Yikes - everyone must have cabin fever or something, so easily set off by this printing thing. I've followed John and Jazzmandan in these forums for years and have not seen such energetic responses to a forum post that they disagreed with. But this isn't about personalities, so let me restate part of my previous post with more "sensitivity" ;0).

First, there is a lot of music software available, some public-domain and some from private companies like PGMusic. Many, but not all, of the creators of these apps will acknowledge that their products have great strengths and capabilitiese, but also have some areas where the decision has been made to limit development and improvement. If you look at many of the apps, the developers made provisions for linking or coupling or importing/exporting with the other apps, particularly where another app could supply needed functionality.

For example, I think that PGMusic made an smart choice by not developing their own midi synth, but by integrating their product with synths developed by other companies (i.e. coyotte, Roland VSC, etc.). I'm glad that PG has spent their development efforts on the features that make BIAB/RB unique and useful (and since I spent 12 years in the 80's and 90's developing wave-table and modeling synths used in major commercial products, I know it's not something one can just pick up and easily create great-sounding synths).

My first post was in response to @Dave's request that PG develop better printing capabilitites for BIAB, and I was saying that rather than having PG spend time on improving the printing, all they really need to do is not hinder others who are developing export and import tools for BIAB/RB that would accomplish this.

Right now, I don't see that PG is trying to hinder such development, but it now requires considerable effort and time for an outside software engineer to reverse-engineer the song files that BIAB/RB produces so that import/export tools can be developed. Thus, my suggestion that PG make a small effort to make such development easier and less error-prone by making details of the file format available. I can't see there is much risk for them to do so, probably entailing the release of a few "header files" with the file format definitions, without disclosing their own intellectual property that makes BIAB/RB what it is.

The "challenge" I spoke of wasn't meant literally, but rather to see if PG would rise to the occassion and make a bit of information available for download by developers. There are already several tools of varying quality that import BIAB files into other products, both commercial and open-source, but these could be higher quality if the file formats did not have to be guessed at.

As Jazzmandan says, this is a user-supported forum and PG doesn't openly reply very often. However, it's likely the support folks (yea!!!) at PG do read these and can pass stuff like this back to PG. I know that the wish forums are the proper place for such stuff (and my request for opening the file formats has been up there for several years), but it seemed that this thread would be a good "use case" to substantiate the need.

My hope is that this thread dies with a quick hand-mute, and those who are interested in developing export/import tools for things such as improved printing arrange to talk directly with the developers. Those users who don't care about printing or exporting can go on helping others with their sage advice, as they have been doing for years. Sorry if I offended some of you.

Please feel free to take this off-line if further admonition is deemed necessary.

Jerry Schneider
Career hardware/software/firmware/music engineer, and member of Hot Club of Boulder, a gypsy-jazz-swing quartet.