If you're familiar with arranger keyboards I totally understand where you're coming from. I have a Korg Pa1xPro the first generation of their Pro series. I would love to have the new Pa4X but it's expensive.

That's the reason I got into Biab in the first place to get similar functionality as an arranger in software that was affordable. Of course the big difference is Biab is not real time and you are not controlling it as the song is playing, everything has to be set up ahead of time then generated.

To your questions I still think Real Band is better suited to what you're trying to do than Biab is but Biab can work too. I just like using a DAW for this because as you mentioned a DAW is linear, you can see everything as tracks.

Just one example, you talked about wanting to revert back to whatever you had set up earlier in a song. RB does that easily and you don't have to render everything to audio to do it either. RB has the Bar's Window where you simply highlight with your mouse entire chunks of your song and move them anywhere you want including both midi and audio.

If you used Style A at Bar 4 for 4 bars then used Style B for 8 bars then Style C for 4 bars and want to go back to Style A you simply highlight the Style A 4 bars section and paste them anywhere you want. Your song could have 12 styles in it and you can cut/paste any of them anywhere. You're not limited to styles either, you can mix and match any one instrument from any style both midi and RT's. Or you found something on the internet that would make a great intro so you can download and import that if you wanted. If it needs some audio editing or triming to make it fit, no problem RB is a very good audio editor.

I'm not going to explain RB in detail here, you can learn about that program by reading and posting questions on the Real Band forum. I've always said that newbies to these programs should spend an equal amount of time on both because only then will you learn what each one can do for you. They're related programs with similar functionality yet completely different.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.