Excellent questions.

Welcome Andyman.

As an artist who releases your own material.... I would suggest highly that you consider the Everything Pack.... I always tell people to buy as high up the food chain as they can afford.

If you are using this to arrange and compose your music, it's just a small step further to have Band in a Box and Real Band (BB & RB) take it to a full audio real track for a very professional and polished sound.

If you listen to the music on my music site and the music of some others here, you will not hear anything that even remotely sounds like a midi synth trying to sound like a guitar or a piano or anything else. I've had professional musicians who play fiddle ask me who was playing the fiddle on a given song because they knew I didn't play it and in the words of one studio owner who commented that he could "hear the rosin on the bow and the strings".

I used to build my drum tracks in the manner you described. All of that tedious work ended with the Real Drums in BB/RB.

Now days, I write my songs and get the details... structure, key, tempo, style, in BB. Once that's accomplished and I'm satisfied with the song, I save and close it in BB. I then open that same project in RB and let it populate the tracks with the real tracks (RT's) I select one of the RT's and highlight it. I then highlight the empty tracks below the default tracks and use those to generate new and different RT's. Normally, I write country but tend to use hard dock styles. So the default tracks are guitars, bass, drums, maybe a B3. I use the Generate Tracks function to get fiddle, steel, dobro, etc into the project.

Once that is done and I have between 8 to 12 tracks, I will export them to a DAW like Sonar for mixing and for adding my live guitar parts and vocals. Not all of the BB/RB tracks make it to the final version in Sonar. Guitars especially get deleted in favor of my live tracked guitars.

Have a listen to the songs on my music site to hear the result of this process.

Buying for E-Bay vs PG.... With PG you know you are getting the most recent version and, as a customer, you have them to call on for support. PG is also very good at getting you replacements and upgrades if you need them, as a registered customer. However, that decision is up to you. In addition, PG offers a 30 day MBG with no questions asked.

But I do stand by my advice to buy as far up the food chain as you can. The further up you go, the more real tracks and styles you get and in my humble opinion, the RT's are where the magic really happens with BB/RB.

You will be totally jawdropping amazed at how far they have come since 2008. Trust me on that.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.