I was auditioning styles for a song arrangement when I found a few with the Bass marked as N/A. I think I should have all RTs currently available so I investigated and found the following.
Nine missing tracks are all Acoustic Bass as follows
2125 2126 set 57 2127
2128 2129 set 14 2130
2131 2132 set 55 2133
I checked 'What Add Ons' and these sets are all listed. I then re-installed those sets and then 'rebuild and fix' in the RT selection panel.
Still nine N/A
Now the strange part. This was on my laptop with BIAB 2018, build 509. I don't use the desktop much now, so haven't yet got round to updating, and yes, you've guessed it, the nine RTs are all present and correct in BIAB 2017.
Any clues or suggestions as to what is happening?
Best regards Vintage
Have just checked the RealTracks folder inside BIAB and located those with today's date and I reckon those N/A tracks are there. The mystery deepens!
These are simple variations of some older bass RealTracks. If you have them in the other bb folder, one way to fix is to copy the ST2 and Xt2 files from there into the bb\Soloists folder of the 2018 folder you're using.
I located the RBass156, RBass157, RBass158. ST2 and Xt2 files in BIAB 2017, copied & pasted into the Soloists folder of 2018. Re-installed RT sets 14,55,57, checked in folders that everything is where it should be, then rebooted.
Nine RTs still N/A
After rebuild I get the following;
9 RealTracks have r*.st2 flies in the BB folder, but no RealTracks in the folder D:\bb\RealTracks. ither install RealTracks again, or point to correct RealTracks folder in RT settings. then press REBUILD button to rebuild the list.
The following are the only Acoustic Bass folders with today's date and I reckon those I have marked* are the RTs in question.
*Bass, Acoustic, Jazz BeBop Sw 190 Bass, Acoustic, Jazz Modern Sw 140 *Bass, Acoustic, Jazz Sw 110 *Bass, Acoustic, Jazz Sw 140 Bass, Acoustic, Soloist Jazz Sw 140 Bass, Acoustic, PopWaltz Ev 085
Rather than use Stylepicker to determine the missing basses, have you gone into Realtrack picker to see whether or not the Realtracks are actually present? (There might be a glitch in Stylepicker that's giving wrong information.)
A simple sort by "Set" would make it easy to identify them. (see below graphic)
From the below Realtrack information, the folders you need to look for (Set 14) under \bb\Realtracks are called...
Bass, Acoustic, Jazz, Half, Quarter Sw 140 (this is #2128)
Bass, Acoustic, Jazz, Half, Half Sw 140 (this is #2129)
Bass, Acoustic, Jazz, Quarter, Quarter Sw 140 (this is #2130)
I should have clarified that after I discovered the issue in Stylepicker, all subsequent searches were in RT picker, but I filtered by RT number.
Your suggestion of filtering by Set number showed me that I had wrongly assumed that the Bass, Acoustic, Jazz Sw 110 folder contained all variations of Sw 110, same for Sw140 & Sw190.
The relevant folders were not in my BIAB 2018 but were in BIAB 2017 on my desktop, so I copied and pasted, rebooted and Rebuilt RTs. Now all present and correct.
However this is just a quick fix, it doesn't answer the 'What Happened' question and I am reluctant to update 2017 on my desktop.
I will contact PG support and refer them to this thread.
I may be wrong here but it sounds like you installed a brand new version of BIAB 2018 directly to your laptop. (That is, you didn't install it over an existing copy of BIAB 2017.)
On your desktop, though, you have BIAB 2017 so you will be installing 2018 over 2017. This is standard practice. Since you have the Realtracks already present in 2017, installing 2018 over the top of 2017 (that is, into the same folder) will add the new material in 2018 directly to what's already present on your computer.
Last edited by Noel96; 01/19/1802:52 PM. Reason: adding clarity to the first paragraph
Noel, when I downloaded all the bits and pieces I just hit the .exe files starting with BIAB 2018 then the new RTs etc so that should have installed as you describe.
Either way, why do those folders not appear when i re-install the relevant Sets.
The BIAB 2017 which is ok came from those files several upgrades ago.
Anyway I've passed the info to support though it will be next week before I get an answer and hopefully a solution.
From lurking around here since the diskette days I feel the response on this forum from people like yourself is often much more immediate and useful than support.
Just throwing a wild pitch but could it be that the folder clean up routine has moved the folders to a place neither you, nor Band-in-a-Box expect the folders to be? But the folders may actually exist on your hard drive? Have you pressed the Windows start button and then searched for any of the folders using Windows search? There have been SEVERAL posts of error messages generated because the clean up feature moved folders and 2018 BiaB still looks at the "old" locations.
Jim,you may well be correct, but since I have just spent three days chasing my tail over this and found a quick fix, I am not prepared to spend more time on it. Thank for your suggestion but I'll wait and see if Support come up with anything. (From past experience these issues are quietly fixed in a future build without any acknowledgement of the original problem)
I have been using BIAB since 1997 think that PGMusic products are very good, but I find this annual round of glitches and bugs following the annual upgrade very tiresome and frustrating. My perception is that this became noticeable after the introduction of RTs and has increased over the years since then.
Before the self appointed BIAB apologists chime with the usual platitudes about complicated, sophisticated programmes, hard working developers and beta testers etc. I use several complicated, sophisticated programmes for music and photography which basically work 'straight from the box' without having to be run as administrator and without the round of 'fix-it' after an upgrade.
1. Copy the entire bb folder from your desktop where you have your full and working copy of 2017, to your laptop C:\bb 2. Install the Band-in-a-Box 2018 PlusPAK to your laptop C:\bb.
Thanks for your input, can I confirm something before I copy as you suggest?
Am I correct in assuming that you are aware from my previous posts that I have BIAB2018 and RTs etc on my laptop's D drive and you want me to copy and install to C to avoid "contamination" ?
Something I just noticed, I didn't look inside the 9 folders when I copied them from BIAB2017. I have just looked and there are no files other than AlternateFolderName. txt and these refer to those folders that, at the start I had mistakenly thought contained the missing RTs. What's that about?
Am I correct in assuming that you are aware from my previous posts that I have BIAB2018 and RTs etc on my laptop's D drive and you want me to copy and install to C to avoid "contamination" ?
Good point, I should have said D. Actually I was just trying to provide clear simple instructions for getting a full BB2018 onto your laptop. Yes by all means if BB is on your D drive and you want it there, that's completely fine. You can even have more than one Band-in-a-Box folder on your hard drive.
Let's say you have D:\bb as your Band-in-a-Box folder, and for the sake of argument you have your full bb folder on a portable hard drive. I would (1) rename D:\bb to D:\bb_old for the time being as a backup (you could just delete it, but why not just rename it until you're finished? Or you could copy over top of D:\bb, but then you have to answer questions from Windows about overwriting files and merging folders). (2) Next you could copy the full bb folder to D:\bb. That will take some time, so be sure not to disturb the hard drive connection. (3) Finally you could install BB2018 into D:\bb. There are a number of ways you could do this, but one way is to run the original 2018 installers, and install to D:\bb.
FYI, the alternate .txt file is normal, and it is just using audio from a different folder. The .ST2's in question use audio content from specific RealTracks folders that you don't have. It seemed from your original post that you were ONLY missing the simple bass st2 files, and that made sense to me because they were released later than the original basses. However apparently you are missing the audio content as well. Instead of trying to figure out why this is the case and if you are missing other things in the new folder, I came to the conclusion it was best just to copy your entire folder over and then you're done.
I just recently found that I was missing some RealTracks (actually, the .ST2 files that go with them) and some styles on my desktop, even though I had done a full install over my previous "everything" install.
However, on my laptop, I went through and found everything was clean and nothing was missing.
So, using the "robocopy" command (which is a command line utility similar to "xcopy"), I was able to copy both my BIAB folder from the C: drive and the RealTracks/RealDrums folders from the E: drive from my laptop to my desktop, replacing only the files that are new or newer than what's there (so it went pretty quickly).
(If anyone is interested in using robocopy, let me know and I'll be happy to give the details.)
When I brought it back up on my desktop, I only had to reassign my audio ports (and I didn't have to worry about VST/VSTi's, as I have those folders mirrored on both computers), and voila, everything was present on the desktop.
That's what I really like about the BIAB and RealBand; since they don't rely on the registry, you can easily copy the files over without doing full "installs".
John
Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 12TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 12TB SATA
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MIDI Styles Set 92: Look Ma! More MIDI 15: Latin Jazz
MIDI SuperTracks Set 46: Piano & Organ
Instrumental Studies Set 24: Groovin' Blues Soloing
Artist Performance Set 19: Songs with Vocals 9
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Instrumental Studies 25 - Soul Jazz Guitar Soloing
Artist Performance Set 20: Songs with Vocals 10
RealDrums Stems Set 10: Groovin' Sticks
SynthMaster Sounds & Styles Set 2 (sounds & styles with audio demos)
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