Ok, for those here who seem sceptical of why anyone would want or benefit from having a feature to allow BIAB to "sync with an external sequencer, heres one:


I use BIAB for the Mac, but since I wanted to be able to experiment with creating melodies and chord changes in a flexible and easily changed manner, more than a year ago I purchased and tried out REALBAND, even though I am a mac user.

I really wanted Realband to be the go-to tool for creating new stuff since it allowed in theory one to work on one melodic MIDI part while
also experimenting with chord change ideas.

I come from a jazz/fusion/prog background so playing around with novel harmonies is de-rigeur. Three chord tricks these aint !.

But after giving REALBAND a sympathetic go, I ended up rejecting it, getting a refund and going back to my Mac based BIAB.

Reasons were buggyness, a poor user interface, and basically I just missed my REAL DAWs - ie Logic and Ableton. RealBand just doesn't cut it.

Not only this - but the way chords and arrangements are built in REALBAND are - maybe for very good reasons - different in how one does things in BIAB, and i liked the non-linear way one arranges a song and structure in BIAB - even if its a bit crude.

So heres the thing. BIAB on the mac generates brilliant parts, and it CAN of course control my sequencers of choice - currently Ableton. But only with BIAB as the "master" not the slave.

This almost works ok ish it allows me to work on a melody in MIDI in the DAW, while using BIAB to try out chord change ideas ON THE FLY !

But heres the rub. Currently I can control the DAW with my MIDI melody from BIAB. This means bringing the BIAB window into the foreground and clicking the BIAB Start or Stop buttons.

But although this is fine when one is tweaking the chord changes and arrangement, it SUCKS when one is tweaking the MIDI melody one is working on inside the DAW.

I want to be able to stop and start the BIAB arrangement while having the DAW window in the foreground.

This is the most natural way of working, and lets one easily work on the ( in my case quite complex ) melody line while
hearing how the melody fits the current chord changes.

All this talk of exporting MIDI and audio into the DAW is all very well. But ONLY once ones ideas are FINALISED.

While i am on this topic can I also beg the BIAB PC music team to at least built in some of the remote control CONDUCTOR features
that WINDOWS users get ?

why oh why are Mac users always given second best ?

Last edited by nonchai; 09/04/12 06:16 AM.