24. How can I save my Band-in-a-Box® songs as MIDI or Audio files, and import them into other applications or burn an Audio CD?

You can save your Band-in-a-Box® song in a number of different formats for use with other programs, emailing to a friend, uploading to the web, burning a CD, etc.

Saving as a MIDI file.

You can create a standard MIDI file from your song, which can be imported into a sequencer or any other program that can read standard type 1 MIDI files. Click the .MID button on the main screen of Band-in-a-Box®. This will give you the option to either save the file on disk, or to the clipboard. If you choose 'file on disk', this will bring up the'File Save' dialog. Choose the location you want the MIDI file saved to and then hit the save button.

Saving as an Audio file.

Band-in-a-Box® 2009 (and higher) have the capability of rendering your Band-in-a-Box® songs to audio files. You can render your song as AIFF (uncompressed audio - lossless), M4A (compressed audio - lossy but much smaller than AIFF), or WAV (uncompressed audio - lossless, Windows format). In addition, you can render a full mix of your song, just RealTracks, just MIDI tracks, or individual tracks. To do this, simply click the Audio button on the main toolbar in Band-in-a-Box®, select the options you want, and press the [Render] button. Another method of rendering individual tracks to audio, is to control-click on the track in the instrument panel at the top of the screen, and select 'Save track as AIFF'.

By default, the rendered audio files are saved within the /Applications/Band-in-a-Box®/Song Renders/ folder. A subfolder will be created in th Song Renders folder, called MySongName_RenderFolder. This subfolder contains all of the audio files associated with your song. There may only be one file, such as if you render a full mix, or there may be multiple files, such as if you render one audio file per track..

If you will be working in GarageBand, there is some additional information in our GarageBand tutorial.

If you want to create an audio CD, you can use a few different applications. One example is iTunes. To burn a CD with iTunes, create a new Playlist, drag your songs onto it, then click the Burn Disc button at the bottom of the window. Note that because specific iTunes features tend to change when new versions are released, these are only intended as general instructions.

Which Output format should I use?

You may be wondering whether you should save as AIFF, M4A, or WAV. When your plan is to work on an audio file in another program (for example GarageBand), or if you your intent is to burn the file to make an audio CD, it is normally best to save as uncompressed AIFF. This file type is much larger than M4A, being an uncompressed audio format. You will probably not be able to hear the difference between M4A and AIFF, but there *is* some degredation in sound quality. In addition, the file would need to be uncompressed to AIFF in order to be edited in another program, and if you keep uncompressing and compressing the file you will be degrading the sound quality each time, since going from M4A to AIFF does not increase the sound quality.

Save as M4A when you know the resulting audio file will be the finished product - the small filesize will make it convenient for many things, for example saving on an iPod, uploading to the web, or emailing as an attachment.

WAV is another type of uncompressed audio format. It's similar to AIFF but is the format most commonly used on Windows computers. If the file will be used on a Windows computer, it is probably best to save it as a .WAV file.

You can choose between a Stereo or Mono audio file, or "auto channels" (usually the best). The significance of the "Auto channels" setting is that some RealTracks instruments are originally mono (for example Sax soloists), and some are originally stereo (for example, Acoustic guitar strumming). This setting preserves the stereo/mono nature of the original RealTracks/Drums recordings.


Alyssa - PG Music