From the article raintalk cited, dated March 30, 2006:

Quote:

"After 12 years at the alpha-release level, Wine is now officially a beta-stage project. Hopefully, this event signals a more consistently stable environment, but some programs still may behave erratically. The Wine documentation gives detailed instructions for submitting useful bug reports, so if you find that your favorite Windows program doesn't work well (or at all) under Wine, you can help yourself and the project by submitting a report.

Wine's support for basic sound and MIDI is good, and support for audio extensions such as Microsoft's DirectX is improving, but you won't be able to use Wine to run large, integrated multimedia applications, such as Cubase or SONAR. However, Wine can run a variety of sound and music programs, even some fairly big packages. Check the Wine Web site (see the on-line Resources) for links to lists that rate the compatibility of various Windows applications."




There was also this on using a demo of BIAB 2004:

Quote:

"Band-in-a-Box is an automatic accompaniment generator. The program creates a virtual backing band that interprets a series of user-defined chord changes according to a selected “style”. A Band-in-a-Box style is a set of rules governing quantifiable aspects of a particular music performance style, such as country swing, rhumba, waltz time, blues shuffle and so forth. When the user clicks the Play control, the program processes the chord changes by the style rules, generates a real-time performance stream and plays it with your preferred MIDI synthesizer. Voilà, you have your dream rehearsal band.

Band-in-a-Box is the reigning king of the auto-accompaniment software domain. Need to play those changes more slowly? No problem, Band-in-a-Box is a MIDI-based program, so you can adjust the tempo to whatever speed is most comfortable. Want those chords played in a different meter or rhythm? Still no problem, Band-in-a-Box supplies hundreds of styles to choose from, and if you don't like what's included with the base package, you can design your own or access literally thousands of styles and arrangements created and freely distributed by the program's vast base of users and style developers. Don't like the instrumentation for a particular style? Change it on the fly, add or subtract players from the band, or mute parts at will.

I downloaded the most recent Band-in-a-Box demo from the program's Web site and installed it with wine bbw2004demo.exe at an xterm prompt. I entered my new ~/c/bbdemo directory and ran wine bbwdemo to start Band-in-a-Box. I loaded an example style from the File/BB Song dialog, pressed the Play control and watched as the program apparently played the loaded style. Alas, there was no sound. I reconfigured the default MIDI output to go to the Emu10k1 synthesizer on my SBLive Value sound card, pressed Play, and behold, I had sound. I tested other built-in styles, all perfectly happy to perform as though they were playing under Windows itself.

I discovered only one potentially serious difficulty with the demo version. I configured the MIDI input device to the hardware port on the SBLive, but Band-in-a-Box would not record what I played on my MIDI keyboard. The program's virtual keyboard display worked perfectly, but I prefer to record directly from the hardware interface, so perhaps it's time to fire up the Wine debugging tools."



Perhaps the recording issue had to do with its being a demo; perhaps not. Worth checking to see what's going on now, though, yes?

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."