PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Ideal Build-Your-Own DAW for BiaB 2019?n n

Time for an update on all this. Yesterday I finally got through to PGM's tech support and had almost an hour long discussion with one of their techs. He kept focusing in on my Delta 66 card as being the likely culprit for the playback noise. Even though my card remains very capable with its 24/96k sampling abilities, he explained that the architecture is very dated and that even the RealTek chip on my motherboard will handle playback better. I wonder if he'd still have that opinion if I were to tell him that the motherboard in this system is 10 years old. But, like the Delta card, it remains very capable. This isn't a slow system at all.

So anyway, he wanted me to configure Windows so that the RealTek chip was the default for playback, but an interesting thing has happened to my system. The monitor I'm currently using is an LG Ultrawide with HDMI connections only. So I had to buy a video card for it. The card I bought was a standard sort of card with decent video performance. It has an NVidea chip that handles the HDMI audio. Now, apparently, when I installed this card, the RealTek chip was removed from the selection possibilities in the Windows Sound panel. I checked with the Device Manager and it shows the RealTek as still being active, however, but there doesn't appear to be a way to get to it anymore. It's place is taken up now by the NVidea chip's sound driver. Until today, I was assuming that I didn't have any way to access the NVidea's audio. My monitor doesn't have built-in speakers, but just today I discovered that it has a headphones out jack. So I went back to the Windows Sound panel and made sure that NVidia was selected as the default for playback, then I fired up BiaB and loaded in a song with five RealTracks. And, guess what. It sounds even worse coming through that headphone jack, mostly because the fidelity through that headphone jack isn't all that great. So, so much for blaming it on my Delta card!

Yesterday, I explained to him that I wasn't having this problem with v2017, and his reply was "Apples and oranges," meaning I can't compare the two versions. Apparently, even though 2019 resembles 2017, the core of the program has been completely rewritten. I asked if PGM had heavily optimized BiaB for Win10 and he said, absolutely not, and that they have users who still have XP who are using v2019. I also asked him if he had any idea why BiaB straightens up and behaves occasionally. I told him that, when it behaves, I can have two browsers open with many tabs open, and I can be playing a file with five RealTracks and I won't be getting any audio problems at all. He didn't have any explanation for that either.

So, at least I'm not at the impasse I was just a little while ago, where I couldn't figure out how to get sound from the NVidia, but now that I have, I've disproved the tech's assertions that the Delta was the culprit.

One more observation: I just installed build 622. It seems like, with each successive build, this distortion problem is getting worse. So whatever PGM is doing to BiaB, they're really screwing it up for me. Unless I can get this straightened out, I'm sad to say that this will be the last time I upgrade Band in a Box, unless something significant changes on this end (like a new motherboard/processor, for example), such that it might warrant giving it another try.