PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Macintosh No longer disappointed - purchase recommended!

To be fair to PG, I want to summarize my conclusions on what's happened since I started the "Disappointed with BIAB 2009 for Mac" thread, after one week of working with the program.

From Peter Gannon's responses there and elsewhere, it's clear that most of the features still missing are not abandoned but still in the pipeline for future releases, in many cases will be made available with free patches. The bug fixes and feature upgrades are already coming thick and fast. The current release of 2009 for Mac is already a huge improvement on version 12. I was one of the guys moaning about the long wait for a new Mac version, so I'm delighted that PG have released this "interim version" as concrete proof that they're not abandoning the Mac community.

I stand by my statement that some of the deferred features will be more useful for me in practice than RealTracks, but the latter is certainly the biggest "wow factor" in comparison with the old version. I've been running around my musician friends saying "get a load of this" and never fail to get a jaw-dropping reaction - they won't believe they're not hearing a live performance recording until I prove it by changing the chords.

The other new headline feature, the Audio Chord Wizard, is also impressive. It works fine, although this kind of automation can never be a substitute for some music theory knowledge - for example, if the wizard is telling you AbMaj7 in a place where you know the chord must be Dm7b5, you need to be aware that AbMaj7 is what you get if you play Dm7b5 with the 9 and 11 on top and the b5 in the bass.

Customer service from PG is excellent. Peter Gannon is active on this forum answering questions and taking fix requests on board, and I'm now in active contact with support concerning the soloist track bug I reported. My installation discs arrived this morning in the post - despatched on the same day I ordered and delivered to Europe by standard mail within 6 days. Way to go, PG Music and Post Canada!

Finally, two pieces of advice for people intending to purchase:
1) I got the UltraPAK in order to have all the RealTrack Sets needed for jazz, and I'm still happy with that decision. At first glance it looks irritating that they're offering the much cheaper MegaPAK with just the country music RealTracks but no similar package for jazz alone. But when you think it through, the 10 jazz RealTrack sets would normally retail for $290, and I paid $80 for them (extra price compared to the basic 2009 upgrade), so still a pretty good deal. I guarantee, when you hear them you'll agree they're worth the money.

2) Some people here mentioned download problems, I also found I needed to restart the download several times - 30 GB is a lot to download! I strongly recommend choosing the installation disc by regular mail option. $10 for postage to Europe isn't much for the security of having everything on DVD-ROM, and if you choose this option you still get taken to a web page where you can download everything - that way you can just pick out a few files for download to get you started right away, then install everything else when the discs arrive.

Cheers,
David

The Real Tracks alone is worth the upgrade.

As to features, I think BiaB is best when used in a simple way: Entering chords and have them played back in style (!).

I still think the user interface is in desperate need of a major update.