Every time I hit "play", the program regenerates the RealTracks ... even if I haven't changed anything. Anyone know why or how to keep this from happening?
I have the UltraPlusPAK Hard Drive "Audiophile" Edition Band-in-a-Box.
Yes, you can Replay instead, which doesn't regenerate. Or just hit the Spacebar, which plays from the current position, without regenerating (assuming Edit-Prefs-Spacebar is set to do that)
Another tip: right click on the Combo button, and if "song has changed, needs regeneration" is checked, you should un-check that, and it will force a replay without regeneration. That would apply if you made a small change in a chord, but didn't want a regeneration of tracks.
Just to add a bit to Peter's answer, Biab regenerates the tracks every time you hit play unless you tell it not to. You're question implies you think this is some kind of problem but it's actually by design. A real band will not play the same tune exactly the same way twice. Similar yes, but not exactly the same. That's one of the neat things about the program, it gives you some variation to play along with just like real band members will.
For example you start playing and the bass player is still talking up the chick in the torn black leather jacket and straggly hair who hinted she has a bag of BC bud and bought him a Black Jack and coke and the bass part is kinda missing and now he's running and he ...never mind. I couldn't resist...
I use replay when I'm not playing at home contemplating....
Actually I meant to suggest another feature which would be 'GET THIS SONG READY", and it would generate all the tracks and superimpose a big play button that could be sort of activated by hitting any key. Why didn't I think of that..before? Guys are always talking about playing live and if you use all Realtracks and the song generated when chosen from the juke box..well.it would just wait for you, while the windmills of your mind turn...
If that bass player manages to score that bag of BC bud from the chick in the torn black leather jacket, the windmills of his mind will definitely be turning after that Black Jack and Coke!
I like the fact that the tracks get re-generated in a slightly different way each time
Quote: Actually I meant to suggest another feature which would be 'GET THIS SONG READY", and it would generate all the tracks and superimpose a big play button that could be sort of activated by hitting any key. Why didn't I think of that..before? Guys are always talking about playing live and if you use all Realtracks and the song generated when chosen from the juke box..well.it would just wait for you, while the windmills of your mind turn...
Isn't that already possible using "Pause Play until MIDI received"?
Quote: Biab regenerates the tracks every time you hit play unless you tell it not to. You're question implies you think this is some kind of problem but it's actually by design.
No, it is a problem. Or at least an annoyance. The RTs (which is what the O/P was asking about) play the same thing, regardless how many times regenerated.
Perhaps the amount of regeneration depends on the instrument - I have found that RT Country stuff like Pedal Steel, Resonator, Fiddle and other soloists etc tend to regenerate to a degree if you right click on the green name and hit regenerate.
Yes, the RealTrack chosen, plus the Tempo, plus the chords in the progression, plus the style, all can work together to either regenerate something a little different -- or not.
Understand that BIAB does not "keep" the resultant audio files for each song. Think about how much hard drive space you would need then. Instead, it generates the arrangement every time you need it. The replay command works, because that particular song is already in memory and has already been generated. But if you load another song, hitting replay (versus play) is just going to regenerate that new song, because it hadn't been generated in the first place. BIAB basically just stores the instructions for how to create the song, which results in small files, and then generates the songs in real-time (although, you might say "slow-time"). That's how it was designed.
John
Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 12TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 12TB SATA
What's going on when you hit play (for the first time) with real tracks, and one of the tracks fails to load and play? That happens to me a lot. The song begins to play with one of the parts missing. I hit play again, wait a few seconds until it's ready, then it usually plays just fine. It's a sporadic kind of thing.
Quote: What's going on when you hit play (for the first time) with real tracks, and one of the tracks fails to load and play? That happens to me a lot. The song begins to play with one of the parts missing. I hit play again, wait a few seconds until it's ready, then it usually plays just fine. It's a sporadic kind of thing.
You may need to defrag your hard drive. I'm taling the C: drive here, regardless of whether or not the BB program resides there or on a USB drive. The RealTracks/Realdrums load to a Temp directory on C: drive.
Don't accept Windows' report on that, the algo they use was designed around "standard" PC use and not audio streaming. Just go ahead and invoke the Disk Check followed by a Defrag.
With today's large drives, this will take some time, I recommend starting the defrag at night after setting the thing to shut down when done, then go to sleep and let it work for you.
I am using a very old CPU Intel Core T8100 produced in 2010 I guess, it takes 6-10s to generate a sample realtrack song(4-5 real tracks), but the CPU usage is only around 50%.
So the time consumed by BIAB loading a song is for what? Seems not only for decoding wma files to wav, otherwise it will take more of CPU usage( maybe upto 100%?).
And it is not consumed by Disk, wma size is so small, it might be the wav file generated in the realtime? But I also tried with SSD as my C drive(since someone mentioned the cache is on C drive), it didn't speed up either.
By the way, when someone said, there is cache on C drive when generating real tracks, I did not observe any change in number on C drive free space. Could the wav files that have been decoded from realtracks-wma only in RAM(and there is no cache on disk)? Thanks.
Many programs don't use 100% CPU to perform tasks, nor all cores of a processor. Some time is spent performing disk I/O, some time may be spent waiting for CPU to become available, some time may be spent collecting information, etc.
How long are the songs you mentioned? 4-5 seconds to completely generate a 32 bar 3-chorus song sounds reasonable.
Also, after you have generated, you can freeze the tracks, and they don't need to be regenerated for future plays. They are then virtually instant.
To freeze tracks, click the asterisk on each track in the mixer. Frozen tracks are blue.
Trevor
BIAB & RB2026 Win.(Audiophile), Windows 10 Pro & Windows 11, Cakewalk Bandlab, Izotope Prod.Bundle, Roland RD-1000, Synthogy Ivory, Session Keys Grand S & Electric R, Kontakt, Focusrite 18i20, KetronSD2, NS40M, Pioneer Active Monitors.
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