Band-in-a-Box (BIAB) is designed to be a band, well, a small ensemble, that allows you to quickly enter chords and generate an arrangement to either quickly create a song, practice with, or even perform live with. Each time you play, it generates a slightly arrangement, to give it that live feel. Yes it has a lot of features that venture towards a DAW, but it is not (and I suspect never will be) a DAW; that's why PGMusic has RealBand. BIAB really is designed to be used "on-the-fly". It generates an arrangement with RealTracks very quickly and your are off and playing along. Sure it does a lot of other things, but at its heart, that's what it is designed to do.

With BIAB, you are able to "get together" with four or five (and with RealTracks) top-notch musicians and play along to your heart's content. Want to go back to bar five and start all over; they never complain. Want to play the song in a different style; a couple of clicks and your there.

Yes, you can create full arrangements and do a fair amount of tweaking to songs, but it really is designed to be a song creation, practice, and performance tool. BIAB has tools to allow you to play the parts you want to play in real time (for example, the Conductor feature).

RealBand is designed to be DAW, and is track-based, and is static. It's not going to introduce subtle changes every time you play. It will play exactly what you laid down. Nothing wrong with that, but I've yet to see live musicians play exactly the same every time in a live environment. RealBand will let you take the output of the band (because it will read BIAB files) and let you work on it, add more tracks, add more effects, double parts, record harmonies, change parts around, etc, but in the end, it's going to be a static performance to be captured to a WAV file for ultimate playback on some device (CD, streaming web, or MP3 player).

So, is one better than the other? It all depends upon what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. I would say one is different from the other in purpose. Is a car better than a bicycle? Both provide transportation. The car certainly has more power and goes faster, but you can't just go anywhere with a car. If you are looking to experience nature in the middle of the woods, a car isn't going to do it for you. It just depends on what you are wanting to do.

I use BIAB often to sketch out ideas (because it's fast), to practice with, and browse styles. It's much faster doing those things with BIAB. If I decide I want to capture a performance for posterity, then it's off to RealBand.

If you like one over the other, then use that one. I don't think we should diminish RealBand because it comes free with BIAB. PowerTracks, which is not free, does the same thing RealBand does, minus a lot of the BIAB features (although it includes more now than it used to), because it doesn't make sense to have BIAB feature unless you also have BIAB to go along with it (styles, soloists, melodists, RealTracks, chord progression engine, etc.) So PowerTracks is sold stand-alone. But it just makes sense then that RealBand go along with BIAB and it's really just part of the overall BIAB package, not just a free add-in. If you just want the DAW parts of RealBand without the BIAB features, then you can purchase PowerTracks for a lot less than purchasing the BIAB/RealBand package, but to get RealBand, you need to purchase Band-in-a-Box, because the two work hand-in-hand.

Is RealBand a Sonar (or a Cubase or a ProTools or a Studio One or even a Reaper)? No, but try getting a pedal steel guitar arrangement to sound right across any chord progression using Sonar or Reaper (when you don't actually have a live player to record). RealBand can do that in a couple of seconds.

And nothing wrong with starting in BIAB or even RealBand and exporting to a different DAW. Would it be nice if we ultimately get Rewire (hint, hint)? Sure, but until then, you are just manually doing what Rewire accomplishes automatically (using multiple tools to feed into a single tool achieve the end result).

Just my $0.02 worth on the two products, and those $0.02 seem to be worth less and less each day. smile

John

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