PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Macintosh BIAB-2018 for Mac, very little has changed

PG Music released the new BIAB-2018 for Mac!

What a disappointment!

It looks like Pg Music is becoming more and more uninterested in Mac platform and all they want is to sell new styles packages.

To understand the disappointment, we should first understand what is it what musicians (BIAB users) want:
BIAB is a great tool for music composers, it should offer the easy and efficient way to:

Recording and Editing Midi
Recording and Editing scores
Recording and Editing Audio

non of the above is up-to-date compared to today's technology.

-- We need to finally get the possibility to efficiently EDIT MIDI recording or direct integration of a DAW to receive the BIAB midi sequences flawlessly.
Window users have REAL BAND which covers this field. Mac user have nothing but complex process to import midi to GarageBand and co.

-- The Score section is still at the beginning .. So many years and still have no improvement in editing the score notes... you can not even select a note to shift ! Even Undo is so slow and jammy.
There are so many great free score softwares like MUSESCORE ... it would be great if PG Music score editor could communicate with these softwares if not offering similar possibilities ...

--- The Audio recording is still unhandy. We were hoping to have a great improvement such as TRANSPORT interface like in DAW softwares, giving many options and the flexibility to carry out recording processes base on an accurate counter to punch-in/out..etc.

--- The Style Maker is still nothing but a primitive interface.
--- The Audio Transcription to Midi is really not ready to be released.
--- The Reading of Internet ABC format is not functioning it reads only BiaB exported ABC format (make no sense!)

and a lot more to be revised.

Nothing of the above has been improved in the 2018 upgrade. instead they offer Real Video, and some other minor additions and a lot of styles. 95% of the users are not teachers so I assume they are not very much interested in "Real Video"

I hope PG Music would try to utilize the power of Mac platform.

Personally I still believe that BIAB should become The Standard in the Music Industry.. PG Music need to stay on the ball and to try matching the paces of development in this field following the path of Protools, Cubase, Studio One..etc. (I know these are no competitors to BIAB, different subject!)

Did they fix the Lyric editor (via the list editor dialogue) because that didn’t work “at all”?

Hi Milo,

thanks for your post. On a related topic but different, by any chance, did you notice a few things start to NOT work properly in the last few updates of the 2017 Mac version of BnB. Ie, specifically, suddenly I started noticing that the last song I had saved would not appear when rebooting BnB after shutting down - this used to happen by default. Secondly, the list of the "recently loaded songs" loaded into BnB disappeared from this menu if selecting it...almost as if these bugs were planted to encourage a "fix" when purchasing the 2018 update... ie, these things should be fixed and working in in the 2017 version.

Curious, were those things at least fixed?

regards, Carlos

Agree, not much different. However I was excited about the harmony feature...I recorded a vocal and played around with the harmony settings, but the result was poor, as if singing under water? Any ideas please, thankyou

Hi Carlos,

Same here.. in 2017 and also still there in 2018.. they did not fixed this problem. when I go to OPEN SPECIAL and load the Previous Song.. it is always something else but the previous song. Today it loaded a song form the BIAB demo collection that I have never played before.

Also one of the issues that really bothered me in 2017 ver. was some times the chord cells are not excepting any keyboard input and I had to go to Edit Chord to type the chords.

Oh Man ... this is disappointing.

Why not 64 Bit ?