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I know what WAV's and MP3's are. I'm sure this would be good, but it would remove my ability to do requests, which is a big part of what my audiences have come to expect.

I need no exact "cover" or tribute-type backgrounds, quite the opposite, just looking to make generic backgrounds.



This is actually good. First, you would not have time in the middle of a gig to create a new song from scratch in Biab for a request. They all have to be set up ahead of time regardless of if you're using Biab live or creating an Mp3 like John-Silvertones does.

Since you're not concerned about doing exact covers, that makes things a whole lot faster and easier. I have thousands of Biab songs I've downloaded from the internet from various sites including Real Book One with all the jazz standards plus tons of regular stuff from polka's to R & R. I can easily email them to you. You could with very little effort open one of those songs and if it sounds correct to you simply save it in your songs folder and that's it, you're done. You may want to change a chord or two, maybe change the chorus repeats or key sig. That takes all of two minutes.

Have you listened to all the Real Track demos? If not, have a listen. If all you need are generic background tracks they're absolutely killer. You mentioned Bluegrass and Country. Listen to some of those, they will blow you away. The one weakness with the RT's is they can't be edited to create a specific guitar line from a Johnny Cash tune or whatever but if you're not concerned with that then they sound simply awesome.

Midi is different. Midi can be edited precisely to create exactly what you want. That's what the Ventures post is referring to. In addition to the Biab files I talked about I also have hundreds of killer midi files. The problem with midi is you need a good synthesizer to play them through. The basic soundchip on your computer won't cut it. I'm a gigging keyboard player and I have several thousand dollars worth of keyboards and sound modules plus software synths to play my midi's with and they also sound great. But if I were to give one of my midi files to someone who doesn't have my level of equipment, that file could sound like crap which brings us back to the Real Tracks. RT's were invented by PG to solve the midi synth problem and man do they sound good. You just can't edit them to do the intro to Satisfaction for example. You either have to play that yourself of just do without it. A midi file would have that guitar part in it but you may not like the sound of it if you don't have a $500 (or more) synth.

Still I think you can do this and I would recommend the Ultrapak with all the RT's especially since you're getting a new PC anyway.

More stuff to think about.

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.