Hi oragndoc,

I have been looking at the same thing however as a guitar player I am trying to figure out if a foot pedal like the Behringer FBC1010 would work with the Conductor feature to do what you are talking about. I have just started reading up on this and would consider myself a Newbie in this area. I presently play in a full worship team at church so we do everything live but have a friend that is at a smaller church that is looking for an upgrade in the music department. The great thing about Midi or Audio files is that with some practice and using a click track you can add and subtract the musicians you need. i.e. you select the musicians you need. A couple of things based on your questions.

1. Using midi files - I have to agree with others here in that you rarely find well programmed midi files unless you are going to buy commercial files which I have found to be fairly expensive if you want to build a fairly large library. You can however import the files, detect the chords and then arrange the song using the BIAB styles. As Mac says you cannot always get it dead on but you can get close enough that the congregation probably won't appreciably notice the difference. One of the great things about BIAB is that I can do a song at it's original tempo which may fast and upbeat but then turn around and with a few clicks change it into a slower more meditative song.

2. Music you compose with BIAB is not a problem from a copyright perspective if it is original music. It is a concern if you are using others songs, like hymns which are not public domain and the newer worship songs. Most churches that are concerned with working within the law (hopefully all of them) use a service like CCLI to report the songs they play and use so that royalties can be appropriately collected and paid. Their link has quite a bit of information on it at http://www.ccli.com.

3. I would agree it would be nice if we could get a folder started with various worship songs that had been programmed in and share the wealth.

4. BIAB and Real Band both offer ways for you to combine audio. I am guessing the Conductor feature would still work even in that case, but as I said I am just starting to read up on this so their are others here more educated than I. Real Tracks are already real audio files.

For the price Band in a Box is going to get you closest to what you want from my research. There are things like Ableton live but you are going to spend more $$ and the learning curve appears to be higher to me though I do not have first hand experience. Their is a company called Interactive Worship which is using Ableton live as its base and selling current audio worship tracks to use with their software if you want to check that out. Again it is going to be more expensive and somewhat limited to the songs they produce.

Anyway probably more than you wanted to know but hopefully this is helpful.

Best to you!

TerryB

TerryB

Windows 10, Dell 8700 XPS i7, 12MB Ram.