"most buttons, including ones most people would rarely use, crammed to the right in the middle of the screen....um.....what?"

Not sure what use you need biab for, instant fast song generation, live accompaniment, songwriting, making up songs out of the box for the user song showcase, hobby, studio work to add track/s to a session, CD's.

BIAB is a six shooter, it will quickly shoot out six tracks, if you don't like a track you can have another shot but it's the whole track you get each time, you can't change some bars or chords you don't like without having to shoot out another complete track/s.
It was originally designed/made by musicians for musicians for auto accompaniment for them hence "Band in a Box", it runs 100% in ram.

There is another program that is included with the purchase called "RealBand" that not many people even know or bother to get to know as all the promotion and neon is all about "BIAB" as the be all to end all.


Real band contains biab that it calls on to generate up tracks or any sections.

You can have as many tracks as you like (48), as many bars as you like.
You can see and edit the wavforms of every track.
You have node control of the waveform like fadein/fadeout.
You can change any/all section/chords of any/all audio/midi track/s without having to re-generate the whole track/s.
You can have as many realdrum tracks as you like, no need to request more percussion tracks for BIAB crammed GUI.
You can have multitrack drum stems.
You can import a midi and it will split the instruments to separate tracks.
You can split a midi drum track to separate hit tracks.
You can make the tracks unique more so and using direct input instruments add your FX/modeling to get the sound you need, and https://www.kvraudio.com/product/redshift-pickup-replacer-by-acmebargig on the DI

I started with biab but I found real band and could see and edit everything without having to type a lot of numbers in to change things and going deep within the many menu and page trees.

There is an actual site www.realband.org that has so much info on the unknown app.

If you want more creative control then Real band.

But if you like things done automatically for you, happy to take what you get and auto accompaniment is what you need by all means BIAB.