If there's a certain lick or riff in a RB track that you really like.... you need to freeze it or export it before you edit the project because it will regenerate and that lick may be totally lost.

That's the nature of Real Band...and one of it's good points. If you and I use the same style and chord pattern, the 2 songs we compose would be different because of that feature.

Regarding the "add 16 bars"..... when I want to make edits to a song, I always go back to BiaB to do the edits and then reopen the edited song in RB.

I was writing a song yesterday and needed to add more measures. SO I clicked to add 20 and something went wrong.... the screen showed all sorts of things I didn't want.... in BB I simply used EDIT>UNDO and waa laa, I was back to the add point and the second time I did it more carefully and that time it did what I expected. I rarely, if ever try to edit in RB, in fact I can't remember ever editing in RB.

Going back to the lost riff.... On my website there's a song called The Best Christmas. Even though I play guitar fairly well, there's times when I just want to be lazy and get a different take on the part. So I wanted to use a RB solo. I tried to get a real band track solo guitar to play a convincing solo. Nothing seemed to work. So I let RB generate the same solo track 5 different times. I used my DAW and volume envelopes to pick the parts from those 5 different solo's so that it sounded like one, smoking hot solo. Oh yeah, there have been numerous times when I "lost" a really sweet lick but I never worry. My thought is that if it did it once, it can do it again. Perhaps not exact but in many cases, even better. And I can always piece something together. BTW: the piano fills in that song are also the result of several piano tracks properly spliced... uhhhh..... edited.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.