Welcome to the fora.

You can tell the type of track from the the labels of the radio button at the top of the BiaB window.

From page 38 of the manual:

"""
The color of the track name indicates its type or state.
- White indicates that the track is empty and is not in use.
- Yellow indicates a MIDI track playing a Band-in-a-Box MIDI part.
- Green indicates a RealTrack. If the track name is underlined, it also has RealChart notation.
If [V] is shown, the track has a video RealTracks.
- Blue indicates a MIDI SuperTracks.
- Orange is an Audio Performance track.
- Red means that the track has been muted. When one of the tracks is being soloed, all other tracks
will change color to red.
- For the Audio track, orange shows that an audio recording is present on the track.
"""


Green RealTracks should sound quite realistic as they're built from recording of musicians playing.

Yellow or blue mean that the sound you get will depend on the MIDI player you're using.

BiaB's default MIDI player is Coyote, which doesn't come with great sounds. I think many or most people use a different MIDI player and there are plenty to choose from. BiaB ships a copy of VSTSynthFont (manual p8), but for some reason it's tucked away in bb/Data/libx64.

There are numerous good soundfonts around. There's one with VSTSynthFont, which I think is better that Coyote's, but there are even better soundfonts free on the 'Net.

The other way to get good sounds from MIDI is with VST Instruments, via the plugins tab on the mixer.

As you're a newcomer, I'd suggest using RealTracks for now as they should sound good and natural, and they're easy to use. Setting up a good MIDI player can be a bit fiddly, so unless you actively want MIDI, I'd suggest leaving that that until you do.

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
.