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

Simple incomplete explanation:

BIAB (Band-in-a-Box) is a program that allows you to create a virtual band for your song's chord progression. You just first frame out your song (tell BIAB how many bars the song contains, whether there is an intro, and how many times to repeat the song - or just enter the complete song linearly and set the song repeat to 1)
Then just enter the chords for the song on a chord grid, pick an appropriate style (much like picking a style on an arranger keyboard), hit PLAY, and BIAB will generate up to five different accompaniment tracks, which can be any combination of Audio (RealTracks and RealDrums) and MIDI. You pick the synth you want to use for the MIDI output. From there you can save the song to an audio file (WAV, MP3, WMA, etc), or if it's all MIDI, to a MIDI file. Like an arranger keyboard, you can specify where drum fills go and when to change to different substyles defined within the main style you are using.

You can also record a MIDI melody and/or solo, or you can have BIAB create one for you. You can also record a single stereo audio track to go along with the arrangement.

RealBand is a Digital Audio workstation that lets you create up to 48 tracks in any combination of audio or MIDI. RealBand has a number of BIAB features built-in, but it isn't BIAB and it doesn't always do things the same way BIAB does.

If you have Sonar (as your signature line indicates), then RealBand would correspond to features found in Sonar.

RealBand provides for much more granular editing of audio and MIDI data, as well as selective generation/regeneration of BIAB style-based content. You can assign DX/DXi/VST/VSTi instruments and effects to all the tracks, as well as the submixes on each track, as well as the master output mix. Once done, you can render your song out to WAV/MP3/WMA/etc.

RealBand will read and load BIAB files and can export certain elements of your RealBand song to a BIAB file. However, BIAB can't read a RealBand (.SEQ) file.

Both applications support the Audio Chord Wizard, which helps you find chord progressions in audio files (such as files in your MP3 collection). Both applications also support (albeit a somewhat dated) TC-Helicon software based harmonizer.

But, you have to buy Band-in-a-Box to get RealBand (which makes sense, since you really need the BIAB content - styles, RealTracks, RealDrums, etc - to make full use of RealBand).

That's it in a nutshell. If that's still too convoluted, then I can try to make it simpler, or just ask about what you don't understand. There are lots of knowledgeable patient folks here who will help you.