Quote:

I guess what I am really asking is, does BIAB/RealBand have good to very good sounding MIDI instruments in the "box?"



Man oh man, Ken. You dropped Biab years ago because of this?

Biab HAS NO MIDI SOUNDS OF IT'S OWN. It never did. It's like asking what kinds of sounds does Windows Media Player ship with. It plays what you put in it and Biab triggers whatever midi synth you want to use. These range from free to $40 for the Forte DXi to the Ketron hardware module for $400 to many different software synth/samplers in the $300-$1,000 range to $5,000 for a new Yamaha Tyros keyboard. The more you want to spend, the better the sound. PG's website support pages along with these forums have explained this since day one.

PG includes the very old Roland VSC that doesn't play with the new Win 7 64 bit OS but does work with Win 7 32 bit. If you have a 64 bit system then they came up with the Coyote Wavetable that is merely a piece of software that accesses the completely crappy el cheapo soundchip on your motherboard. These are only there to get a new user started so they can hear something. Anything better than those you have to provide yourself.

A new twist are all the Real Tracks and Real Drums. Those are truly revolutionary but as good as they are they are still limited in one very important way. They are prerecorded audio tracks so you can't program them note for note like you can with midi yet Biab can change keys and chop them up into good sounding phrases according to whatever chords you put in. That is amazing and much easier than working with audio loops in Acid for instance. For 90% of most songs we mostly need backing tracks that are good "groove tracks" and for that they sound awesome. All the different RT soloists are killer too. The other 10% are the song specific musical hooks or melody lines that identify a particular tune. To produce those you need midi. If you want to create covers you need a combination of RT/RD's and midi but if you manage to pick up a good enough midi synth then the midi tracks can sound almost as good as the Real Tracks. This is where Real Band comes in. RB is a great program that combines midi, audio and RT/RD's on a track by track basis but it would take me another 3 big paragraphs to begin to describe it.

Do the upgrade, keep the 30 day guarantee in mind and start having some fun. Biab will amaze you.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.