Hi Alberto,

It's true that if a song is expanded into a single "once through" arrangement, 255 bars is the maximum. For reference, 255 bars of 4/4 time at a tempo of 120 bpm will take 8.5 mins to play.

Despite the above, please note that 255 bars is not necessarily the limit of bars that a song can play, though. There are ways to increase this number of bars.

ONE: BIAB uses a "chorus" system for playback where the word "chorus" is used in its classical sense and means "once through the entire song". For example, if I had a song that consisted of verse 1 + chorus (in this case "chorus" means the chorus of a song), verse 2 + chorus, verse 3 + chorus, all I'd need to do is to program verse 1 + chorus system and set BIAB "number of choruses" to 3. Doing this would have the song play through 3 times. In this way, if my "verse + chorus" system was 100 bars long, my entire song would end up being 300 bars long.

TWO: It's possible to set up repeats and codas so that those sections that have the same melodies can be replayed simply by entering once.

THREE: Use Realband to assemble the song. Realband uses the BIAB generating technology and does not have the limitation of bars.

Thus, while there is a limit of 255 bars, because of the fact that most modern music has repeated melodic sections, it's easy to structure songs so that they have more than 255 bars and will still fit into the 255 slots that BIAB make available.

Regards,
Noel

MY SONGS...
Audiophile BIAB 2026