Thank you for your help and advice, Jim.

From reading Matt's Tips and Tricks article on the difference in sound quality between the Audiophile pack and the other packs, it has helped to clarify that it's the Audiophile version that would best suit my needs.

As I'm already familiar with BIAB 2008 and have used it regularly over the years, I wouldn't foresee many problems in adapting to using any of the later versions.

My typical usage of BIAB, is to type in the chords of one of my songs, and experiment with the many different styles, tempos, and key signatures.
Then if I find a style that I'm happy with that includes RealDrums, I export the Realdrums audio track to my 16-track digital recorder and proceed to record myself playing all of the other instrumental tracks (including vocals) on the other available channels.

I then import each track as a 16-bit, 44.1 Kz, to Audacity for individual sound processing and editing.
Finally, the song is mixed down to two channels and saved as a 16-bit WAV file.

In short, all I would really require from a more recent version of BIAB, is to use some of the other instruments (in addition to Drums)in my songs, and the higher the sound quality, the better.
Therefore it's the Audiophile version that appears to be the best version in order to deliver that requirement.

I'm quite happy with the number and variety of styles that I can choose from in BIAB 2008, so I'm pretty sure that I would be equally happy with what is included in more recent versions.

Unfortunately, I've decided that the benefits of using the Audiophile PAK to obtain what would be quite a limited amount of content for use in my projects, is not worth the cost of purchasing it in my particular case, despite the excellence of that content, but I can see how useful the package is to the many happy users on this forum who utilise it's many features.

After watching the BIAB 2017 demo ad on Facebook, I was so impressed with the sound that I was quite interested in buying the product, but after looking into it in more detail, it's about four times more expensive than I would be willing to pay.

I've not used RealBand as it's not included with BIAB 2008, but from looking at several video demonstrations on YouTube etc, I can see that it is obviously a very useful piece of software used in conjunction with BIAB and I'm sure that I would probably want to try it out if I bought BIAB 2017, but I would still then want to export each individual track to Audacity for further processing and editing,so it's not exactly an essential requirement for me.

It's great to see how PG Music has improved these products over the last few years, and it's a pity that I cannot simply buy an affordable upgrade to my existing 2008 version so that I can benefit from the excellent music quality and musicianship that is available in the later versions. That's what I was hoping I could do when I watched the demo, but I realise that a lot of work has gone into improving BIAB and buying the latest edition is money well spent for those who can afford it.

Last edited by Andyman; 03/09/17 12:37 PM.
https://linktr.ee/andyshearer