PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows At a crossroads: invest my time mastering RealBand instead of BIAB?

Hi everyone

I have made a few attempts at learning at least some of the many details of BIAB. As you can appreciate, it's pretty daunting. My latest attempt has been watching the 20-video series by Groove 3. Things are getting clearer.

However, the more I learn about BIAB, the more I think about ignoring it and working solely in RealBand (which I’ve only played with a few times.) I’d like folks’ advice on this.

Here is some background:

Once BIAB 2015 arrives, I will be on my third version of BIAB starting from 2013. My experience with the software has been thus... I open something up, hunt for ideas, get blown away by some of the things I audition... but then when the works starts, of turning these ideas into properly arranged finished pieces or stems within BIAB with high degree of control, I start getting lost, or badly cramped, within the BIAB visual framework.

I am used to seeing parts as horizontal tracks, with changes visually marked somehow; whereas in BIAB, if I have several tracks with various changes going on e.g. tempo changes, style changes, patch changes etc. I find it becomes too much work to have to remember where and when these occur; I have to right click each bar to get all this information, bar by bar, instead of having a single view "song map".

This is one of the reasons I have so many works in progress in BIAB (maybe 20) but only 1-2 finished projects. (Another reason is that I tend to wander off exploring the trillions of options available, but that is my fault.)

So, because my job limits my free time a lot, I figure, if I am going to save time and brain juice by properly studying (i.e. including going through the manual, gasp) just one of the two, it should be RealBand. The DAW track layout is so much more intuitive.

I have read posts here in which people say they often do their "finishing " in Real Band, or semi-finishing, with finishing in another DAW.

I very much like the idea of working just in RealBand, as opposed to some in BIAB, some in RealBand. It simplifies things by dealing with just one program, which, from what I understand, does most of what BIAB does.

But -- and here is my main question: what are the main things which you can only do in BIAB? What would I miss by using only RB?

By the way, some more background about how I use BIAB, as this might affect your answers..

I rarely aim or want to create something start to finish using PG's tools. Rather, I will start with a bare-bones midi or audio track created elsewhere, get the chords, tempo etc info into BIAB, and audition accompaniments, often part by individual part. I'm not looking necessarily to have a full New Orleans RealStyle accompany my bare bones track, but I might be interested in, say, its bass or piano RealTrack.

I also don't care much about BIAB Melodist of Harmony functions.

I do want to be able to use Solos (RealTrack, MIDI etc) from available styles though.

Anyway, I'd be grateful for any thoughts.