PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist What are the killer features making upgrade worthwhile

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.