Hi, I had posted earlier that RealBand 2016 version 7 and version 10 were aborting on me. I can't find that post so here is the final result of that post.

My Ratings:
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Band In A Box 2016.
Love this program. 10 out of 10. A Keeper. Will upgrade if great new jazz related realtracks are introduced or maybe great new features.
RealBand 2016.
I have stopped using this program except maybe for creating an acid loop but I very rarely will do this. For this last reason I will give it a 3 out of 10. To many aborts for me. Details below.
Audacity latest version as of 2019.
I have replaced RealBand with this program. Love Audacity. Does everything I need extremely fast/well. Never seems to abort.

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So I did a mix session for our jams. I did the first 3 mixes with RealBand. Lots of aborts. The 4th song was too much for me. I would say the total hours lost due to aborts was about 6. I decided to try Audacity. It took me about 4 hours to learn everything I needed to know. I finished the remaining 11 mix downs with zero aborts. In fact I learned to trust it so much that at the end I didn't do any interim saves. Audacity is clearly all I am likely to ever need. This experience with RealBand reminds me of the survey question the MultiCharts people put out on their forum. 'What is the most important feature you look for in our software". Every single answer was reliability. One last thing about RealBand. I had upgrade to version 10 of 2016. It seems that the aborts roll it back to version 7. Almost forgot. I am using Windows 7 service pack 1 on 3 machines. I have no other programs giving me any issues on any of the machines and I run a lot of software. I may have stopped using software before that was too buggy but not to often. I just remembered Version 3 of Multicharts had serious bug issues so I rolled back to version 2.9 for a couple of years then finally got the nerve to upgrade to version 8. It was fine. I am now on version 11 of MultiCharts. It has not aborted on me yet. The thing about Multicharts that is different than RealBand is that no other software is as good as as MultiCharts within its category. The main point is if your software is not not the best in its category you need to have your software running 100% bug free for users like myself (I don't do beta). I would recommend programming that stores a history of the abort somehow and when the abort is the first of a type force the dump to be saved to disk and somehow in the background (so it does not bother the user) ship it to your programming team for investigation. In addition to this make sure the user is contacted when you are sure the fix is in place (you need to make sure they know you fixed it). Automate this and make sure the user's know of this procedure (especially the ones who get an abort). Of course some aborts just lock up. I guess with those ones you just have to use in house testers and beta testers who are trained on how to get the info you need to you. The MultiCharts people use to have 5 dedicated testers (I do not know the current number). Some software vendors have 3 versions out there (totally reliable in that it never aborts, a bit risky, beta). Interactive Broker's Traders Workstation is like this. I have used only the totally reliable and I have never had an abort ever since 2007 when I first started using it.

John


Last edited by bowlesj; 05/02/19 03:32 AM.
John Bowles
My playing in my 20s:
https://www.reverbnation.com/johnbowles