PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows biab or realband

Just because one reply doesn't give you the answer you seek doesn't mean someone else won't. So yeah, try to be a bit patient. If someone seems to be missing the point of your question, simply restate the question with more details added or in a different way. The folks here are helpful and friendly.


OK.... SO to answer your question.



BB/RB is such an amazing program and has so many functions I never use...so I will explain this from my POV and how I use the two programs.

BB is a great scratch pad kind of a program. It's super easy and fast to try an idea and switch it around..... new key, different tempo, different style, and all in a matter of a few seconds switching from one to the other. You have a small number of tracks.... 5, I think plus a melody track and one audio track you can record into. I use this program to get the song structure together and hear, approximately, how it will sound when it's finished. When I'm satisfied, I save the file and close BB. I almost never use the melody track or the audio track in BB.

RB is a DAW with some limits but it allows way more tracks than BB does. You can save your song in BB and then reopen it in RB. First thing RB does is to populate the tracks with the existing 5 or 6 tracks you had in the song in BB. At this point, you can easily, and in a matter of a few seconds, add as many more tracks as you want and not only in the style you used for the song but also using instruments not in the style at all. For example, if I write a song in BB using the LA Hard Rock style.... it has bass, drums, and guitars (IIRC).... but in RB, I can add steel guitar, dobro, trumpet, or whatever else I want in my song. You can also do your own live recording into as many of the available tracks as your computer will adequately process.

The 2 programs work together and do seem to do similar things and yes, a number of the functions overlap, but then as you understand what BB and RB can do differently and uniquely, that's where it starts to get interesting.

Even though RB is a DAW, it has some limitations that other DAW's on the market do not. I use Sonar, and other folks here use Cubase, and other DAW's. I find that it's easier for me to work in Sonar, but perhaps some of that comes from the fact that I have been using Cake products before I started using PG products.

Hopefully this shows some of the differences between the two and why you really should learn to use them together to get things done.