Noel, thanks again for your help.

I now understand that if I select a RealTrack instrument as my Melody instrument it will not play my existing melody but will generate its own. A bit counter-intuitive, since all I'm efectively doing is changing a patch, but it obviously runs deeper than that so I just have to accept it.

I also understand that Realtracks will not be able to be saved as Midi unless they have an associated RealChart to provide the mapping. Thanks for the explanation and the link.

I'll chase down the codec(s) you suggest for exporting mp3, thanks.

A bit more tricky changing the Patch to Midi... until I realised that it's not done via the rather obvious 'Select Midi Instrument (Patch)' item on the right-click menu, which does not work, but via the slightly less intuitive 'Select Custom Midi Style for this Track'. Only snag is, with the latter I can select from the GM set, but with the former I can also access the GM2 extended set. I wanted a midi Ukulele for the track, but cannot see how to get one.

Not sure I understand the purpose of the 'Select Midi Instrument (Patch)' option if you can't use it, but Ii'm probably missing something (again!)

thanks again for your guidance.