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Hey folks another thread! Ahh well.

"It is time for Rb and PT to take off and fullfill what folks want. Take Rb to the next level, add volume envelopes, refine midi, and audio editing a bit more, finish the VSTi coding so it uses all VSTis, even the ones with time adjsutment like jamstix, and rework the ASIO implimentation a bit more, so that ASIO is more usable than WDM. Make it so folks think long and hard before draging files to Cubase, Reaper, Sonar, whatever. It really is not that far away."


Hey Rob you suprise me (grin)

Many will characterise me as wanting a fundamental rethink - well not really its semantics at the end of the day.

Here is what I cant do in BAIB and I would want to do in BIAB even if I had real band working

1] Play a VST instrument such as a decent piano

2] Record it (not with the idea of producing some wonderful track but just ot give my ears a bit of feedback when I am practising)

3] Add a decent reverb if i wanted to (convolution)

4]Mix the sound in a rough and ready way WITH visual feedback (yes the tiny spin buttons do a bit of this but in a very old tech way)

Until BIAB can do these things its not providing the basics in my view.

As for the interface, it looks tired but that OK. You can tweak it quite a lot though which is good. I would like ot see something like Cubase's 'Key Commands' menu so that I can do things like make the copy command into a ctrl click as I am always shoving bars around by mistake. The notation window is buggy and I don't use it at all because the screen breaks up here (through several versions and XP and Win 7).

Its obvious that there is something wrong with the way Asio works in BIAB if it cant support VST channels with multiple instruments. Doing so would not make it a sequencer.

At present I control the sound of my piano thorugh its standalone window, the overal level of BIAB output via the windows speaker icon, and the level of each instrument via tiny spin buttons (with my poor eyesight).

I dream of seeing all these levels in one panel with nice red LEDs bouncing up and down like a conventional mixer

If a person calls that a fundamental rethink, or 'turning BIAB into a DAW' then (politely) I suggest they just stay with this version and allow the company to move on. There is nothing to stop a person staying with an old version if suitable for them. None of the above would

If any updates include Real Tracks of course I would have to get it. Below are the main reasons many thousands of us bought BIAB in the firstplace.

"Band-in-a-Box is so easy to use! Just type in the chords for any song using standard chord symbols (like C, Fm7, or C13b9), choose the style you'd like, and Band-in-a-Box does the rest… Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional-quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar, and strings or horns.

Plus, add REAL accompaniment to your song with RealTracks. These are recordings of top studio musicians that replace the MIDI track with audio instruments. They sound like real musicians, because they ARE real musicians!"


As long as BIAB stays true to the original concept it doesn't matter what changes are made. I have no need for BIAB to function as a DAW since I use BIAB for accompaniment only. I'm pretty sure a good percentage of users are using BIAB the same way that I do. Anything else is gravy! Later, Ray

We need to stay focused on the fact that BIAB can not be everything to everybody. There can not be EVERY style for EVERY song for EVERY user. I am working on something now and listened to close to every style in there and nothing is close, so it's back to programming the drum machine for this one song. And playing all the parts. But it's one song of 11. BIAB has done the job for the other 10. 91% success rate works for me. And given that these are just demos for players to learn songs from anyway it's no big deal.

BiaB is not meant to function as a DAW; that's what Realband is for. Use BiaB for accompaniment and song writing. If you want a DAW (with BiaB features) try RB. It's the middle ground where DAW and BiaB meet. And it's given to you with BiaB for free.

Zero everything you want is in RB. EVERYTHING! Once again Everything. I really do understand wanting to be able to add a good Piano, but you can!!!! Add Sampletank or Kontact, both have some very nice pianos, and will give that feed back you want. After all you want to work things out there and practice, well those will give you what you want.

Then if you want to add a pile of fancy effects, and record those tracks use RB.

Heck i can start the project in RB and never even open BiaB if I want and get the same results, all the styles work there, all the RTs and RDs work there. I can add midi and audio to taste. Best of all i can enter the chords in the chords window, pick a style and generate a real BiaB arrangement just like ... you guessed it BiaB.

Rharv, Zee and myself and a couple others have been rattling around on this subject for a while now. He can't get RB to work, and i offered to help him, even shadow his screen with teamviewer to get it working.

Maybe a couple of us can concentrate on this and help the fellow get his RB working.

Real Band..."The Phoenix"
It can do everything as you said:

"Best of all i can enter the chords in the chords window, pick a style and generate a real BiaB arrangement just like ... you guessed it BiaB!"

And speaking of entering chords from Real Books (the original jazz extended chords)...or even "copping" cool jazz type progressions for "jazzier-sounding" moving-chord additions to tunes and jazz playlists!

The electronic Fake Books available today, onlin...and there are many, many of those...(as I mentioned in my post on FB's...they also offer extras features, like Midi Progressions that can be copied into RB, (and even the $8.00 iRealBook at the Apple App Store, can be another source for jazz-oriented chord changes as well as chord melody or chord leading-tone examples)... that can be utilized in composing original and new forms of chords for RB!

(Huh??) G-Daddy, have another shot of that "breakfast good stuff" you're sipping on!!

I am sure that Peter & Jeff are quite focused!

I'll add my voice to the comments about RB. It works fine. Zero, you've said before that you're experienced with other DAW's. That means you know about having to set up your midi input/output drivers along with your audio in/out drivers. Same with RB. Go to Options>preferences/midi then do the same thing but hit "audio". It's all there buddy. If you can't figure it out, either call Support, use the Help file or post exactly what you're problem is.
RB will open Biab song files, midi files, combine them both, it will use multiple synths either DXi or VSTi, multiple effects both DX and VST's, generate Biab tracks, Real Tracks, Real Drums all kinds of stuff. It's a full blown audio/midi editor, has full mastering capabilities. You can use any of the high end mastering suites as a plug in like Ozone, T-Racks, Wave Gold, etc. I use Garritan, Sampletank, and a bunch of different effects plugs. The one thing it won't do is tempo lock so a delay effect that's supposed to match the tempo of the file won't work or using one of the Drum plugin programs that can create their own grooves won't work. Other than that, it does pretty much everything any other DAW will do. Maybe not as pretty or elegant but the functionality is all there. Keep in mind this is a freebie with most Biab packages or it can be bought for $49.95 instead of $2-3-5-or even $700 for Sonar Producer, Cubase, etc.
Again, it works fine you just don't have it set up properly.
Bob