Band-in-a-Box (BiaB) is predominately an auto accompant (I'm a bad speller sometimes so please excuse the spelling) program. BiaB has four special tracks (drums, melody, audio and solo) and accompanying tracks (bass, piano, guitar and strings). You "build" a song by entering up to four chords for each bar or measure. The program's strength is defining the structure of a song by identifying the unique intro, one or more repeating choruses and a two, four or fading bars ending. The program does not normally or necessarily display the song in a linerly manner; the song is not displayed against a timeline.

RealBand (RB) is a "value added" program given to Band-in-a-Box users that also use the Windows operating system. RealBand is an adaptation of PG Music's digital audio workstation (daw) program, PowerTracks. As a daw, RealBand has 48 track capability that displays each track along a timeline so two differences immediately recognized are track count (8 vs 48) and song display (song structure vs timeline). RB has traditional daw features such as track editing but special functionality has been added to let the program work with BiaB song files. BiaB regenerates by track while RB can generate just highlighted track sections. RB can generate seven or eight selections to choose from (that's called multi-riff).

One way to think about how or when to use each program is to think about BiaB when you're perfecting song structure or how the song is laid out and RealBand when you're wanting to construct perfect instrument tracks.

Both programs can do much more but perfecting song structure versus perfecting tracks uses the strengths of each program.

Jim Fogle - 2025 BiaB (Build 1128) RB (Build 5) - Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk Sonar - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home