This is as good a place as any to post bug reports..... however, be sure, first of all, that it is a bug and not just something you haven't yet figured out or learned yet.
Most often, the bugs are most prevalent in the first new yearly release and get fixed in the subsequent "updates" in the first quarter of the year, so by now, they are all (mostly) fixed if you have the most recent upgrade applied.
So, as Noel asked... what seems to be the issue?
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.com Add nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.
The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
I know, everyone hates newbies, they ask all the same questions... But I searched and didn't see it. Where do I post bug reports?
Thanks!
Willy.
Willy, one little correction: As far as I can tell, nobody here dislikes newbies. Everyone starts somewhere. Welcome to this great forum. There's some great members with stacks of knowledge who are willing to help and share ideas. You've already had a reply from a couple of them.
Trevor
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
Okay, so here's one: 1. Downloaded Sultans of Swing from Amazon and had the Audio Chord Wizard turn it into chords for me. It made a decent stab at it, but got a lot of things wrong, D vs. Dm, too many 7s and sus's that kind of thing, but it's hard and I don't take that as a bug. 2. So I sent it back to biab and it got the key wrong, it thought it was in F and most of you know it's in Dm. Okay, not a problem, there are F chords in there after all. 3. Spent a lot of time getting all the chords right, but eventually things are okay. I then tried using the song form to put in ABCBCCCCD, and that worked okay, but it did nothing visible. When I tried to use it to auto-generate repeats it said it couldn't do it, so I put all the repeats in by hand. 4. Had a glitch when trying to put it back into ACW and when I sent it back to biab a second time, it wiped out all the chords, changed the first chord and the key to F and that was that. But now I can't reproduce that one, so okay. 5. Now I tried to enter the lyrics in Notation mode. First off, why so large and why only two bars at a time even when I change the font smaller? Anyway, I use line mode next since I don't have a melody line. 6. Second, if I do anything other than type text, the cursor goes back to the start of the line. Click on the notation line for example, then click back where you left off typing, and what you type starts at the start of the line. I think you can fix it by clicking twice on the spot you want to start typing again, but it is a bit cumbersome. 7. Next if you are done typing for the current two bars you can't go to the next two bars using the arrow keys. You first have to ckick on the staff area and then hit right-arrow. Then you have to click on the text bar again. I can't say I had a good time doing this but eventually I got lyrics entered all the way to bar 128. 8. Here's where it gets unhappy. I tried entering text for bar 129 or 130, and the other bar next to it, and then went to the next couple of bars only to find the same text I just typed already there! In fact the same text was now copied to the rest of the song, from bar 130 to the end (bar 213 or so). I never managed to put the rest of the lyrics in.
Enough for now, does any of that sound familiar? Don't get me wrong, it makes very nice accompaniment, using the Real Tracks country style with pedal steel right now, but I thought things should be a little essier than what I encountered so far... and I just got started...:-)
You really did start at the deep end. If I was a new user, I would've been happy at about step 3...
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
Firstly, regarding the size of the notation editor window and the 2 bar display.
To change the size of the window, enter into Notation Mode and click on the "-" sign I've highlighted with a yellow circle below.
Secondly, to adjust the number of bars in the display, again enter Notation Mode. This time, click on the "Opt" on the left upper side of the stave. I've highlighted the setting to adjust.
Regarding point #4 in your post (losing the chords when sending the song back to BIAB a second time).
This is correct behaviour. The programming assumes that when you send the song to BIAB, you have finished with the ACW. Next time you use the ACW, BIAB will assume it's a new song and overwrite what is on the chord sheet.
Personally, I always save multiple copies of songs so that I can get back to a previous working version if needed.
F is the relative major of Dm - both have Bb in the key signature. I'll have to do some experimenting here because I'm not sure how accurately ACW differentiates between minor keys and their relative major.
To be fair to ACW, there is nothing that really identifies "Sultans of Swing" as being necessarily in D minor. The C and Bb chord are much more appropriate to F major than D minor and there is no Gm chord that I'm aware of (chord IV in the key of D minor) to help the identifying process.
Open it in Realband, set Bar offset to -2, click on Tempo Map, Clear it set Tempo to 148 (this tempo worked with my mp3, you can add to tempo map or change to sync if out), drag the mp3 in and move (Ctrl+Drag) it after highlighting it (Ctrl+A) to align to bar 1, and solo that track, click up on the big L (Lyrics window) click find lyrics.
Edit: the original wav from my CD was 143 so you can leave it at 143 without removing the tempo map if your mp3 is 143, you can also change the tempo of the Amazom mp3 if it's out by highlighting track > right click > Time Stretch..Selected Audio Track > Old Tempo New Tempo, till it syncs.
Willy, I have found the ACW to be unpredictable when transcribing chords from a CD. It does work with simple songs and it works really well if one instrument is playing but it does have problems with whole bands. This is a problem with programs like ACW and not limited to just ACW.
My method goes like follows: 1-google 'song title chords' (no quotes) and you will find a lot of sites that will give you the lyrics and chords and print them out. 2-input chords into BiaB. As most all songs repeat the chords for verses, chorus, etc copy and paste will save you a lot of time. 3-generate a backing track.
I have found this method much faster then using ACW but YMMV.
I hope this helps.
OK, a random thought; Why does toilet paper need a commercial? Who's not buying it?
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
To Noel: thanks, I knew about the - and + but hadn't found the place to allow more bars in the display. So that would help, if not for the following: the font of the lyrics in the lyrics bar stays the same enormous size, and when I change the number of bars on the screen, the lyrics basically get shifted around to cover a larger number of bars. When you print this out, the lyrics remain on the printed page where they were before, but each line now has more bars, and thus the correspondence between bar and lyric is lost. I would call that a bug.
As to point #4, I could understand (but just barely) if ACW would put back all the chords that IT thought should be there, but the two or three times I tried it (but now can't reproduce), it got rid of all chords, and just put an F chord in bar 1. All other 212 bars were blank. Also, you are supposed to be able to keep your edits and yet go back to ACW, according to the docs, and to the dialog that asks you if you want to keep all that. But we'll let this go until it happens again... :-)
As to point #2, setting the key to F where most of it is Dm, I think that's fine. Would be good if it could remember that you changed it, though.
To solidrock: Thanks for the pointer, that sure seems like it would save a lot of work. By the way, it seems that RealBand duplicates a bunch of stuff in BIAB. Is RealBand the start of a rewrite of BIAB? Why have two different programs otherwise? I haven't quite figured out when to use BIAB and when to use RB.
To Mario: you may be right, it takes about as much time to edit the chords produced by ACW as it would take to type them in.
About chorus and verse: I have read the docs and FAQ on that, but still don't understand. What is a chorus in BIAB? How would you describe what the chorus is in Sultans of Swing, for example? As I said before, it seems like ABCBCCCCD to me, where A is the intro (8 bars of essentially Dm) and B is the first what I would call verse, C the second (Sultans doesn't really have what I would call choruses), which is like the first, except it has an added piece, and finally a tagline of four bars that get repeated until the song fades out. Suppose I knew what BIAB means by a chorus, could I do something with it? One is supposed to be able to print out multiple lines of lyrics for each bar of chords, for example, but I don't know how to do it.
I'm sorry about all these questions, but you said you didn't mind newbies... :-)
From the Help section: 'Important Note: We are using the term "chorus" as it is often used in Jazz music. A chorus therefore means "once through the entire form of the song." A typical length of a chorus is 32 bars. A song may have the form AABA where the A sections are verses and the B section is the Bridge. This entire form AABA is considered one chorus.'
Essentially it is the entire song, after the intro (if any), and before the ending tag (if any)
Repeats of the chorus can have different settings, e.g. in the screen capture, the song starts at bar 5 (after a 4 bar intro), plays two choruses from bar 5 to 34, on the last chorus, when it gets to bar 11 it jumps to a tag at bar 35, and ends the song at bar 54.
This is designed to give the most flexibility available.
Hope this clarification helps
Regards
Trevor
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
Why have two different programs otherwise? I haven't quite figured out when to use BIAB and when to use RB.
The first thing you should like about using Realband is that it lays the whole song out in one linear piece. None of the 'chorus' stuff that is causing your confusion in BiaB. For me the linear layout just seems to be easier to work with. I admit that is a big reason I prefer RB. From your post it seems you would like this also. Plus the additional tracks to work with .. lots of differences.
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
Willy, first I'll welcome you too and nobody dislikes noob's here as long as they're respectful. Funny, I keep fighting the urge to add Free to your name...
Anyway,
Here's the deal, you're starting with the ACW and trying to to work with an existing classic song. The ACW is pretty cool and trust me there is nothing like it on the market that I know of. It works "fairly well". The key to the ACW is the simpler the song the better, the more complex the song the worse because we're dealing with an audio file here not midi.
If you had a midi file of Sultans the program would recognize everything about it from the chords to the melody to the voicings of all the instruments but that's midi. Audio is much more difficult to work with. You're asking a dumb computer to do what even you cannot do, use your ears to transcribe difficult music from a record. Not an easy task unless you're a graduate from a big name music school. When you think of it that way you begin to realize just how amazing the ACW is even with it's flaws.
This is not Biab's primary function just like printing charts or sheet music is not it's primary function either. Biab will do lots of interesting and useful things but still what is it's primary purpose? To make good generic backing tracks for you to play along with. That's what it's name means, Band. In. A. Box. As in you get a full band to practice with. It's not designed to create cover versions of classic songs or any of that. It can be made to do that but it's very tricky and that is for advanced power users, not noob's.
You can use loops, you can record some classic song licks yourself in the audio track, you can import parts of midi files of whatever song, you can edit a Biab generated midi part (but not a Real Track, that's audio vs midi again, remember that) and then freeze the track so it won't change when you regenerate the song. All of that is tricky and takes time.
Meanwhile the program is designed for you to simply pick a style and tempo, enter some chords, hit play and start jammin. That's what the program was built for. All the rest of it is icing for experienced users.
My suggestion is learn the basics first, get a handle on how the program works then start with the advanced stuff.
Well, yes, I agree BIAB is mostly to have something to practice with and to make backing tracks.
But in principle, it has these other useful features. Printing out fake sheets is something I'd really like to do, so I can share them with the rest of our after-hours band at work. And making some sheets with the lyrics and where they are in the song would also be really nice. So that's why I tried to do exactly those things first (in addition to using it for practice).
Anyway, the main thing, providing a band to practice with and to make backing tracks BIAB handles quite excellently, I haven't seen any other software that does that as well. But I must say I am having a bit of trouble with just about everything else I've tried so far.
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