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

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