Q. << I have placed a style change midway through a song and the change isn't taking effect. Help please. I'm clearly not getting something right. >>

Reply. What styles did you start with and change to? We can test.

A. I started with _COLDRO Honky Tonk style and wanted to change to Bowey3 style. Aaaaaagggghhh . . . it's driving me mad.
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The Problem: BiaB doesn't allow a a bar settings Style change using mix of RealTracks and MIDI in the same song.

_COLDR is a RealTracks style, Bowey3 is a MIDI style. Because substitute RealDrums is on, the MIDI drums in Bowey3 have been replaced with RealDrums, so the drums keep playing.

Unfortunately, you can't mix and match RealStyles with MIDI styles or with Super MIDI tracks.

You can go Real-to-Real or MIDI-to-MIDI at the track level, but not MIDI-to-Real or Real-TO-MIDI.

This was recently discussed in another thread and Andrew from PGMusic gave a nice explanation about it.
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Finally --- The Right Question: Any other ideas/suggestions?

So, what does one do if they really, really want to mix and match RealStyles with MIDI styles or with Super MIDI tracks using Band in a Box?

It's true that BIAB doesn't mix RealStyles with Midi Styles but both type styles will work with an Audio or Performance Track.

Render one style (either style will do) to audio and import it back into your BIAB project onto the Audio Channel. Sync the audio track to Bar 1 if necessary and then use Bar Settings to mute/unmute the tracks between the current style and the audio track.

I compiled One Chorus of a 32 bar song this morning and loaded the _COLDRO Honky Tonk style and rendered the style to a WAV file. I wanted to have both the _COLDRO RealStyle and the Bowey3 MIDI Style to play a portion of the song together so I used Bar Settings to render all of the _COLDRO RealTracks for the first 16 bars and from Bar 17 to the end of the song at Bar 32, to mute all the tracks except having the RealDrums and RealTrack Bass continue to play. That provided me with 16 bars of all the RealTracks and 16 bars of only RealDrums and RealTrack Bass.

I imported the saved _COLDRO.STY WAV file onto the Audio Track and confirmed it was synced with Bar 1. *Care must be taken here to use the Audio Import command from the AUDIO Menu at the top of the screen rather than the Open File command. The Open command will prompt to save the current song and reset your project to a New Project.

Then I selected and replaced _COLDRO.STY with BOWEY3.STY

In Bar Settings I Muted All Instruments and reset the Audio Channel back to Normal. These settings will play just the Audio Track, muting all of the current MIDI style tracks.

At Bar 17 from Bar Settings I set All Instruments to Back To Normal. This setting turns on all the current Bowey3 MIDI Style except for the Muted Drums and Bass Tracks in the Mixer.

The final result:

Bars 1-16 will play only the _COLDRO.STY audio render. From Bar 17 until the end of the song, Bowey3 MIDI Style will play along with the Audio Track RealDrums and RealTrack Bass from the _COLDRO.STY.

BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.