Hi Andrew,

Quote:
There are various ways that you can end up with STY's in your installation that call for RealTracks that you don't have. One option is to substitute similar RealTracks that you DO have ("Find best sub"). Another is to not use those styles and set "don't show styles with N/A RealTracks" in the StylePicker.


If I use the don't show styles with N/A RealTracks I don't get ANY styles with my new #299 add-on set. All the styles in the set are missing tracks so this makes my purchase useless if I try to use it in this way.

As already pointed out in a prior post, I already tried your other suggestion of substituting similar RealTracks with and without the "Find best sub" option. There were two problems.

In a number of cases the "Find best sub" option turned up zero examples of suitable substitutes and in most cases the number of suitable options was very limited.

Compared to the demo examples, all the styles in the original new #299 add-on set sounded decidedly thin as would be expected from styles with many missing or muted tracks. After spending quite a few hours attempting to substitute existing tracks the results ranged from disappointing to absolutely horrible.

Obviously I don't have the skills to do this effectively but I think the problem was compounded by the lack of suitable RealTracks in my Mega 2019 installation. I expect that this situation would be even worse with a lower level or older version of Biab.

I am pleased to hear that you intend to add information to the web site to warn others of this situation. Had this information been available to me at the time of purchase I am quite sure that I would not have proceeded down this torturous and time consuming path.

While I have been using Biab for many years, I am an unsophisticated user of this product. I tend to simply select and use styles "as is". I suspect that this applies to a fairly high percentage of Biab users. At the time of purchasing this add-on set, I firmly believed that I was buying five new styles that would perform in the same way as the existing RealStyles do in my current version of Biab.

Even with the benefit of hindsight I maintain that these expectations were reasonable and realistic based on the information provided at the time by the PG Music website.

I have recently been in contact with PG Music support and requested a refund on my purchase of the ill-fated #299 add-on set. I intend to purchase an upgrade to UltraPak. This appears to be the only viable way that I can achieve my objectives of getting additional RealTrack styles that work properly at a realistic price.

Regards
Tim