Hi Jim

If you think about it, whatever styles are included almost have to use materials outside the set. If you look at set# 299, where are the drums or bass?

I guess the problem is that I didn't think about it enough at the time. I just assumed that you would download and install the set and automatically (in this case) get five new styles with similar characteristics to the accompanying demos on the web site.

There is a highlighted requirement message in red at the top of each set. For the #299 set it says Note: This RealTracks Set requires Band-in-a-Box® 2018 for Windows or higher. Nowhere can I see that it says anything about the fact that a set will require additional instruments that may not exist on a users current system. In my case a total of 15 instruments were missing. For the price of $US29 for a set it seemed to me reasonable to expect that the set would contain all that was needed to make it work properly and as demonstrated.

When you buy a car you expect it to come with 4 wheels and some sort of spare. If you bought a car and it was delivered with only two wheels and you were told that the other two were expensive extras that had to be purchased the dealer would be in serious legal trouble.

While it could be claimed that I didn't think enough about it, I make no pretensions to be a BIAB expert. I believe I did assess PGMusic's offer as a "reasonable and typical user of the product". It is my opinion that the way these RealTrack set products are promoted on the web site is highly misleading. At the very least there should be a prominent warning that they are incomplete and will require additional real instruments with perhaps a list of what those instruments are.

Thinking about it further, one could reasonably ask what is the purpose of offering these incomplete RealTrack sets at all ( I am assuming that other sets have the same problems).

Purchasing additional sets to provide the additional instruments appears to not be economically viable and there would also be the problem of determining in advance what other sets or instruments are required. If an upgrade provides all the sets and these individual sets don't work properly on the lower level systems, then what is the point in selling them?

I also attempted to supply missing instruments to the new styles from existing RealTrack instruments that are already on my system. The results were unsatisfactory. There simply isn't enough choice from those available from my 2019 Mega system. There is also a significant amount of skill required to select tracks that sound good when combined with others.

As an aside, I attempted to use the Style Editor to alter things like genre and description in my modified styles. I haven't attempted to use this editor for many years but found it about as user friendly as a cornered rat. It continuously crashed when I tried to edit fields and frequently failed to update fields when i tried to save them. I eventually managed to figure out how to do it but not without a lot of frustration and angst. I don't imagine many BIAB users would use this facility but it appears to me to need a major overhaul to make it more stable and work in a more intuitive way.

I think we all agree now that the easiest and really only viable way to get additional Real Styles is to upgrade to a higher level system. I have a support call lodged with PGMusic from last week on this matter to which I have yet to receive a reply. I will give them a few more days and contact them again and try and negotiate a reasonable deal.

Thanks everyone for your constructive input.

Regards
Tim