I agree with Notes there's certainly more than one way to create quality music with BIAB and everyone needs to determine the work flow and tools that work best for them.

I straddle the fence between MIDI and audio and use both for their particular strengths they bring to a BIAB song. Edited MIDI files can and do make songs better and audio can really close the gap to making a song sound realistic and commercially viable. Nearly every song can benefit by containing both elements.

There are multiple ways to add song specific licks and kicks using audio, change chord inversions and then use MIDI to make the song play notes in chords and other things that BIAB doesn't play or MIDI is the better choice over using audio.

I believe that over time, MIDI is now only tens or a hundred times more editable than audio. Band in a Box has sufficient audio editing tools to complete many audio editing and arranging tasks that most users normally and unnecessarily export out to a DAW to do. But it's super easy to transfer BIAB tracks when the DAW is the best editing, arranging and production tool. But often, it's more beneficial to edit from BIAB rather than a DAW so features and tools that are exclusive to BIAB can be accessed and utilized. Techniques like programming the Chord Chart to see and anticipate instrument changes, panning and volume automation, muting and unmuting tracks, smooth transitions, fade ins and fade outs are professional studio quality when done in the BIAB project and don't have to be addressed when the project is moved to a DAW.

I use a Real Track if it is exactly what I'm looking for, but on occasion, it's not. When there is something I want to change about RealTrack audio, I edit the audio itself or sometimes combine it with Other RealTrack audio or MIDI most times without leaving BIAB. Done correctly, editing and arranging tracks in BIAB is indistinguishable from manually doing the same in a DAW.

In many cases, I think editing audio from within the BIAB program is vastly underrated and underused. This is true is such areas as the updated Melody's feature and it's 10 channel sub mixer and the two versions of User Tracks where the traditional User Track is not as broken as it's thought to be and the User Artist Performance Track which isn't broken at all. Loops are easy to create and can be made from MIDI or audio and even MIDI and audio combined. The BIAB Mixer can export stems and sub mixes quickly and easily and even if they are exported out for use in a DAW project, reduce mixing time and tracks in those projects.

BIAB 2026:RB 2026, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.