Thanks for everyone's help!

Rather than multiply the replies, I'm replying to my own post in the hope that you are all listening for any updates, or will look back later.

I'm thrilled to say that with the help of the advice you've all given, I've managed to complete my first song. I've input the chords in a linear fashion as suggested - which does make it easier. But I guess if I need to produce sheet music later, I'll have to do as someone suggested and produce a second version. I kept the auto-ending after all in the end. I'll explore that again sometime later.

The styles were good, but as I was trying them out, I began to notice how many of them have common features - either they're based on others of have adopted similar piano parts or sequences. Is there some way of viewing the settings for the instruments used in each style?

I managed to implement part markers, plus a guitar solo on in intervening verse. I did have problems with the soloist though, because the dialog is different for transposition to the one shown in the user guide (although I bought BIAB2009, I got a BIAB 2008.5 user guide with a supplement for additional features on 2009). Soloist transposition is now handled in semitones rather than keys, and although this is a little more flexible, you have to be able to do maths to get the right transposition. I think I would have preferred it if there was a choice.

The choice of soloist instruments seems rather poor, in that many of them are just midi instruments and they sound very artificial. I looked at church bells, vibes and violin, but eventually gave up and settled on acoustic guitar. Am I right in thinking that this will have invoked the real guitar? It sounds realistic. Somebody suggested I check to ensure that realtracks and realdrums are enabled. How and where do I do this please?

I has some major problems outputting the song to wav, as the setup kept crashing and telling me afterwards that all my drum settings had been lost. I'm not sure quite why this was, because I did it about the fifth time and it worked fine, and my drums were fine afterwards.

Next step is to try creating a track for one of my own songs. That will be interesting! Thanks to everyone for help and advice.

Lyrics rule OK! Fighting for folk and folk-rock...
www.philmaybury.com