Carkins, in my opinion what you are suggesting is mostly a marketing change. Those types of suggestions sometimes are not well accepted with the intended goodwill that you have in place. I've been saying this about the graphic design of PG advertisements for at least the past 5-7 years. It still has a 'home-made' appearance, when it's advertised in print. Homemade, not as in 'better' like with most food, but more like something one kicks out of Microsoft Publisher, complete with gradient block text, etc. I've suggested PG Music run a graphic design competition for logo design, web page design, magazine advertisements, etc. with a local community college and they will almost assuredly get a more modern appearance to their messaging. Quite honestly, the graphic design looks the same as the cover of the manual I have from the 1996 era version of PowerTracks Pro Audio that I have still on the shelf here. Companies update logos, design themes, etc. regularly. Even iconic brands like Apple, most car companies, etc. update their branding at least once a decade.

PG could organize it's products into 3 categories:

Composition and backing track generation: "Real Band In a Box" to combine those two tools into one, whether you are using recorded audio or midi patterns to generate.

Digital Audio Workstation: Power Tracks Pro Audio

Computer Aided Music Lessons: All of the way cool lessons PG has with their lesson series.

I still think that most of the consumers of the other DAW softwares are likely unaware of PG products. As to the uniqueness of the composition tools, probably the group of potential customers that might be able to grasp it the best are those using Garageband for iPhone and iPad (this might be in Mac OS versions, not sure), where the 'smart' instruments are useful for realistic backing if you simply supply the chords (via touching the desired chord names whilst recording) but the results are not easily changeable - what gets recorded in Garageband are the auto-generated midi note data. So, if you recorded an Am in bar 3 of a section and want to change it to C, well - you have to erase the individual notes or 'clip' and start over on that section - not as cool as simply regenerating the data.

Imagine if when visiting the PG website, you saw a short animation of the basis of what BIAB and RB are mainly about - auto accompaniment/backing track generation.

@eddie, you are correct that most of the DAW-like features of PG products are right on pace with other more well-known products. Where there are differences seem to me to be in one of a few general categories:

1. Compatibility with general trends in audio processing (VST/VSTi, ASIO - PG was quite late to this game, and there is still at least one aspect of the VST/VSTi which simply doesn't work and renders other software's unique value proposition meaningless - tempo locking)

2. Signal routing internal to the program (compared to modular hosts - but these are not so popular: Tracktion, EnergyXT, there's at least one Mac platform program I can't think of

3. Signal routing external to the program (ReWire capability - nearly standard these days with any other DAW, even lower priced programs)

These are not showstoppers, but they are what make people walk or stay away - if they are even aware of the differences.

-Scott

My Songs, photos, writing,etc.
My Sound Cloud