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From my testing, I'm not sure that is correct. The very first thing that happens when you click on the Vocal Synth button in BIAB is that a file, Sound.XML is created in the folder /bb/Data/SRequest
I get two results when using the "automatic" Sinsy button, one of which is a standard audio .wav file, the other is suffixed .XML, but upon examining the contents of that file I find only the Lyric Data in it, the Note entries are all empty at that time. I see no Pitch entries either. I do see Note Duration entries, though.  No note data = not a complete .XML file at all to me. No notes means "no chords" which is kind of defeating of the xml point. Once the thing comes back from Sinsy is a different story, though. Now the missing Note and Duration data appears. Apparently Sinsy analyzes the .wav soundfile created and sent as well as entering data into that .xml file and returning it to us. --Mac
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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David, your good work should be brought to the attention of Peter Gannon. When the work is good enough, he'll hear it.  Actually, when the work is good enough, I'll start posting on the forum for feedback. I've already written to Peter about this. I'd like to see something better than Sinsy, but there aren't a lot of people promoting singing voice synthesis programs. There are a lot of free projects (including Sinsy, which recently released their code), but most of them are abandoned, and the websites are filled with dead links. Vocaloid would be too expensive to add to BiaB. On the Mac, there's a program called VocalWriter that uses articulatory synthesis, but it's never been ported to the PC, and (unfortunately) the author died several years ago. His wife is looking to sell off the product, but I doubt PG wants to go that route. The Mac actually has a quite nice vocal synthesis program built in, but there's no PC equivalent. (Finally, somewhere the Mac users are finally ahead! ) I believe the best commercial bet is SoftVoice, which has has a rather nice library. The owner is pretty busy right now, but he said he'd try to get me a demo. You've probably heard their product in some incarnation - Software Automatic Mouth, MacInTalk and Talk-It! are some examples. The speech sounds a bit synthetic, but it's understandable and (to my ears) superior to Sinsy. If I get a demo from SoftVoice, I'll post the results on the forum. But I haven't seen the API yet, and creating singing output isn't entirely trivial. In the mean time, I've dusted off my own speech synthesis program (mainly because Sinsy seems so deficient). It uses formant synthesis for vowels (like SoftVoice, but it uses sampled consonants. It can now read the MusicXML file from BiaB, covert the words to phonemes, and output a .wav file. Unfortunately, the new consonants broke the timing code, so I'm trying to fix things back up again. Once it works, I'll start posting some examples to get feedback. It's written in Java, but once it's done if it's any good I'll give some thought to re-writing it into C (or with a language which can compile to C).
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Mac, you're wrong: BiaB generates the MusicXML file, not Sinsy. I'm not entirely clueless here. After all, I'm the one who pointed out Sinsy in the first place. I've even made a song with it before it was added to BiaB. Even PG Music says so in their own instruction on how to manually create output.  So trust me: The only thing sent to is the Sinsy website Sound.XML file, and the only thing received from the Sinsy website is the .wav file. BiaB --> Sound.XML --> Sinsy website --> result.wav You're fundamentally mis-understanding XML. It's a hierarchical, structured tag-based markup language. Before arguing that this is a malformed MusicXML file, you might first want to look at the MusicXML tutorial.Everything between a <tag> and </tag> is part of that tag. If the tag contains nothing between the start and end, it can be abbreviated with the form <tag/>. So in your screenshot, everything between the start <note> tag and the closing </note> tag is part of the same note. The top <note> tag contains a <pitch>, <duration> and <lyric> tag. The <pitch> contains a <step> and <octave> tag. If there were an accidental, you'd also see a <alter> tag. So the pitch of the note is G5, with a duration of 64 ticks (relative to the song's division, set in the first measure). The same note also has a <lyric> tag, which indicates it has a syllabic type of single, with the lyric of la. All this information pertains to the same <note>. The next <note> contains a <rest/> tag, indicating that it's a rest. Notice the form of the tag is <tag/>, indicating it is both an opening and a closing tag, so there is no enclosed element. The duration of this rest is 16. This is followed by a G5 note of duration 96 ticks. Your screenshot demonstrates exactly what I said: the MusicXML file (generated by BiaB) contains rests following notes.
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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It is important to realize that BIAB is indeed generating some Music XML, which is what makes me so hopeful that this function can be expanded in the future to represent an entire BIAB song. You're doing great work, David.
BIAB 2026 Win Audiophile. Software: Fender Studio One 8, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Fender Quantom HD8 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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I stand corrected.
And Thank You for explaining it so well.
--Mac
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Just to beat a dead horse: To the best of my knowledge, Band in a Box does not create nor send Note Off data, either. Hence the commonly found stuck synth on strings and other pads when someone hits Stop before the Duration value has ended. BiaB most certainly creates and sends NoteOff data. How else would notes be able to turn off? Sidebar: Sending a NoteOff or sending a NoteOn with a velocity of 0 amount to the same thing. Other than being pendantic, there's not really any point in making the distinction. And I'm certainly being pendantic here.  The idea the the MIDI instructions themselves have any timing or durational information is incorrect. MIDI commands don't contain timing information. They are directives that are meant to be executed when they are received by your synth. These include instructions like: - Play a note at velocity
- Turn the modulation wheel to position
- Change the instrument on channel to instrument
When the instructions arrive at your synth, they are executed immediately. There's no such thing as "Play an eighth note" in MIDI. To make that happen, you would: - Send a NoteOn instruction.
- Wait for an 8th note duration of time.
- Send a NoteOff instruction.
If you want to store timing information, you can put the MIDI commands into a MIDI file. This is a binary (not humanly readable) file containing not only MIDI commands, but timing information as well. The program that executes the MIDI file (BiaB, your favorite DAW, whatever) reads the file, runs a timer, and send the MIDI instructions out at the appropriate time. But the commands themselves have no timing information, and they are acted on as soon as they arrive at your synth. The MIDI NoteOn command instructs the synthesizer to play a particular note until a NoteOff instruction is received. There is no durational information. From the official MIDI Message Table specs: Note On event.
This message is sent when a note is depressed (start). (kkkkkkk) is the key (note) number. (vvvvvvv) is the velocity. As a result, not sending the NoteOff command will cause any synth to behave like it had a stuck key. I hope this clarifies things a bit.
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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I stand corrected.
And Thank You for explaining it so well. Mac, you're a really knowledgeable guy, with far more useful musical knowledge and experience than I'll ever have. Sorry for my tone, but it's hard to write a polite response and still get to the point.  By the way, don't miss the post above about MIDI and durational information... 
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Miss it?
I already oopied and pasted it into a certain little file I keep handy.
And thanks again for the correction.
That is part and parcel of good engineering in my book, once someone proofs their argument, I'm happier to have learned the better for it.
--Mac
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I think I found the reason, FWIW, and that is that I've got so many MIDI editors and viewers, etc. that use the term, "Duration" when what must really be happening under the hood is that after a certain number of ticks, the Note Off gets sent. So they don't really show me the Note Off command, using that Duration label instead.
Is that it?
--Mac
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David and Mac, Nice discussion. Will either of you gentlemen enlighten me about the differences, if any, between midi (.MID)and SMF (.SMF) files?
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...what must really be happening under the hood is that after a certain number of ticks, the Note Off gets sent. So they don't really show me the Note Off command, using that Duration label instead. That's correct - the duration that's being displayed is a calculated value based on the difference between the NoteOn and the NoteOff events.
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Will either of you gentlemen enlighten me about the differences, if any, between midi (.MID)and SMF (.SMF) files? The file extensions don't indicate anything in particular. There are three different types of MIDI files: - Type 0: All events from the different channels are combined into one track.
- Type 1: Each channel gets an independent track.
- Type 2: A collection of patterns or song (fairly rare).
BiaB gives you the option of creating either Type 0 or Type 1. But all the types share the same extension ( .mid or .smf).
-- David Cuny My virtual singer development blogVocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.
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Thanks David for the quick answer to my question smf versus mid. I've never been able to find a concise answer from my web searches or printed sources.
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