PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums RealBand WHAT is with this style??

Muso, I am not and have never "set" style picker. I just click it and it opens. This has nothing to do with favorites. It opens as the "style currently being used" despite the fact that I have never and would never use that style.

This software gets buggier with every release and with the growth curve of PG the support is getting more and more diluted. The last issue I had could have been resolved in a 5 minute screen share but I had to endure a 75 email exchange, many of which made demands that were clearly just buying time to push the problem out into the next day. I have to screen dump and verify my build version FOUR TIMES! Is it even conceivable that I would roll BACK a version from the first report? I wish I hadn't deleted that mail thread.

Sadly, like everywhere else in this microwaved bottom-line driven world, customers seem to matter less and less. I am not even going to care about this problem as I know what I would be wading into. Days of insulting questions and multiple requests to "verify" things, all designed to kick the can down the road because they are swamped with help requests. Less people doing proportionately more work.

The thing is that it is intermittent. About half the time when I go to style picker the software freezes when I leave and I have to close through task manager. And then deal with the annoying "Real Band crashed last time. Should I start in safe mode?" thing. I don't want to ever have to go through and reset 129,265 parameters to get back to where I was!! No software in the world acts in a way where crashing would require resetting things to vanilla. Maybe rather fix the bugs to avoid crashes than ask me to reset after crashes? That confirmation box is saying "We know we are going to crash so we built this in rather than test thoroughly and eliminate the crash points." Why, under ANY circumstance, would just going to the list of styles cause a lockup? Not even selecting one! Just going to that routine. If I bother to report this, I will be asked for screen shots of my Windows version, my computer information, how much RAM, what CPU...

Wife 3.0 once asked if Photoshop would work on her computer. When I came out of shock that she would ask such a STUPID question, I asked "Do you seriously think that Adobe makes "Photoshop for EVERY Windows computer in the world" and then a separate "Photoshop JUST for Jane's computer?"

This is how I feel about issues like this. The theory behind clean code writing is that the code executes EXACTLY the same on every computer running the same OS. And to drill down one level more, to run the same way every time it runs. Not work fine for 2 weeks and then suddenly, with NO changes to the OS, start crashing on handfuls of computers and when it seems to be in a bad mood. Man, you open the program, you enter chords, you pick a style, and you hit generate. The same steps every time can't result in who knows what will be a random result on a random cold Saturday in the Great Lakes area with snow flurries and no sunshine.

There are a handful of GUI problems too but I really don't need the heartburn and migraines to start explaining them to non-techies, only to be met with those same insulting tier 1 troubleshooting steps that are cut and pasted from scripts. Again, kicking the can down the road instead of sending it to the coders who can probably tell me in 87 seconds what needs to be done. It turns into a game of telephone, where person one tells the joke to person 2 and the joke gets passed around the table and when it gets back to the originator it is nothing like how it started. The more links in a chain, the weaker the chain. If it's "Fred" who knows the answer, tell "Fred to answer me, not pass it along to Mike who then tells Mary and Mary replies to me 3rd hand. It's like "If we give him a hard enough time, he will get frustrated and stop bothering us about his petty little problem." Help desks everywhere do that. This one didn't used to. I feel like we are customer numbers anymore and not people.

I once had to call the vet because after flea med application my dog was violently shaking his head as if he was trying to get something off of his back. She said she'd tell the vet. The vet called me immediately because the desk jockey said "The dog is shaking". The vet took that to mean convulsing. How did it get from "shaking his head" to just "shaking"? The telephone joke game! (He was allergic to the med.)

Very frustrating. I wanted to work on something tonight but if it is going to keep freezing just because I want to pick a style I won't bother. I don't need aggravation tonight. It's bad enough the weather was so bad today that I was held hostage in the house. Perfect day to work on music but the software is messing up so bad I just quit caring for today. Pretty good song in my head that may actually never make it to screen because I can't be bothered with constant restarting, desperation computer reboots when nothing else works, etc....