PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows An idea to fix the dreaded "255 bar limit"

The very first song I tried to use with BiaB after I purchased the program back in December is a 9-minute long ballad that I wrote in January 2013. It consists of an intro, three 12-line verses, a 5-line chorus that is repeated three times, a short musical interlude after each chorus, and a 2-line tag at the end. All of these sections combined total 327 bars. After I opened the .XML file that I had created in MuseScore and started listening to a newly-created arrangement in BiaB, I discovered that all of the bars past the 255 mark were blacked out. That's when I first encountered this limit and had to do some research to find out more about it. So then I tried to figure out how to create repeats for the verses, chorus, and interlude to get around this limitation but eventually gave up because of the complications I kept running into. And as a brand new user of the program, I didn't want to get bogged down with such complications on my first attempt to use the program. So, I moved on to another song that didn't have more than 255 bars.

Then in February, I started to use BiaB for a 7+ minute acoustic/rock/symphonic ballad that will be the title track for an album that I'm working on with a local producer. Because I was already aware of this limitation and the challenges involved in setting up the repeat function (which I'm still not sure would prevent the 255 bar limit from being exceeded), I simply created a .XML file that only had one verse and one chorus before the bridge. Then I created a .WAV file of the arrangement, which I imported into Tracktion (a program I was already familiar with from using it in the past on other songs) where I constructed a full-length version of the song and exported that to a .WAV file.

If I just wanted to create a single demo of this song for myself or to share with others, I would have been mostly done at this point. But this wasn't the case because I intended to share this song with my producer as my next song for him to arrange and produce for me. Plus, this would be the first time that I used BiaB to create a fully-arranged demo of one of my songs before I shared it with him. In the past, I simply gave him a video of the lead sheet so that he could play the song on his guitar from the lead sheet as the melody was being played in the video on his computer. As has been the case with every song I've given him to produce, he always finds things in the song that need to be tweaked, changed, or even rewritten to make it fully ready for him to produce. The "pre-production preparation process" for this particular song lasted 5-6 weeks during which I went back and forth to his studio about ten times with new demo versions of the song that contained necessary and/or desired modifications---some of which I came up with on my own. And every one of these new demo versions required me to go through the same process I described above along with the additional step of importing the .WAV file of the full-length version of BiaB's arrangement of a new .XML file from MuseScore (that I pieced together in Traction) into another program (ActivePresenter) that I used to create a video of the lead sheet as the melody is being played in MuseScore.

But this doesn't even tell the full story of what I went through before I was able to create the final full-length demo version of this song for my producer. There was one week in particular during which I spent at least 30 hours repeating the above process numerous times because I wanted to provide my producer with several different options for him to consider (one with two different tempos, another with and without a key change for the final chorus, and another with and without a capo on the second fret). I also had to start over twice with the entire process for all of these options because I discovered when I was listening to the final demos that I needed another measure in one or two places in order to make sure that the down beat of the drum track didn't switch during a subsequent line. If I wouldn't have had to construct a full-length version of BiaB's arrangement for each of these options in Traction because of the "255 bar limit" I doubt that I would have spent more than ten or perhaps fifteen hours at the most creating these demo files during that week. It is primarily because of what I went through with this particular song that I felt motivated, or rather, compelled to post my idea to fix this limitation.