Well, I've been advised to try RB instead of BIAB for playing VST instruments along with the generated accompaniment. First off, it's confusing to me which button to click on - both the "DX Plug-Ins" button and the "DXi Synths" button open up to a dialog called "DirectX/VST Window". But I went ahead and chose one and somehow managed to add a couple VSTi's for testing: NI's Akoustik Piano and B4-II. I generated a little song in style "=FPKE120" (Straight Country - Style Disk #94), which creates six tracks - one is MIDI (rhodes piano) and the rest are RealTracks. Here's what I've found, and maybe you guys can make a suggestion:

1: First, in order to play a VSTi along with the song, I right-click (or double click) the next available MIDI track, then choose "Specific DXi/VST synth for MIDI track", and then select my VSTi (Akoustik Piano). So far so good. But I can't hear anything yet because I've still got "Re-route MIDI to default DXi synth" checked in the MIDI Driver dialog (which apparently results in my keyboard controller's signals being sent to ForteDXi on some channel with no instrument loaded, cuz I can't hear anything). So I uncheck the "Re-route..." box, and voila!, now I hear my Akoustik Piano as the RealTracks play. But of course now there's no longer any sound coming from the rhodes piano MIDI track. So I choose that track, right-click and again choose "Specific DXi/VST synth for MIDI track" and choose ForteDXi, forcing that one track to resume using Forte. Now everything sounds right.

Question: Is this the way it's normally done? If I had had several generated MIDI tracks in there, would I have had to go through the same procedure four or five more times? I tried Ctrl-clicking and Shift-clicking several un-used midi tracks, just to see if RB would let me send multiple tracks at once to Forte, but when I went to choose "Specific DX/VST synth for MIDI track", it only changed it for the one I actually clicked on, and not all of the other selected tracks.

2: Also, if I make adjustments in my VSTi, like, for example, turning the rotator on in B4-II, as soon as I stop or re-start my RB composition, the rotator turns back off. I tried unchecking "Zero continuous controllers" in Prefs>MIDI>MIDI Out, but that didn't help. Neither did unchecking "Send most recent Patch/Wheel/Controllers".

Anyway, I'd welcome suggestions on either issue. Thanks.

- Bob K.