For creating from scratch, I think nothing beats Band in a Box. Especially for beginners to create music. Great for beginners before moving into DAW recording. It's a way beginners coming from the background of analog recording with multitrack recorders with a limited number of tracks; they can bring many of those multitrack techniques into BB to extend track count, bounce tracks and increase the number of instruments in much the same way they did with their analog multitracks.

I think most people are unaware that BB can produce a song with dozens of tracks and dozens of different instruments, at CD quality and no loss of quality to the audio without having to use another program.

All of the same dxi,vst and audio effects available in RealBand are also available in BB. I think that another advantage to using BB over RB for creation to a beginner that processes like panning, gain changing, fading, etc are more similar to working with presets and beginners can spend more time making music than learning DAW programming. I see it as a beginning and more conducive to motivating the artist with successful production of music rather than frustrations of not being able to get the music in your head into a format that produces the audio you hear because of technical computer skill limitations.

Band in a Box is a great place to begin your creation journey and allows you to enjoy success as you grow into the more complex areas of production.

BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.