I may be off base here, but I'll say it anyway. So, I've been following this thread and it does seem to me to that it's comparing apples to oranges.

As has been said, when BIAB generates a song, it starts playback shortly after generating the beginning of the tracks, and then keeps generating the rest of the song in the background while the song is playing. So, while it may seem to only take 6 or 7 seconds, that is just to have enough generated to start playback, but because BIAB will continue generating the rest of the RealTracks in the background, it's not enough to have fully formed tracks from beginning to end in that 6 second time period. Unfortunately, you don't see how long it actually takes BIAB to generate the track completely; you only see how long it takes until playback starts. When RT's first came out, you actually had to wait for all the tracks to be generated before playback happened. Then they figured out how to start playback before the tracks were generated, but that only reduced the time to start hearing the playback, but the tracks kept generating in the background.

Try regenerating a song in BIAB with a bunch of RealTracks and then immediately try to play on the last few bars of the song and see how long it takes to hear it play. BIAB has to generate all the tracks to that point to be able to hear it.

Given that the process of the plugin is to drag a track from the plugin into your DAW, even if you could hear playback happening more quickly (which is probably doable), you still can't drag in a track that hasn't been fully generated yet.

I'm not saying it can't be done faster (perhaps in memory), but you have to consider what is happening under the hood. I agree that if RT's could be cached into memory and processed there (as Pipeline has suggested), it would be a lot faster; that could even be applied to the main BIAB program, not the jut plugin (or the RealBand interface to the BIAB features). Maybe when you select a style file, it should just automatically load that content into memory (after checking for enough memory to do so) and process it there. Given that even though the files are WMA, BIAB processes them as WAVs, that means a 3 minute song with 5 tracks at 10 MB/min would only mean loading 150MB into memory, which should be pretty fast. And then it's there until you change styles or load a different RT or RD.
If memory was not available, then do it off the hard drive as it does now.

But to compare generation times for entire tracks versus just the ability to hear the beginning of the song playing is still apples to oranges.

Flaming can start now, if you wish. Doesn't bother me.

John

Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 2x2TB, 1x4TB SSD
Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 2x1.5TB, 2x2TB, 1x4TB SATA

BB2025/UMC404HD/Casios/Cakewalk/Reaper/Studio One/MixBus/Notion/Finale/Dorico/Noteworthy/NI/Halion/IK

http://www.sus4chord.com