I went through this today to give it a fair shake. And I could see how it might be a useful work-around. But it is most certainly not anywhere nearly as good as having additional mixer tracks!
5 minutes was obviously not enough time for you to give it a fair shake. It's not a work around, it was a major new feature over the last two year version releases. Work-around to what? It can replicate all the functions of using F5 bar settings to mute, return to normal, volume and pan automate... I agree, the new Utility Tracks are much easier, streamlined and powerful.
- you cannot see all of your tracks at a glance without opening the picker and then the medley dialog (which took a long time to load btw)
Why is that necessary? Once it's programmed, you hear it.
- you cannot freeze/unfreeze these medley tracks individually
Yes you can.
- you cannot control when the medley tracks play except with presets (chorus, 2 bars, 4 bars, etc.)
Not true. Those are only pre-sets. You can manually program changes to occur on any measure of any length.
- you cannot mute/unmute individual tracks in your medley
Yes you can.
- the mixer is never updated to reflect what track is actually playing
I believe you mean to reflect what instrument is playing rather than track. The meters show the track playing and you hear the instrument.
- you cannot set reverb and tone on the individual tracks in a medley
Yes you can but again I believe you mean instrument rather than track. Regardless, you can do that too.
- you cannot apply a plugin individually to tracks in a medley
Yes you can regardless if you're referring to instrument instead of track. The tracks play and react normally with no regard to whether the track contains 1 instrument or 10.
- you cannot apply bar settings individually to tracks in a medley
The tracks respond normally to bar settings as far as I know. Using the RT Medley gives the user access to many unadvertised automatic, professional quality BIAB programmed features like cross fades, fade ins, fade outs, smooth transitions between instrument changing, having a single measure fade one instrument while simultaneously fading in the next instrument, multiple instruments playing simultaneously, playing grace and lead in notes between instruments changing and more.
- and probably other "cannots" I didn't even see in my 5-minute evaluation
Fortunately, there are many more can's you've missed -
I continue to feel strongly that to tout 77 tracks is misleading at best. It is an interesting work-around with limited application. No one uses it because it is a bit kludgy and counter-intuitive while also being less functional than true mixer tracks.
What's misleading? I can use this feature to replicate the arrangement of a 77 track DAW with the resultant sound indistinguishable between the two. Everywhere the DAW changes instruments, I can change instruments, every cross-fade between soloists, I can cross-fade. Each sub-mixer for each legacy channel is a 'true' mixer track... as mixer tracks they will function exactly like a ---- Mixer Track!

I appreciate you taking time to give this feature 5 minutes but I hope any other interested user will not give credence to your assessment as being knowledgeable and complete. You're missing elements that set this tool apart from any other. It's providing a gateway to programming a song arrangement that uses BIAB on RealTracks that can be done in a single generation of a song and takes a lot of manual work in a DAW to duplicate.

Here's an example how quickly and efficiently this tool can replicate a common DAW function:

If you have a song where you want to have two tracks of the same acoustic guitar playing simultaneously, one panned hard left and the other hard right with each guitar having a low cut filter, compression, reverb and a limiter, that would require you to generate and export two guitar tracks to a DAW. It would require either applying the four effects to each track or to create an effects bus for those four effects. Using this tool, the task can be completed in a single render onto a single track... faster than you can ever do it in a DAW..

Last edited by Charlie Fogle; 12/11/20 01:13 AM.
BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.