Summer NAMM - RealTracks Artist Appearances! If Producer Mike Harrison is recording a lot of these RealTracks in Nashville you would think by now we would have the higher quality 24bit/48khz audio rather than the 16bit/44khz from the Biab 2008 days. Not to mention multi stem drum tracks to allow proper level mixing !
I remember upsampling some RealTracks to 24/48 and BBWin would not load them but MacBB did, though I think that should be easily fixed.
If you buy any Tracks/Loops/Samples/Virtual Instruments they all come in 24 bit. Superior Drummer 3 has released their drum library on a 24bit 250gig hard drive.
With the low cost of hard drive storage these days you could have a 3-4T 24bit Audiophile drive.
16/44 is Red Book standard CD quality. This is sort of like the Monster Cable argument. No, the electrons do not move faster in a Monster cable...And no, nobody but a few savants listening in a perfect room using 100K worth of equipment can hear anything better than CD quality. Just the other day I read an article about blind testing a $75 DAC against a boutique $3,000 one. Result? Nobody could tell any difference. Again.
24 bit allows more headroom in a live recording which results in a better dynamic range but that's only useful in a studio with a good mixing engineer. How would that translate into higher quality sound in Biab compared to the current Audiophile CD quality wav's?
The best thing to do is keep it stuck in the past, limit it to your own limitations and understanding and expect others to come down to that level so you are comfortable. Don't dare look beyond. Don't dare want it for studio work, DVD or Surround mix.
The best thing to do is keep it stuck in the past, limit it to your own limitations and understanding and expect others to come down to that level so you are comfortable. Don't dare look beyond. Don't dare want it for studio work, DVD or Surround mix.
So true; wish i had my old Volvo 245 back; could fix anything myself, especially on the way to a gig. These days one needs computers to change a light bulb in the car to make it work. Down under it must be a Holden. F
The best thing to do is keep it stuck in the past, limit it to your own limitations and understanding and expect others to come down to that level so you are comfortable. Don't dare look beyond. Don't dare want it for studio work, DVD or Surround mix.
There is certainly truth in your comments and you go a long way in helping recording artists overcome the current limitations to produce or create projects easier and more efficiently with third party programs that boost the abilities of BIAB. But there has always been a past. History tells us that music is about creativity and not gear and recording formats. Without folks like you accentuating product limitations, we may very well be stuck further back in the past than we are today. However, creativity has always been king and creativity overrides format technology in most every case. Tracks are most often rejected for content quality and not format. Especially if a piece is difficult, expensive, untimely or impossible to replace. Would most producers, commercial or amateur, of a recording project reject a track from Joe Bonamassa if the track was restricted to 320 MP3 quality due to some contractual stipulation? Probably not.
From Wikipedia; Multitrack recording: " The process was conceived and developed by Ross Snyder at Ampex in 1955 resulting in the first Sel-Sync machine, an 8-track machine which used 1-inch tape. This 8-track recorder was sold to the American guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor Les Paul for $10,000." $10,000 in 1955 is equivalent in purchasing power to $94,193.66 in 2018.
Three track recorders were the most popular medium in the 1950's and early 1960's in commercial studios but they were not multitrack recorders, they had to record all three tracks at once. Such a limitation was overcome by innovators such as you and utilized many 'third party gear' solutions until economics and technology caught up.
In regards to what we do with home recording and BIAB and it's format quality, 1/4" magnetic tape is the past. Later, cassette based medium was the past. Millions of demos and home recordings were made using these mediums. Some made it into big time recordings.
"Don't dare want it for studio work, DVD or Surround mix." Literally thousands of hours of these inferior medium recordings made their way into mainstream, commercial recordings by some of the era's biggest recording studios and artists. My guess is that nothing has changed. Today's higher quality of inferior medium coupled with what recording engineers can do with the expensive, high quality tools they are proficient with, added with the fact that so many people now have fair to remarkable home recording equipment and skills to operate that equipment, have rendered the inferiority factor to a greatly diminished factor in the recording industry.
I don't totally agree with Bob's (Jazzmammal) assessment regarding 24 bit recording in commercial studios being a huge benefit to them. To me, the real professionals don't necessarily benefit as much as the inexperienced recordist or other low cost, lower quality recordings do from the higher quality formats. The commercial professionals have the skills, training, facilities, equipment and environment by default so they are normally working with better, cleaner tracks out of the gate than the average home recording artist. Conversely, they are also much better equipped to restore or adapt an inferior recording into a main stream project than we ever will be. In most respects, BIAB recorded RealTracks and the ability to programming these random audio pieces into customizable arrangements are the overriding benefit to the home recording BIAB customer more so than any other feature.
Saying all that, I do fully support the proposal to upgrading.
Band-in-a-Box® 2025 for Mac® users: Build 904 now available!
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We've packed Band-in-a-Box® 2026 with major new features, enhancements, and an incredible lineup of new content! The program now sports a sleek, modern GUI redesign across the entire interface, including updated toolbars, refreshed windows, smoother workflows, a new dark mode option, and more. The brand-new side toolbar provides quicker access to key windows, while the new Multi-View feature lets you arrange multiple windows as layered panels without overlap, creating a flexible, clutter-free workspace. We have an amazing new “AI-Notes” feature. This transcribes polyphonic audio into MIDI so you can view it in notation or play it back as MIDI. You can process an entire track (all pitched instruments and drums) or focus on individual parts like drums, bass, guitars/piano, or vocals. There's an amazing collection of new content too, including 202 RealTracks, new RealStyles, MIDI SuperTracks, Instrumental Studies, “Songs with Vocals” Artist Performance Sets, Playable RealTracks Set 5, two RealDrums Stems sets, XPro Styles PAK 10, Xtra Styles PAK 21, and much more!
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