PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic A model for the next BIAB GUI

Sorry if I offended you Peter, that was never the intention. I know you are proud of your and your team's efforts. So you should be.

I also stated how excellent the program was in more ways than one.

However, all things move on and evolve. Over time, cars change in their appearances, not a little, a lot. House designers continually modernize the homes they build. Appliances, computers, smart phones, everything. They all get new designs.

So do software packages. It's a fact. Your product is great, probably the best there is. But ask yourself are other products edging closer in appearance/appeal? I only see this as a truly friendly reminder that 'great' can be 'greater'. Please don't take my comment as a criticism, that was never the intention. What I stated was exactly the words I heard. I was surprised to hear them too, but I couldn't really argue.

A fresh change to the interface, removal of the legacy DOS 8.3 stuff etc would be a great move forward. So would ability to have dockable, floating windows (including the current mixer window), individual display panels that could be docked, moved or hidden, not just everything at the top of the form 'on or off'

Nobody asked or expected a spaceship. Well, certainly not me anyway.

No offense, & peace...

Trevor

My personal opinion is that I like the retro "look" of BIAB. I don't know that I want BIAB to start looking like every other music app out there and become just a face in the crowd, like so many other music applications today. "It's familiar" (a great Andy Griffith line from "No Time For Sergeants").

That being said, there are a few (I would imagine) fairly simple things that could be done to modernize the user experience. Peter has often said to provide specifics for changes, so here goes.

The main screen has a lot of white, errr, grey space on it. The little chord entry box has been discussed at length recently, but just look at all the unused space surrounding the little box. The white space areas should be able to be used more efficiently, which is where some of the below suggestions come into play.

I think what would go a long way towards modernizing the interface would be to make all the window elements floatable (where you can move it around on the screen and resize it), dockable (you can lock it into place it on the screen at the top-bottom-left-right), visible/invisible (if you don’t want to see it on the screen, then poof, it’s gone, easily brought back), and scalable (which is different resizable – for example the static mixer window elements are of fixed size, which is why there isn’t room to see the Thru or Audio tracks. Resizable usually makes things disappear; scalable changes the size of the fonts and graphics to continue to display the entire element).

Toolbars should be fully customizable – dockable or floating. You should be able to determine whether the buttons have text on them, or are large or small buttons. You should be able to add/remove any buttons, as well as re-order the buttons to suit your own workflow.

While colors currently are user customizable, this should be made as easy as possible, with clear descriptions of what each screen element represents.

The request for improving chord entry in the chord grid has already been made and discussed at length, so I won’t go into here (other than something should be done to improve it).





Right now, for example, you can bring up the floatable mixer, but the static mixer stays on the screen. And they don’t look the same or have the same functionality. And the reason you made it floatable was to reclaim screen space, but that doesn’t happen. There should be ONE mixer window with all the functionality that could either be docked to one of the sides of the screen (PGMusic could figure out how that would work and what would go where when there are multiple elements docked), or it could float and you could move it around as you see fit (and all tracks should be displayed.

Additionally, when you change an instrument on the chord grid (maybe by using the F5 key at a certain bar), the mixer should change to reflect that new instrument, not just keep showing the instrument as originally defined in the style. It’s confusing to see a guitar listed and hear a violin, for example.



The VST/DX screen is in need of rework (this issue affects both BIAB and RealBand). The top part of the window takes up a third to half of the screen, leaving little room for the actual VST (which is what you really want to see in the first place). When I want to just check, for example, if an instrument is playing through the VSTi, I should not have to bring up the windows, move the window to the top of the screen, resize the window so I can adjust the scroll bars, then adjust the scroll bars to see the VST interface. By that time, I’ve forgotten why I clicked on it in the first place. The stuff at the top is important, but ought to be called up only when you need it, not visible on the screen the whole time. Maybe a twisty where it by default displays the current selection only (on a single line), but then you click on the twisty to see the other tracks and selections, and then click the twisty again and it just displays the [possibly new] current selection. That way, there’s plenty of room for the actual DX/VST interface, which s what you wanted in the first place.



Even though there has been some work done here, the menus need to be reworked to remove redundancy.


For example, on the File Menu, how many “Open” commands do I need. I should only need one, and then I can choose what to open once the “Open” window appears (just like other Windows applications do).

Likewise on the Export To and Send To commands. I understand that one is the “last one selected”, but just make the default entry on the “Export To” command be the “last one selected”. The redundancy is not needed.

And you really only need a “Save” and “Save As” command. If something hasn’t been saved previously, then it should invoke the “Save As” command; otherwise, it just saves with whatever options you previously set. And then any options you want to set should be on the “Save As” screen (this is where you would be able to save with patches/harmonies/etc).

The help menu also has a number of (in my opinion) unnecessary redundancies, but all menus should be looked at carefully.

Yes, there is more that can be done (did someone say StylePicker, RealTracksPicker, Songlist, etc?), but as a start these would, in my opinion go a long way towards improving user experience and workflow for creating music. Of course, these are just my opinions and suggestions. Take 'em or leave 'em. I still love BIAB/RealBand and will continue to support it, regardless. Nothing else comes even close to doing what they do.

Needed: More constructive posts like yours John.

Colors are user customizable? Wow.


I mean.....duhhhhh.........

No matter how many times I look at this Menu, I still get confused and have a lot of reservations about exactly what to select. Not a criticism, a fact. This reads to me as one big parallel menu that really would more intuitively be presented as a number of sub-menus. If not, I clearly still don't understand it. It doesn't read like "select this or select that" (i.e. Radio Buttons), it reads like select as many items as you want. I don't think that's how it's meant to work though.

This would be a great place to also make some changes, (just IMHO).

))) showed this to a programmer colleague of mine, and without any prompting from me, he said: "What's this, some kind of cartoon?"

I showed BiaB to a musician friend with a quick demo of how fast it can be to enter chords, choose a style and have a song. --- Here's what he posted later on Facebook.

"I learned today it takes aprox. 1 minute & a half to write a pretty good song. Not that I want to make one, but thats how easy it is once you learn the programs. Audacity, band in the box, and a few other programs will do it. Wow how things have changed.. Very interesting Charlie."

Not surprising that a programmer and a musician can look at the same software and see two different things.

Fantastic eloquent post John.

I just wrote a long post, which I deleted. It was chiefly about the quirkiness of the notation window screen. I could list quirkiness with any window or feature.

It's all been said before, and before and before and before.

It's like a city made of spaghetti, it does work as a city (mostly), but only if you know about spaghetti and boy scout knots.

If I were a designer I would be printing out every screen on paper laying on the floor, getting out the white board, having a brain storm, getting out the De Bono (maybe some beer) the design team, some outside commentators with what the Cockney Brits call 'nouse' (horse sense?) and looking at it all again.

I would begin by determining what are it's core functions and strip away everything else - just so I could see the wood for the trees. In writing there is a term known as "Killing your darlings". This means even if you spent so much of your precious time on this paragraph (or code) on this or that, if it's not needed it goes.

Getting together focus groups of newbies, non musician groups, and young musicians and creating essentially a new product with all the MIDI, Audio and Sequencer functions redesigned. A Weekend away.PG genius and outside minds.

VST, 32 and 64 with standalones - critical.

If Band in a Box was designed this way it would be no cul de sac. It would breed it's way into the DAW and Studio world.

its time (IMO).

Z

Peter with all do respect that screen shot you posted was an advertisement shot showing all of the options that are included in that DAW. NO one, at lease no one that I know of, uses a DAW with all options open. It's mostly one option open at a time and maybe two option other times, unless one is using two monitors then it is two open most all of the time.

There have been many suggestions, some excellent ones here, on how to improve BiaB, i.e. user icon options, condensed menus, better packaging pictures and advertising, etc.

BiaB is my most used music software and I will use it regardless of what the GUI looks like. But I still think the current GUI turns off younger potential buyers. YMMV.

Great post and suggestion John!
Thanks

That is the funniest thing I've seen you write and very true.



I've suggested many times there should be a sort of beta test for rewriting all the help files, menu's, floating tips, all of that stuff. PGM could ask for volunteers, each person gets assigned one section, it gets submitted, they put it all together and then publish it for evaluation. It might take a year but with all of us working together we could clean this up.

Bob

OK, since we're looking at FLStudio as an example of a good interface, I will say that it is by far one of the most MODULAR interfaces I've seen. If dockable, sizeable, hidable elements are the measure of excellence... they got 'em.

And conceptually, I like the paradigm of triggering everything from a drum grid. I have ALMOST bought it 4 or 5 times now in the past few years... but every time I DL the latest demo... it just doesn't make sense to me. It's got to be one of the least intuitive music making programs out there. I'm sure some of you like it, but I'm just saying my opinion... I find it to be totally UN-intuitive. Pretty, but useless. Haha.. "pretty useless" <--(that was an accident but I kinda like it)

BIAB and RB, on the other hand, have made sense to me from the moment I started using them. To me, they are good examples of an intuitive presentation.

There were problems I'd been trying to overcome for years in other software, and I couldn't even find a so-so workaround that made sense. But BIAB and RB have given me all of the important things I need to make music, and usually the next parameter I need to set is in a right click menu that's easily accessible.

At the end of the day, you can't please everybody. You can change 99% of the interface and people will bee-otch about the 1% that didn't change.

With all due respect Pat, this is not one of those things where no one agrees and you'll never please everyone. In the short time I have been here (maybe a couple of years) I have seen it go from sacrilegious to criticize BIAB GUI to commonplace. In that fairly short time many software companies have refined and redesigned and improved their interfaces immensely while we finally got violin to say violin instead of strings (and even then, not fixed everywhere!)

Just because a handful of us have learned how to navigate a cumbersome out-of-date interface does not lend any merit to the argument that it does not need big improvements!

But based on Peter's earlier response I get the feeling this user wish to improve the GUI is not really going anywhere so maybe it is time for the jokesters to get out their "beat a dead horse" animated GIFs for this thread!

The ONE idea in the FL Studio video I would like PG Music implement is for the GUI to use vector graphics. BiaB and RB users have a wide variety of displays being driven by a variety of graphic cards or on board motherboard chips. The Fl Studio video demonstrated how vector graphics provides a sharp image on any size display. That's exciting!

I would like to see Band-in-a-Box and RealBand have screen tabs similar to those used in Chrome or Firefox. Each tab would display BiaB or RB from a different perspective. For instance, the default RealBand tabs might follow the progression to create a song with Tab 1 offering a minimal track screen, commands to import a SGU or midi file, chord sheet and load instruments, tab 2 geared to editing, tab 3 mixing and exporting.

While changing to vector graphics may prove a stretch, an effective use of tabs could eliminate a great deal of clutter.

John, I'm not trying to be obstinate here, but I'm afraid We're still not communicating.

I'm trying to make points above and beyond the GUI. Your main point appears to be that the GUI needs to change or BIAB is doomed. I'm saying there are lots of reasons besides the GUI that make people buy software.

1) LOTS of music teachers use BIAB, and their students are introduced to it that way. I'd guess that most young people who use BIAB are trained musicians who started using the software through their parents or teachers.


2) PGMusic already has a huge market penetration... more than Sonar or FLStudio according to the last report I saw that included PGMUSIC. Since most software owners tend to upgrade rather than buy new, their large customer base will provide plenty of income even if they never sell one more new copy of BIAB


3) But they WILL sell new copies because PGMusic has an international presence. They did the work early to get BIAB translated into all of he most common languages. That is huge!


4) PGMusic is at all of the music trade shows like NAMM and MUSIKMESSE. They aren't sitting around waiting for phone calls, they are doing all the right things in terms of global marketing.


5) Years ago most of the major music software was MIDI based, and they were all pretty similar. Most of those programs poured resources into their interface, but their core capability remained approximately the same from one company to the next. PGMusic used their resources to come up with innovations that nobody else has. That is huge.. to be the only kid on the block with most of BIAB's features puts them in a unique position. If you want what they have, the only way you can get it is by buying BIAB.. whether you like the GUI or not.



If your concern is that PGMusic is going under because of the GUI, you can relax because that ain't gonna happen any time soon... probably not in our lifetime. They have too much global momentum, too large a customer base, too unique of a product, and a customer base that is rabidly faithful to buy upgrades every year.

In my opinion, the biggest threat to BIAB isn't the GUI.. it is the fact that desktop PCs are becoming dinosaurs. If I owned a software company, I wouldn't be wasting resources to make my software look better on soon to be obsolete machines. All my resources would be geared toward putting my product on the cloud in a format that could be accessed by small devices that don't have storage space for the huge installation as it exists today.

If you really want PGMusic to survive, don't push to redirect their resources to solve problems that are about to become irrelevant.

my two cents.

the future is small devices. Look at the menus on your phones. In my opinion, most small devices have DOS-like menus. Much of the cool stuff on the GUI of programs that run on desktop PCs will not transfer to small devices. Get used to it.

Boy or Boy, I hate to pile on ... after all BIAB gets my $$ every years at update time. But over the past couple years I have had the opportunity to "teach" new users how to maneuver and work with BIAB and I can tell you I get some strange looks from the students. Things that we long-time users take for granted and work-arounds that we don't even notice are workarounds, can really get the attention of a newbie.

Having said that, I can tell you I have found peace with BIAB - it is what it is and I used it for what I need. So whenever the time comes to storm the castle with burning torches, you won't see me there.

Pat, you make good points but you'll never change my view that the user interface is one of the most important parts of a software program like this. Yes, those RealTracks are really something but then again, I find I am starting to use them less as my library of samples for MIDI grows and I am finding that with a little more effort I can create RealTrack quality backing tracks in MIDI. AND I get to control every note! I recently purchased a MIDI program that works a lot like BIAB by using a huge predefined library of musical phrases and chord progressions and drum patterns, etc. And I can simply hook up my VSTis to it and get really great backing tracks that I can edit! I still love BIAB of course but the BIAB interface is so clunky after using so many great GUIs on my other tools.

So, we'll just agree to disagree! Lots of really exciting tools coming out every year and with some of the new MIDI tools and samples I would not assume PG's RealTracks will provide a strong enough advantage over newer, easier to use programs.

I'm with Pat all the way here.


I'll just use the tools PG provides until I don't like them, can't use them to do job at hand, or I find something BETTER. But so far, for what BIAB DOES, there is NOTHING else, period. If there were, then all here who dislike the BIAB interface or function that much would have long ago left for the land of GUI bliss and this thread would be a hell of a lot shorter.

Yes, improvements could be made yet I don't own ANYTHING (SW, HW, instruments, cars, home appliances, firearms,...) where improvements (DONE MY WAY) could not be made! And the HOW it gets improved is not going to please everyone anyway - we all have different work methods.

"it's a poor (fill in occupation) who blames his tools"


Larry

Jim Fogle has started a nice thread in the wishlist forum with practical, specific suggestions as to how people want the GUI changed. Thanks Jim!
Since this current thread will likely fade away, it would be better to post your suggestions for the GUI in Jims thread...
http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=293650#Post293650

I completely agree with Pat and Larry. Show me another program that does what BIAB does. When I gig with BIAB, no one sees the GUI. I close my laptop after selecting a song. I could care less on how BIAB looks as long as it functions the way it does.