That's good advice from Herb and I always follow threads about the karaoke sounding BIAB productions because it seems to be a main theme and criticism among some musicians to disparage the product and as a discussion topic in other forums.

Trying to be speculative and not critical, it appeared to me from what I could glean from your post that your set up and production replicated a typical Karaoke set up that coupled with a typical out of the box generated BIAB track is going to yield a karaoke sounding track. Backing tracks/karaoke is a major feature of BIAB and very easy and quick to obtain. "Enter the chords of your song, set your key and tempo and hit play. It's just that easy."

Ever heard that before? And (Chuckles), it's even easier with a midi style....

It is so, so easy to sit back and let BIAB do all the work by generating your music. It does so quickly, efficiently and easy. What happens when you do that though is BIAB algorithms are making production decisions and dictating the sound rather than you. I personally struggle when writing within BIAB, experimenting with various instruments and styles, that sometimes I lose the song in my head. That's also easy to do.

The magic of Band in a Box is not the program, the magic is you.

The forum threads are useful as learning tools and one thing beyond Herb's excellent advice on mixing and recording that I recommend is to take advantage of the forum to learn the tips, tricks and techniques of the members songs posted in the User Showcase that you admire and desire for your BIAB songs to sound like. I don't have the musicianship and vocal ability of some, actually most, of the forum members but I can learn to program and use BIAB like they do. You can too.

A better sounding BIAB production is not dependent on how well you sing, play or write. The foundation of every BIAB produced song is always and singularly, the structure of the song. If you pick a style or individually choose instruments, enter a chord chart, set the tempo and key and hit play. Biab generates your song but does not make tempo changes, mute/unmute parts, modulate the key, do pushes, holds or rests. There are no instruments that have multiple versions generated to copy and past to comp into a single unique track. It's learning to do these things that propels BIAB into the higher level production. Styles, mixing, instrumentation, adding tracks and applying effects all build on whatever foundation you have built for your song or cover....

What helps me to bring my productions beyond the karaoke sounding BIAB song has been to analyze Biab productions posted on the USER SHOWCASE and try to replicate them. Most users post the Biab info with their post which gives me an excellent starting place and I use the Audio Chord Wizard to produce the chord chart and tempo map. The process is similar to a artist trying to duplicate paintings by master artists by creating your own version of the Mona Lisa.

BIAB 2026:RB 2026, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.