When I have an idea pretty well firmed up, moving the tracks into a DAW as MIDI gives the greatest flexibility for further refinement of the arrangement; different instruments/variations, etc.
In the end, very little if any of the original BiaB material will still exist without being heavily modified.
I'm not against RealTracks. I would just hate to see the MIDI side get abandoned.
I just want to echo Bob's comments, as this is almost exactly the same way I work. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that we all may have different goals and we all may have different work flows that get us to those goals, so I am not trying to say that how I work is "the right way" or more respectable than how anybody else works.
For me, writer's block can be a major factor, and compositionally, I am very intuitive and iterative. A concept has to tr grow on me. I am simply not one of those people who can sit down and crank out a great song or arrangement just by writing it down directly.
BIAB has always been an invaluable tool for me. For my arrangements, I really need to feel the groove before orchestrating the wind parts, and the MIDI tracks let me do that. And for me, it turns out exactly as Bob says almost every time. I use BIAB to get the harmonic scheme and the song structure in place. That may take a bunch of iterations before I am happy with the overall concept. At that point, I put those BIAB tracks into Finale which gives me a "canvas" to work on. From that point forward, all my editing is done either in Finale or Sonar, never in BIAB.
As various parts of the arrangement fall into place, I might go back and either simplify the rhythm parts, or rewrite parts of that altogether to make the whole chart work. Probably less than 65% of the original BIAB MIDI remains in my completed Finale project, and any if the original BIAB that does remain is hidden under slash notation, used only for playback, not for notation.
Even though I have used BIAB for at least 15 releases, I have learned some useful things from this thread. These tips will help me make better use of the MIDI-capable tracks that are there already. I do think that clutter has always been one of the biggest problems in BIAB, and even though they have reworked the style picker in 2016, it seems to me this needs a lot more work to help people who really only want MIDI-capable output.
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