PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Biab 2021

[Rog] "I tend to work in Realband and I often find that
I'm piecing together several RTs, all from radically different genres, but ones which still seem to work for the song."

[Rog] "I remember when I got a DX7 and I knew what all the 32 voices sounded like. A few years later we had keyboards with 1000 voices
and I hardly knew five percent of them. Now it's the same with RTs.

So, is the problem really that we don't have enough RTs and genres, or just that we don't have time to audition them all?"



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Excellent points and you're explaining what's a very common workflow for many audio enthusiasts using BIAB as cross-platform software for creating accompaniment tracks, practice tracks and original music. As you noted, BIAB in a similar fashion to the keyboard analogy, has grown dramatically in the volume of RealTracks, RealStyles, genres/sub-genres and Real instruments over a relatively short period of years. An issue besides what you've listed is that for cross-platform users, cross-platform compatibility has not kept pace with BIAB growth. This is true even for users that use RealBand.

If you start a project in BIAB, enter the chords, select a style, key and tempo and then save and open that song in RealBand to audition, load additional instruments and comp instrument tracks, that process severely restricts search options and some features that are available in BIAB that are not cross-platform compatible with any DAW including RealBand.

A search example that BIAB offers which RealBand, can't replicate is to audition a Style, Real or Midi, over the Chord Progression, tempo and key of the song project. A Style can sound radically different on the users Chord Chart than the Style Demo does. Simply opening RealBand, the only DAW having the capability to audition PG Music Styles, eliminates the opportunity to take advantage of this unique, exclusive and powerful search tool to the point of not finding a suitable instrument or style for your song project.

Another restrictive deficiency of bypassing BIAB for RealBand is the loss of the BIAB exclusive MultiStyle feature. PG Music Style developers have long made use of MultiStyles. They predate the introduction of RealTracks and RealStyles. My system has more than 8,000 Styles and nearly 1,000 of them are MultiStyles. Bypassing BIAB and using RealBand to either search Styles or to take advantage of pre-made PG Music MultiStyles, negates those nearly 1,000 Styles because RealBand doesn't respond to the MultiStyle Feature. All of the built-in programming is ignored and the feature is negated and the file is generated as if no editing had been done. To accomplish what a MultiStyle provides can take hours to get the same results in RealBand or every other DAW. MultiStyles are a very powerful programming tool and also quite versatile. Every Style in your StylePicker can be modified and converted into a custom MultiStyle by users. It's a simple process that can be done quickly either from scratch or by modifying an existing Style. MultiStyles can have up to 24 Substyles with each substyle having 'a and b' sections.

I've attached two m4a versions of a PG Music developed MultiStyle, Western swing soloist MultiStyle Demo, WSWING+.STY. One version is the Demo opened, loaded and rendered unaltered in BIAB and the second, opened, loading the style demo in RealBand and rendering it unaltered. The demo is the same in both programs but the rendered audio has radically different results that you'll hear for yourself and quickly realize the loss of productivity and ease of creating more complex, higher quality arranged tracks by opening your project in RealBand rather than BIAB. The BIAB version has multiple Soloists, different Styles, is more dynamic, interesting and lively.

Unfortunately, such radical differences will apply to every MultiStyle opened between the two programs. Cross-platform capability doesn't apply to the feature. Of course MultiStyles can be generated and exported from BIAB and the exported audio will play correctly in any DAW but my point here is to demonstrate the deficiency and restrictions of bypassing BIAB and searching and playing Styles and RealTracks from RealBand. There are many other features that are negated or unavailable to users of the cross-platform workflow with RealBand.