PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB totally unusable (frustration mode ON) [Resolved]

Hi,

I'm so frustrated right now !!

1ST ISSUE

Each time I make any change, just as tiny as renaming a chord, BIAB takes 20 secs to load the change. It doesn't matter if I press the "play" or "play+" (regenerate), the waiting time is the same. It has reached a point where you don't want to touch anything because you're gonna have to wait 20 secs to play the tune.

Thought it would be faster.

And I'm only speaking about a basic Christmas song in 4/4. I can't imagine how tedious if will be when I start to input some jazz fusion stuff.

So basically each time I make a change (renaming a chord, adding a chord), the little windows blue circle appear and I have to wait for BIAB to reload up to 100% so that I can hear the result. This is when I'm lucky. If I'm not lucky then after pressing play the screen is kind of frozen with "windows is not responding" at the top of my browser, then the screen goes white for 2 secs then it comes back and after a few seconds BIAB keeps on loading and when it's done I can hear the result.

In a nutshelle my BIAB is totally unusable. I'm so frustrated right now!

2ND ISSUE :

I open a saved song, it loads and open and I have the chords. Then I press Play or spacebar. You would think that the song is going to start since it loaded the song, right ? NOPE! BIAB has to LOAD again and here I am waiting for another 15 to 20 seconds.

As much as I want to love BIAB if I find no solution I will have to return it.


EDIT : running Windows 10 familly, AMD A8 64D APU with 8Gig or Ram. Running BIAB 64bits.

Sorry to hear of your frustration.

Help is possibly at hand.

The AMD processor is probably not extremely high-performance, but should be OK.

Firstly, once you have Generated a song, you can freeze the tracks. Next time you play, BiaB will not regenerate, but simply start playing. This should be in the order of a few seconds delay only. You can feeze by slicking the '*' on the mixer, or from the Play menu.

Secondly, there is an option to Speed-up Generation of RealTracks. If this is unchecked, then the generation time may be slower. Options > Preferences > RealTracks

Note also, that in some cases BiaB has no choice but to regenerate (e.g. if you change a chord).

Hi,

I might be wrong but as I read through your above post, I found myself wondering if maybe the frustration you are experiencing is due to not understanding how BIAB creates its backings.

As an aside, do you have the latest build of BIAB installed? If you have a look under "Help" and click on on "About Band In A Box", the build is found in brackets following the version. For example, my BIAB presently says 2020(709) -- this is saying that I have BIAB 2020 and build #709. If you don't have build 709, go to the following link, download it and manually install it.

https://www.pgmusic.com/support_windowsupdates.htm


Rightly or wrongly, I get the impression that you are anticipating instantaneous playback.

If this is the goal, it is necessary to load a MIDI-only style. These styles will take a second or two to generate and playback is almost immediate.

To isolate the MIDI-only styles...

1. Enter Stylepicker

2. Follow the numbers from 1 to 4 on the below image.

Now to get BIAB to play MIDI-only styles (the instruments for MIDI tracks are written in yellow in the mixer), it is most likely necessary to disable auto-substitution of Realstyles.

To do this...

3. right-click on the chordsheet

4. select "Song Settings"

5. disable the option "Allow Style Aliases" -- it's in the right column of options.

Advance warning...

When you play MIDI-only styles, you will hear that they sound much less realistic because the computer's synthesiser system is being used. The quality of MIDI sounds depends totally on the quality of the synthesiser used and most inbuilt computer systems are functional rather than high quality.


Now for Realtracks.... (these are written in green in the mixer)

Realtracks are audio files of real instruments. Musicians have been paid by PG Music to play accompaniment patterns in multiple keys and with multiple chords. PG Music then map these chords in the audio file.

When a chordsheet is generated in BIAB, programming scans through the audio files being used and copies and stitches together the sections needed to create the given chord progression. Because this is happening with audio, the process requires time. It is not instantaneous. Generally, a 10 - 15 second wait does not seem unrealistic to me. This waiting time depends on the speed of the computer.

For example: I have a very fast computer right now and it takes about 5 seconds to generate a song. On my previous computer, which was much slower, it used to take around 20 seconds.

Every time a chord is changed on the chordsheet, BIAB needs to regenerate the song.

When I'm in the early stages of putting a song together, I use MIDI to determine the chord progression. When that's done, I then move to Realtracks and Realstyles for realism.

Hope this helps,
Noel

The other thing that I have done on my computer is to stop my anti-virus software from checking the \bb folder and all its subfolders.

I found that because the anti-virus program scanned everything every time it changed, adding \bb as an exclusion helped.

I concur.

Yes, I am not aware that there is any statement that BiaB provides instantaneous arrangements, but what it does and the way it delivers this is far beyond the way other products work.

Do try to understand how it produces backings, using RealTracks from live studio recordings, and that a reasonably good CPU processor power is required to deliver this faster than a slower processor can.

Then I think you will be able to recognize the true capabilities that nothing else can comparably offer.

Thank you all, you all proved once again why this community is so great.

I have the latest update and the box to speed the RT was already checked.

Disabling my 2 antivirus from scanning the bb helped a bit. Something else did help : factory reset BIAB. Can't say why but it appears to be a bit faster.

I understand that things can't be instantaneous especially since I'm using RTs only. There is still some annoyances which I don't understand why they are there, for instance :

- as I said I load a song and press the space bar : I have to wait 10 secs for the song to play.

- I loaded a song, pressed the space bar, had to wait and the song plays. If I stop the play and space bar elsewhere : it STILL has to regenerates and THIS dear gents is something that I don't understand and frustrates the heck out of me since BIAB had to regenerate the first time after loading the song when I pressed play, so why take another 6 to 10 secs to regenerate again if I play from another bar ? I have to play a couple of times from others bars for BIAB to finally play instantaneously afterwards whereever I start the song.

When BIAB regenerates I have this blue window circle spinning and on top of the screen is written "doesn't respond" (like when your browser freezes for a few secs). If I do nothing it unfreezes and then regenerates ; if I click on the mouse then my screen goes white for a few secs and then it regenerates. All this takes usually 15 good seconds each time.

It adds up especially when you are constantly trying new styles, new arrangement, you constantly have to press the Play button and 15 secs here, 10 there, 20 secs sometimes here can turn into a good hour of just waiting. Waiting each time 10 to 20 seconds just because you changed a G chord into a F doesnt make sense to me, it's not like going from 4/4 to 3/4 rythm. Something like that is so basic that it shouldn't take that long.

I don't use MIDI because to me they don't sound good (but this is for another topic). Now maybe with an Intel i7 + 16gig of Ram things would be faster, I don't know.

Anyway as I said disabling the anti viruses AND factory reset improved a bit the problems and is "almost" ok. I will keep an eye on it and eventually if things get bad again I will post a video here so that people can really see in real time that what I experience seems to be a bit more tedious than what you do experience.

Thanks all, this is a great community!

Hi, just out of interest are you running from an SSD or 'normal' hard disk?

P.

Angelomusic,

What happens if you generate a song and then freeze all the tracks, then press Play? Do you still have an equally long wait (10 - 20 seconds), or is it less?

If so, I think the issue is possibly with the speed of your computer, not the capabilities of the program itself.

If you want to start the song somewhere in the middle, I suggest double-clicking on that bar rather than click on the bar and then press the space bar. (This is my usual plan of attack.)

Regards,
Noel

A couple more things to try would be to disable your Network card in the device manager. This stops all software from phoning home. Second if you are running any anti-malware programs turn them off also.

Is anything else running in the background? Maybe WiFi or BlueTooth? Anything running can cause slowdowns as your CPU is divided in tasks it must perform.

It has been asked if you are using an internal or external HD. If you are not using SSD what are your "normal" HDs speeds? A 5400 RPM HD is a lot slower that a 7200 RPM HD.

Lastly you are running two anti-virus programs? Everything that I had read says this is a no no. You may want to select only one.

The space bar resume play problem is not normal, nor is the blue spinning circle. Tell us specifics about your computer and especially the disk drive with the RealTracks.

Run the utility Geekbench 4 and tell us the single core score.

Yep - my PC runs an AMD chip. It isnt the fastest horse in the stable but it does the job.
OK - so I have wait a a few seconds for it to reload each time I make a change but whats the hurry??
Why does everything these days have to be INSTANT, NOW ,IMMEDIATELY, AT ONCE!!?? Sheesh!
It ISN'T 'unusable' and if you feel that way call the PG and get your money back pronto and go find anything better - and of course, FASTER.
Ian

This is all about your computer. I tried looking up up AMD A8 64D and it's not listed. You have to be accurate with descriptions or we can't help you. I did see that there is a very long list of various AMD A8 processors going back to 2011. That means it's not AMD's newer line of Ryzen chips that came out a few years ago.

As for starting playback then quickly stopping and starting again at another bar. When you check the Fast Generation box you're telling Biab you have a fast system that can handle it. I'm 99% certain you don't. Whats happeneng with that box checked is Biab starts playback before it's finished generating meaning the song is playung but it's still generating in the background. If you stop playback in the first few bars you interrupted that process then if you start again quickly Biab has to stop the generation process then start over so it looks like it's not responding.

Yes, an i7 with 16 gigs of RAM makes all the difference. That's what I'm running but it's not the latest, it's about 5 years old now. Although a current 8th gen i5 is pretty strong too.

An SSD is critical as well. The only new systems running a spinning hard drive now are the cheapies.

Midi is completely dependent on what synth you have. The good ones start at several hundred bucks going up to thousands. PG gives us the free Coyote Wavetable and Sfzorndo just so we can hear some sound with a midi style but the quality is not the best. You can load better soundbanks into Sfzorndo but that's another discussion.

Bob

Yes, as you mentioned, MIDI sound is a topic for another thread. It certainly has no bearing on your current problem. BIAB with all MIDI tracks would run great on the worst of computers.

Whenever I hear someone complaining about the wait time I have to chuckle to myself. When I first started using computers I had to use tape for program loading and saving data. That sometimes meant waiting 20 minutes for a program to load, praying that you didn't get that horrible error at the 19th minute. That meant you had to start loading the program all over again.

I can wait a few minutes or seconds now!

My first computer programming used punched cards, and if you gave the deck to the computer center operator on Thursday, he or she would tell you to come back for the results Tuesday.

And ten years later, I had a computer with cassette drive storage, too.

My wife started as a key punch operator in Brockport Suny college. Four years later she was a supervisor there. At that time she was light-years ahead of me when it came to computers.

Again, thanks all for all your answers, you are all very nice with the newb that I am I'm going to respond collectively.

My DD is 7200rpm so should be good there. But unfortunately it is no a ssd.. Question : if I get a usb SSD external drive connected to my pc and put all the RTs on that ssd drive, will it be faster even if it is an external one ?

Thanks for suggesting to check what's running in the background, I disabled some stuff automatically running at startup and got rid of 1 of my 2 antivirus.

Yes the AMD is not the best I presume (tbh this is my wife's computer that she's not using anymore so it is handy for me to use it instead of buying a i7 based new one, but it comes at a price : the speed).

There are a couple of comments here implyging that I want everything delivered immediately. I never said that. What is annoying is to have to wait 30 to 40 secs (I checked my chrono) for each single change. If you have a couple that's fine, but if you test RTs and arrangements and end with many changes it becomes difficult not to get annoyed. To all those who only have to wait 5 to 10 secs I'm sure you will understand.

Now clearly it appears that the issue is more CPU based.

Here is the CPU benchmark result (dunno if the GPU test is useful I only did the CPU one) : https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15085526

I will definitely double click on the bar (thanks for the tip)

So I tried the "freezing tracks" tip and compare the waiting time. Each time I opened a song, made a change and generated it
- without freezing all the tracks : 25-27 seconds
- when freezing all the tracks : 10,8 secs

Now the song has been generated but I stop it before it starts and want to start on another bar :
- without freezing : 9,3 seconds inspite of the song having been generated already (for the 1st time I try randomly, after that it's ok)
-when freezing all the tracks : 1,4 sec

So I guess that this proves that the CPU is the guilty one ?
Now I wonder if I can upgrade the cpu on my motherboard since this is a HP 2 in 1. But oh well this is not a computer forums so I won't bother you with that, I will figure out.

That being said I don't see the point of freezing (please don't scream ). I mean if I freeze all tracks, I can't add any more chords (they won't play) or any new RT (here it's even worse BIAB bugs but I'll keep that for another post). So I presume that freezing tracks is recommended when I "just" want to avoid waiting for a song to play ? Sorry for the noob question.

Your Geekbench score indicates your CPU is likely below what is recommended for BIAB. While no minimum score has been explicitly stated, a discussion about two years ago recommended a score around 1500 minimum for you to be pleased with the performance. A lot of people seem to underestimate how powerful a program this is and how much it uses computer resources. BIAB will work for you, but slowly.

An SSD drive running over USB (even 3.0) is severely crippled, limited to the USB transfer rate that is generally lower than an internal SATA traditional hard drive.

Granted, this is extreme, but my BIAB program is on an internal SSD drive and my RealTracks and RealDrums are on an internal 10,000 rpm hard drive.
However, because my CPU is also fast, BIAB runs satisfactorily from the supplied PG Music USB drive. The CPU speed is easily more important to BIAB than the storage device speed.