Some of the new features and enhancements of 2019 and 2020 versions of BIAB were to revisit features and enhance techniques that have actually been available in the program for years. For years, BIAB has been capable of creating songs completely within the program that contain dozens of instruments and dozens of tracks. Each track in the BIAB mixer can interchange instruments and can have up to 10 instruments per channel. These tracks can either play back and forth alternately or play simultaneously. The new thickening feature offered in 2020 takes advantage of this feature. The tracks now have panning and volume so any loudness difference between the recorded audio of the different instruments can be leveled out.

PGMusic staff have developed more Medley RealTracks that showcase using multiple instruments on a track. There are many ways to trigger the instrument changes such as by part marker, number of bars and manually programming instrument changes at any bar.

Because the BIAB search engine reads ahead, it knows when an instrument change out is about to occur and intelligently selects endings for the first instrument and a beginning for the second instrument resulting in very smooth transitions. It is also not uncommon for the two instruments to overlap very realistically to how a live hand off between two instruments occurs in real life.

Using the Audio Channel and Performance Tracks make it quite easy to create sub-mixes or bounce tracks to free some of the Mixer's seven tracks to generate new tracks, new bounces allowing a single project to total of dozens of tracks from the seven that are visible. Because these bounces are digital, there's no degradation of the audio quality. Midi tracks and RealTracks and Performance tracks can be used together to create a sub mix. This also allows a single project to be made using dozens of different Styles.

Very complex, high quality songs can be constructed that are indistinguishable from a project where much of this type work is normally done in a DAW.

I've posted some songs on the User Showcase with around 14-15 different instruments and that have 15-17 tracks as well and completed the whole project in a single instance of BIAB.

I also make use of the Edit\Copy Special\Copy Move command to separate the channels of an imported Midi File which freezes the track and allows applying high quality HI-Q patches or VST patches to the midi track.

You may find some use from these somewhat hidden features and enhancements. I have a lot of fun and it can be interesting and challenging creating complex projects just using BIAB, no DAW, not even RB.

BIAB Ultra Pak+ 2024:RB 2024, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.