Yesterday I took my regular look at the PG web site to see if there's anything new on BIAB for Mac - and wow, they released the new version! Finally! I immediately bought, dowloaded and installed the UltraPAK. Finally I can kick out the BIAB 2007 for Windows that I owned before switching to Mac and have had running under Parallels during the long wait for the Mac upgrade - or so I thought...

To begin with the positive - the RealTracks and RealDrums sound awesomely good, and the whole technology works fine on my system (2008 MacBook Pro with 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB RAM), tracks generate very fast. Big applause to Peter and his team for this impressive technological achievement.

However, I'm seriously disappointed to see how many of useful newer features from the Windows version are still missing from the Mac version. Where's the full window multiline notation? Where's the Repeats/codas/1st-2nd endings dialog? Where's the simple marking and looping of any number of measures anywhere in the sheet? Where's the choice of jazz or regular fonts in lead sheet printouts? Where's the chord symbols for making a really good-looking lead sheet?

I'm beginning to wonder, am I so different to most customers in what I use BIAB for? I'm a hobby jazzer and jazz learner, I use BIAB for playalong practice, for making lead sheets for myself and the band, for reharmonizing tunes and a little for my own composing. Is that profile so unusual? I just can't figure out why anybody would think the implementation of RealTracks soloing is more important than those features I mentioned above. Sure, listening to my computer blowing a realistic-sounding solo over the changes is a neat trick, but it's not actually of any practical use, is it?

Most frustratingly, BIAB 2009 for Mac won't save anything I type into the solo track - it even erases notes in the solo track of pre-existing files on resaving, I already killed one painstakingly transcribed solo that way. What's going on here? Saving notes in the solo track worked fine in the Windows version and in version 12 for Mac - what am I missing?

The sad truth is, with the exception of the RealTracks, BIAB 2009 for Mac is still way behind BIAB 2007 for Windows in terms of features and upgrades. I'm seriously considering making use of PG music's 30 days money back option and getting version 2009 for Windows instead. It's a pain having to fire up a virtual OS just to run this program, but I just lost faith that we'll ever see all of the Windows version functionality available under Mac.