Thanks for the supportive comments. I have some more observations based on continuing to work with the program.

First, if you look at new computer sales today, month-to-month, Macs account for 7% to 12% of the market in the US and in most countries in the world. Mac sales are way, way up today. But besides that, I'm talking about features that ought to be in both the Windows and the Macintosh product. So the platform is irrelevant to my discussion.

I'm not *comparing* BiaB to Finale or Sibelius. I'm talking about using the BiaB *in conjunction with* either Finale or Sibelius, as many arrangers doubtless are already doing. But there is no way to get a "workflow" going between one and the other.

More about MusicXML.

In BiaB 2013, once I make a song and generate a version of it, I can freeze the notation. Then I can get notation displays of each musical part *individually*, viewing only one track at a time, and I can output a PDF of each.

But what I want is to export all these notation views together on a multi-stave conductor's score in MusicXML, so that I can get the arrangement into Finale or Sibelius, and then start editing and arranging it based on the ideas that BiaB has given me.

The only way to work with this now is to create PDFs from each individual track's notation view in BiaB and then create a blank score in Finale or Sibelius and, in one of those programs, manually key in all the notes from the individual notation displays generated by BiaB. This seems to be a tremendous waste of effort since BiaB has already created notation for me. It's just that there is no way to get this notation from BiaB into Finale or Sibelius.

Of course I could export a Standard MIDI File from BiaB and import that into Finale or Sibelius, but that never works very well, particularly with guitar tracks, and a lot of notational information is lost that way.

This is what MusicXML is all about--it is designed to enable musical projects to be moved between different software programs as a kind of lingua franca. It is much more useful than MIDI files, because MusicXML preserves the elements of music notation that are not represented in MIDI files--key signatures, clefs, beaming, ties, stem directions, multiple parts on one staff, fermatas, and all the rest. If you don't know about MusicXML, you ought to read up on it.

After working with BiaB for a week, I decided to also purchase iReal b, the Mac OS X and iPad app. For a lot of what I want to do, iReal b is a better product than BiaB. Now of course BiaB produces much more detailed and realistic playback of musical arrangements than iReal b does, by a long shot. iReal b is downright primitive in comparison.

iReal b allows MusicXML output, but only of the basic lead sheet chord progression, not of the actual full arrangement, which is far short of what I need. However, when one creates a chart in iReal b, at least one has something that one can immediately take to a gig and perfrom from, as an iReal b chart live in the program, or as an output PDF file which can be easily printed. iReal b's printed chord charts are much more elegant and legible than BiaB's.

Furthermore, creating and editing new chord charts is, to me, much easier with iReal b than it is with BiaB, because iReal b works like standard music notation with regard to repeats, first and second endings, dal segnos, etc. BiaB's ancient grid view that you have to use to enter a chord progression, and the method for indicating form (such as AABA, and how many measures in each section) just doesn't work like standard music notation and seems very awkward to me. You who have been working with this for many years don't think of it as awkward, but I sure do.

I know that for the programmers, incorporating MusicXML into Band in a Box would be a huge, expensive task. I'm asking for a great deal here, and I may be unrealistic in asking for it.

But I think BiaB is not going to get beyond its current market niche, and is going to continue to lose ground against the new wave of programs like iReal b, which serve a useful function that many musicians appreciate. Well, so be it then. For now I'm going to need to use a bunch of different programs and cobble together what I want to do.

I fully realize that what I want to do with BiaB is not what most of its users seem to want to do with it. But I wanted to express my thoughts all the same. Thanks for listening.