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Charlie: "the purchase price is worth it for just the Audio Chord Wizard alone."

Sorry but I've always had problems with ACW, whenever I had to reanalyze the song, the chords always came out different. The 1st bar is easy, but the beat setting is a challenge. Miss one beat and restart the process, the chord detection is all over the place. Sometimes in my frustration I just say the heck with it.

If I could "slow down" the audio a bit, it might be more accurate.

DE

I always felt this would be a step which would open up BIAB to a whole new demographic and has been in the wishlist and discussed here for a long time.

We are not talking about hosting an application within BIAB (that can be done), but rather hosting BIAB within an application... Making a VST version of BIAB.

Granted, lack of this has not stopped us from integrating a BIAB workflow into our DAWs. But the ability to host BIAB directly in a DAW sounds like a good idea. Similar to the Toontrack products which also are based on a chordchart or sequence which is laid out in the VST itself and provide standalone and VST version.

Peter, I don't believe you have ever commented on the feasibility of this.

As soon as the vst synchronization is fixed this should be achievable like:
https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/flstudio_vst_plugin.htm

http://www.energy-xt.com/index.php?id=0115

http://www.musicdevelopments.com/wiki/doku.php?id=rcwiki:vstplugin
"the RapidComposer VST plug-in is a small, reliable plug-in which does not include the whole RapidComposer application as in previous versions, but it communicates with the standalone application through shared memory, also known as 'bridge'. This results greater stability and flexibility.

When the RapidComposer plug-in is loaded by the host (DAW), the plug-in locates the RapidComposer application, starts it, and connects to the application. If RapidComposer was already running, it will switch to “VST Mode” which means the user interface and some internals will be changed."

The vst controller loads into the host and the play/stop events and tempo are synchronized to the main standalone application that runs outside of the host not as an actual vst.
So, you load the biab vst controller into your daw.
The biab vst controller receives the play/stop events and tempo from the host daw, thus playing in sync to your daw.

But unless multriffs are added it maybe better having real band as a vst as it has multiriffs.
This way you may have your tracks recorded in your daw but need some extra tracks added to the session.
So generate them up, hit play on your daw, real band will play in sync with the daw, whatever sections don't fit you simply multiriff them to fit, now just drag the tracks into your daw.
This way you can fine tune the tracks to fit your session and not have to accept whatever whole track that biab generates.

The ACW may not be a necessary feature for you. I don't use Notation but Matt Finley finds it invaluable. Mario D focuses on the midi capabilities. That was my overall point. Whatever feature you purchased BIAB for, that's its value. As you develop musically and as you learn of all that BIAB can do, the program just becomes more valuable. My purchase was made on what I knew of the program before I purchased it. At the time, the ACW was not in the forefront of features. I didn't know what it was or what it did. It just happened that once I became aware of the ACW, it was an important feature for me.

The ACW is a skill just the same as any skill in any trade. I play guitar but when I attempt to play lead guitar, my music sounds like a song that you have run through the ACW. It's all wrong and all over the place. I know good carpenters that struggle with making dovetail joints, can't properly calibrate a planer and don't know every scale on a carpenter's square. They have other methods to make joints, avoid planers and use the carpenter square for what they do understand about it.

That you can become frustrated and turn to another method to solve determining chords and tempo detracts from the necessary motivation to stick with learning the ACW skills. I had this same discussion with my brother yesterday as we've been discussing working jointly on a project with pre-recorded audio files I made years ago playing with my late brother. We are thinking of adding him along with these existing recordings so all three brothers are playing together. The main obstacle is my brother's lack of mastery of the ACW.

The ACW is a skill that can be mastered with practice. It can be and is frustrating and sometimes is not the quickest way to get a correct chord chart. A speedy chord chart is not its forte. An accurate tempo map/chord chart (usually edited quite a bit) is. Oddly, for me, one day after many hours of frustration, everything just clicked into place. It was as if I learned to throw a baseball curveball. Once I threw curve, it was nearly impossible not to throw one. It becomes mechanical memory. You have to determine for yourself if learning the skill is worth the effort. If you have suitable methods that allow you to bypass the ACW, it may never have much value for you.

The ACW allows very accurate control over RealTracks that provide a realistic live sound to recordings. It is the foundation for projects that include pre-recorded music for me. Being the foundation, it is not unusual for getting the ACW export just right and the work within the ACW is the most labor intensive and time consuming portion of the entire project.

Regarding the beat detection, you can miss a beat and not have to start over. I also use the new Stylepicker to provide me the correct key signature/tempo and feel before I process the audio through the ACW. Knowing a song is 4/4, 110 ev8 beforehand takes a lot of the guesswork out of what to look for during the ACW process. If a song is at 110 BPM, the ACW will be the most accurate at that BPM.

Charlie: wow that is quite a post, thank you taking the time to go into detail in your response. Appreciated.

DE

You're welcome. I was afraid it may have sounded a bit preachy but my intent was to let you know learning the skill of the aCW is not due to natural ability but due to patience, knowledge and practice.

I even use it on occasion with BIAB projects that I start from scratch and that don't have pre-existing audio tracks.

When I generate a BIAB Realtrack song, render it and then process the rendered audio through the ACW, it is not a simple 110bpm generated track. The tempo varies slightly throughout the song. I call it de-quantized. These minor variations make the song much more natural feeling and live than just generating the tracks because the tracks now vary in tempo slightly as the song follows the more precise tempo map created by the ACW.

By the way, I learned that by creating BIAB tracks, running them through the ACW as a way to practice learning and gaining experience with the ACW. I recommend this process as a way to familiarize yourself with the ACW. Going in, you already know the key, tempo and chord progression.

Dave
Welcome to the forums.
No plans have been announced thus far, but often changes and new features are not advertised ahead of new releases.

64 bit has been often asked for. PGM use a different approach to deliver 64 bit connectivity for plugins (JBridge), but who knows, this may ultimately be superseded.

I venture to suggest that nobody outside of PGM knows.

I also suggest lots of people would be very happy to see a native 64 bit version.

Videotrack;

Thought I read (very) recently from Peter that there are no plans for 64 bit as JBridge handles it well.

DE

DE, I don't recall seeing that recently so it's probably in one of the forums I don't frequent. Do you think you could find and repost it?

JBridge provides a way to handle 64-bit VSTs and additional RAM, and that was indeed the major need at the time. But there would be other benefits to changing the app to fully 64-bit at some point.

While I can not point to a explicit PGM statement I can tell you that from my perspective, PGM has been very clear that 64bit is not in the works and not even on the horizon. Likely it took a bit of "reading between the lines" on my part instead of "read my lips", but that has always been the take-away-message when PGM has weighted in on the subject. Anything else is wishful thinking or just politically correct speak (both of which is generally the case when this subject comes up.)

So hate to burst everyone's bubble but being around here a long long time does lead to things other than just being old.

"The purchase price is worth it for just the Audio Chord Wizard alone". I don't use the Audio Chord Wizard ever, because I input the chords for lead sheet I use to play the melody. My main requests for BIAB are these:

1. Cut time
2. 6/8 styles that do note play as 12/8 styles
3. A unison mode in which allow individual parts to play the part of the multi track . For example if you had a horn pad track with multiple instruments, with unison, if you had the individual instrument based on the horn pad track the individual instrument would play their part along with the multi track.
4. A best of Real Tracks option in which any track designed as a background track when inserted and generated would allow you to have three different takes, this when selecting one, it would then save that take as a .wav file for that song only and allow you to play the song with that take and have that take be rendered to .wav when mixing the entire song.

I haven't seen this. In this thread Dr. Gannon said that 64 bit softsynths run in BiaB with jBridge and that BiaB is a 32 bit program that runs on both 32 bit and 64 bit machines. I have not seen anywhere where he said there are no plans for 64 bit.

Perhaps you could point me to that post?

[edit] I see where Matt beat me to the punch about the posting.

Matt: This is the post Peter made on page 2 of this thread.

#358994 - 07/30/16 07:57 PM

)))No 64 bit,
64 bit plugins are supported and work seemelessly with jbridge ($10). Otherwise the program is 32 bit and works fine on 32 and 64 bit OS`s

2014

A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse. Case closed

Hi DE
This has probably already been answered, but I think this is the comment you were referring to. Peter wrote recently:
"64 bit plugins are supported and work seemelessly(sic) with jbridge ($10). Otherwise the program is 32 bit and works fine on 32 and 64 bit OS`s"

I hoped my response to Dave didn't imply that there was or wasn't a 64 bit version on the horizon. My reply was to say that despite many requests, only PGM knew what might or might not happen with a 64 bit version.

my impression was that Peter asked for someone to make a compelling case for specific 64bit benefits and I don't think anyone really did! given that, and the fact that it would be quite an undertaking assuming the team has little experience building 64bit applications, I'd say this has to be pretty low on their priority list.