday, and what other posters say - turn orange with the content obliterated when it's re-opened.
I can't speak for MusicStudent but my guess is that he is referring to a different feature. Rendering your tracks or your whole song to wave file is a very common thing to do. You can do it via the menu options I mentioned, and it is also common to do it by dragging tracks to the "Drop Station".
There is the concept of converting a track to a "performance track", which is what MusicStudent may be referring to. This is done by right-clicking on the track --> track actions --> Save track as performance track. This is a bit like freezing your track, but it actually converts your track into an audio (wave) file. The track would turn orange.
Well now I do have to clarify! That's what I get for a quick off the cuff response.
When I saw "orange" I figured "performance track". That is what the "do not do that" remark was in reference to, since I figured you only wanted to export a .wav file. My apologies for my lack of clarity. I'll do better next time.
BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud (Tip: No need to create a SC account to hear music - just hit ESC ).
Truth told we really don't know what Andy did to get the orange tracks. To his defence, there are different ways to do the same things in BIAB. However, those different workflows may have different consequences.
Thats all I have to say about this.
BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud (Tip: No need to create a SC account to hear music - just hit ESC ).
For years - a decade or so - I've rendered SGUs using the .WAV command ("Save the Song as an Audio File") on the toolbar. This has always worked fine.
Recently - using 2022 & 2023 - the same command unpredictably turns the chord sheet orange and strips the SGU of all useful information leaving "Stereo 32 bit" in the Mixer column and "None" in the Plugins column of the mixer.
Sometimes .WAV works as it used to (as in my trial reported above). Sometimes it produces an orange & stripped SGU along with the rendered tracks.
I am doing nothing different from what I have always done.
My question concerns this serious new unpredictablility in how the programme responds to the .WAV command.
(Serious in that if a DAW unpredictably destroyed the source material when a render was run, the company would be out of business very quickly.)
For years - a decade or so - I've rendered SGUs using the .WAV command ("Save the Song as an Audio File") on the toolbar. This has always worked fine.
I just don't see an option to "save the song as an Audio File", Do you mean this (see pic)? Is that right?
That works for me. When I select "render" and ".wav". I don't see any orange and the .sgu stays intact. There is now a .wav file in the same directory. But the name is changed to append ..._Render.wav to the end of the file name.
In fact there are two (2) options in that menu to create the .wav file. I tried both with the identical results.
So if I got that right, still can't say where the "orange" came from. There must be something else we need to find.
BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud (Tip: No need to create a SC account to hear music - just hit ESC ).
Recently - using 2022 & 2023 - the same command unpredictably turns the chord sheet orange and strips the SGU of all useful information leaving "Stereo 32 bit" in the Mixer column and "None" in the Plugins column of the mixer.
For a track to be an orange 'performance track', there needs to be a wave file saved in the same directory as your .SGU file, with the same name as your .SGU followed by the name of the track. For example, let's say you have a song "C:\bb\MySong.SGU". If you also have the file "C:\bb\MySong Bass.wav" this wave file is a 'performance' track for the bass track. When you open MySong.SGU the bass track will be orange, and this file will play instead of (re)generating a bass track. Use case for this is to freeze a particular track so that it will always play exactly the same, or to be able to play an .SGU without having RealTracks needed to generate one or more of the tracks. (Of course in the last few versions of BIAB there is a dedicated freeze feature that is much easier to use for freezing tracks, and doesn't require the entire track to be saved as audio data.)
Just to be complete, there is also a way to create a performance / audio track containing the entire song. That can be done via Audio menu | Render song to Audio track. The program does this by disabling the style tracks and rendering all tracks to the 'Audio' track, creating a file "MySong.WAV". A wave file with the same name as your .SGU is the audio track of that song.
Note that when you render / export a BIAB song to wave, the rendered files are named by default "MySong_RENDER.WAV", "MySong guitar_RENDER.WAV", etc.
Assuming that you are using the regular Export Song as Audio File function that you always have, here is what could be happening.
A) You are selecting the option to render each track as individual files. B) Saving the rendered files in the same folder as your .SGU C) At some point, renaming some of the files from *_RENDER.WAV to *.WAV or * trackName_RENDER.WAV to * trackName.WAV. This would make the program see them as audio (performance) tracks for the .SGU.
You can fix that by renaming the wav files, or the .SGU.
It might be an idea to warn people in advance that rendering individual tracks with the .WAV command, in the way we've always done, now risks obliterating the SGU file - unless you've first saved the SGU with a different name, or renamed the rendered tracks.
Renaming files was the workaround I suggested might be needed - see my second post above.
As I suggested in my previous, I think this is maybe a more serious issue than the normal quirks of new releases. A DAW known to obliterate the file on occasion when hitting render would not last long.
I was saying that YOU renamed your wave files (after they were exported) in such a way that they were recognized as audio tracks for one of your songs. That is the only explanation I can think of.
This feature has been unchanged for a long time. The audio track has always worked like that (well over 10 years), and performance tracks were introduced maybe 5 or 6 years ago.
If there is something else going on, please post step-by-step how we can duplicate it.
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