I personally LOVE Real Band and could not really say what is "missing" beyond what the tech department gradually adds as useful features. I think they are doing a great job with steadily improving it as essentially a free tool that comes with BIAB.

Real Band was never designed to compete with a Sonar or anything like it --that's not what PG Music does, and the costs would be prohibitive, I think, to try and enter the market of high end products with floating screens and titanium colored mixing panels and all the bells and whistles.

What Real Band does extremely well, in my opinion, is GENERATE AUDIO and RECORD AUDIO. In that aspect, it is a beast, and it is my go to workhorse DAW for recording audio. It loads fast, and I never have any spiking issues. I get a good clean solid .wav than I can drag into another DAW (I mix in Sonar.) Also, let's not forget that RB doesn't just generate audio, it also generates midi, and that is HUGE, if you know what to do with it.

I suppose they might work on the mixing board of RB to give you the type of slider and "board feel" you would get with a Sonar, but I am not sure that would be worth their investment.

$99 gets you Sonar Artist, which is pretty darned close to Platinum except you don't get a few of the high end mastering plug ins. But you can substitute your own VSTs.

So, my process is:

A.) I record in RB.

B.) I tweak in Audacity.

C.) I mix and do all effects and EQing per channel and in the master bus in Sonar.

D.) I do a final run in Ozone for the final master.

This all seems to work pretty well, and it is not expensive at all, but seems to be highly effective.

So I personally feel I am living in heaven with all these great tools around me.

David Snyder
Songwriter/Renaissance Man
Studio + Fingers

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