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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Apr 2016
Posts: 3
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Guys,
I apologize if this is answered elsewhere, but I was unsuccessful in finding it.
I recently installed BIAB 2016 - a new installation on a new computer. I chose Installation Option 2 - keeping Real Tracks on the External USB Hard Drive.
However, I've rethought this - and would like to go ahead and have Real Tracks on my internal hard drive (Installation Option 3 effectively).
What's the best way to do this? Should I uninstall BIAB, and do a complete re-install? Or is there an easier way to go?
Thanks
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Scott,
There's no need to uninstall. Simply install over the top of your existing installation. It will take around an hour to install if you have the UltraPlusPak or EverythingPak.
If it was me, before installing, I would go to "Help | Utilities" and deactivate the installation. Once re-installed, I'd then reactivate it. (According to what I've read from PG Music, this shouldn't be necessary because the activation is computer sensitive and not installation sensitive. I haven't tried it though so I don't know.)
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Noel
P.S. Choose a custom installation and deselect Amplitube and Sampletank. These won't need reinstalling a second time. This will speed things up a bit.
P.P.S. The reason why a simple copy from here to there won't work is because Realtracks require files other than just the Realtrack file.
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2026
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Feb 2002
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Guys,
I apologize if this is answered elsewhere, but I was unsuccessful in finding it.
I recently installed BIAB 2016 - a new installation on a new computer. I chose Installation Option 2 - keeping Real Tracks on the External USB Hard Drive.
However, I've rethought this - and would like to go ahead and have Real Tracks on my internal hard drive (Installation Option 3 effectively).
What's the best way to do this? Should I uninstall BIAB, and do a complete re-install? Or is there an easier way to go?
Thanks Provided you don't have the audiophile version transfer is OK. But according to PGMusic if you have the audiophile version on an external disc drive and transfer to your comp drive the WAV tracks get copied to WMA - (Windows Media Format i.e somewhat compressed). Re.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 27,449
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Provided you don't have the audiophile version transfer is OK. But according to PGMusic if you have the audiophile version on an external disc drive and transfer to your comp drive the WAV tracks get copied to WMA - (Windows Media Format i.e somewhat compressed).
Re.
Frank, I can tell you that in my case this advice is just not true. I have the audiophile version, and for many years I have copied selected RealTracks to a separate internal SSD drive. As Noel mentioned, this isn't enough - you also have to copy ST2 and XT2 files to the /BB folder. The process is complicated and I don't recommend it for the faint of heart, but it can be copied manually and it will work. Could you please cite the source of this advice from PG Music? I have to believe the context is not correct (unless they, like me, were just trying to discourage you).
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Thanks guys -
I do have the Audiophile version - What would be your advice in this case?
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Scott, I would call PG Music Support and ask their opinion. You will want to tell them why you are considering this, and how large your target internal drive is. The PG Music external drive with the audiophile version has about 1.5 terabytes on it! Most of that is RealTracks. And yes, the drive has both .WAV and .WMA versions of each RealTrack. The compression is about 11:1 for the .WMA files.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Matt and Scott,
I wonder if Frank was meaning that the Audiophile drive does allow a user to install the wma version of Realtracks and Realdrums on a computer's harddrive as an alternative full installation.
Noel
MY SONGS...Audiophile BIAB 2026
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Noel, probably. Not so much now, but when the audiophile version was first released, it was even larger because there were more files (two-thirds could be eliminated from the use of the Elastique algorithm). Few computers had internal drives large enough for an install of the full set of .WAV files. The installation choices thus included the option of loading only the compressed .WMA files.
By the way, we haven't yet said clearly, the audiophile version works just fine from the PG Music USB 3.0 external drive. The only disadvantage I can think of is that you don't have a backup. However, if you upgrade each year and get a new drive, you can do what I do: back up the new drive onto last year's drive.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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By the way, we haven't yet said clearly, the audiophile version works just fine from the PG Music USB 3.0 external drive. The only disadvantage I can think of is that you don't have a backup. However, if you upgrade each year and get a new drive, you can do what I do: back up the new drive onto last year's drive. I run Audiophile absolutely fine from the USB 3 drive. Yes, one way to obtain a backup would be to clone the USB 3 Drive to another drive. This might take some time, but could be run overnight. Then there would be a backup available. For the O/P, my understanding is that there is no difference in the BiaB software for either versions. The software simply looks for WAV (Audiophile) files first, and uses them if available, if not, it looks for and loads the WMA file. Oh, and welcome to the neighborhood! 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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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Yes, what Trevor said about how the program works is correct.
But I need to apologize for not realizing Scott just joined the forum today. Welcome! I'm sorry for getting so deeply into technical details so quickly.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Yikes - I obviously have a learning curve here. I think during the installation process, it suggested that with Option 3 (installing entirely on the computer's internal hard drive), it would take about 100 Gigabytes. However perhaps this was in reference to using the lower quality files. Perhaps I should just stick with the external drive. I just like the idea of being able to use my laptop without the external drive. But I definitely can't provide Band-in-a-Box 1 TB of space on my computer.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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You've got it right. Especially for a laptop, with one internal drive of limited size and speed, the external drive from PG Music is the right choice.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Feb 2002
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Provided you don't have the audiophile version transfer is OK. But according to PGMusic if you have the audiophile version on an external disc drive and transfer to your comp drive the WAV tracks get copied to WMA - (Windows Media Format i.e somewhat compressed).
Re.
Frank, I can tell you that in my case this advice is just not true. I have the audiophile version, and for many years I have copied selected RealTracks to a separate internal SSD drive. As Noel mentioned, this isn't enough - you also have to copy ST2 and XT2 files to the /BB folder. The process is complicated and I don't recommend it for the faint of heart, but it can be copied manually and it will work. Could you please cite the source of this advice from PG Music? I have to believe the context is not correct (unless they, like me, were just trying to discourage you). Matt you asked for a citation. From the read.me files on my PGMusic audiophile ext drives for 2015 and 2016. BIAB 2016 "Option #3 - Install Band-in-a-Box© AND RealTracks on your computer hard drive (**about 100 GB free disk space required**) In addition to everything installed by Option 2, this will copy the RealTracks and RealDrums folders from the USB drive to your computer's hard drive, as if you had installed everything from DVD. This will allow you to keep the PG Music hard drive primarily for backup, and use Band-in-a-Box© and RealBand (along with the RealTracks) directly from your computer hard drive. Since these folders contain many audio files, this option requires much more hard disk space, and may take about an hour to complete depending on how fast your computer is. Note that this will NOT copy the .WAV files, only the .WMA files, as explained above ("Important information about this AudioPhile Edition"). BIAB 2015 _____________________________________ Important information about this AudioPhile Edition _____________________________________ In this AudioPhile edition hard drive, we have included all of the original uncompressed "lossless" audio files (*.WAV) for RealTracks and RealDrums, in addition to the compressed ("lossy") *.WMA files that we normally ship. Note that Installation Option #3 described below will only copy the compressed audio files to your computer's hard drive, not the .WAV files. While not required, if you wanted to copy all the .WAVs to your computer hard drive as well, you would choose installation Option #2 instead, and then manually copy the Drums and RealTracks folders from the bb folder on this USB drive, to the bb folder on your computer hard drive. This would usually not be practical, since it would require almost 850 MB of hard disk space. You shouldn't delete the WAV files from this hard drive, since these are the original uncompressed files (higher quality), and this is one of the advantages to having the AudioPhile hard drive. Note that if you DO delete or archive the WAV files leaving only the WMA files, it is possible to uncompress them back to WAV, however these new files will not be the same as the originals because they will have already been compressed once - that is, they will be lossy." Cheers F
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I admit that saying the wav get copied as WMA files is not correct. What I should have said only the WMA files get copied based on the read.me info in option 3.
Re F
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Good job, Frank. Thanks for clarifying.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I have Audiophile 2015 but already upgraded to 2016 (wma)
Although Audiophile is running smoothly from the external USB3 hard drive I´m thinking about copying the real tracks to my internal SSD. With SSD´s storage volume still being expensive, I think about deleting the wma´s where wav´s are in place. That must be around 50-60Gbyte and therefore worth thinking about on a SSD.
Has anybody an idea how to do this deleting process fast and easy without the danger of deleting anything important?
Thanks in advance
SC
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I used to teach batch file programming but I'm not sure how to do this, or I would have done it myself.
My setup is similar to what you describe. I have the BIAB program on an internal SSD I used to use as my boot drive. The RealTracks of the audiophile version are copied to an internal Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive, which is faster than most at 10,000 rpm.
I only put some of my RealTracks there, the ones for samba, bossa, and swing that I write. I use a program called Total Commander to highlight some RealTrack folders and copy just those. You also have to remember that all of the .ST2 and .XT2 files must be in your /BB folder. I know some aren't needed but there is no way to know which.
When I want to use other styles (rarely), I go into Preferences, RealTracks and switch the location back to the PG Music external audiophile drive. This works for me but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone because there is plenty of possibility for error.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Ask sales and support questions about Band-in-a-Box using natural language.
ChatPG's knowledge base includes the full Band-in-a-Box User Manual and sales information from the website.
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Band-in-a-Box 2026 for Windows Special Offers End Tomorrow (January 15th, 2026) at 11:59 PM PST!
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The office will be closed for Christmas Day, but we will be back on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) at 6:00am PST.
Team PG
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