PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Styles that actually sound something like the style name &/or band/song title linked to it.

While waiting for improvements of the search concept in the style picker, here are some ideas and suggestions for some improvements in the style picker search mechanism:

1.Style Picker GUI: Make it more efficient to review a selected set of styles.
Today the user have to:
a) select the style
b) klick on the Play button (against my chords or the demo)
c) go to a) above

This is very time consuming, a suggestion is:
I. Allow a selection of styles, by marking up and selecting them one by one or as chunks (e.g. by use of the shift key as in most other software e.g. like marking up text rows in MS Word).
II. Allow the user to step to the next style in the marked up list and play it by a simple klick on Play.
This will allow users to review the styles more efficiently just by making a selection of styles, then only to klick Play to step through the list and play the styles one by one.

2. Real Drums Picker GUI: Make it more efficient to review a set of drum styles.
I. Basically it is the same problem in the Real Drums picker GUA as in the Style picker GUI. It has the same problems i.e. the user have to select one item from the list then klick play, then select another item, then klick play etc, very time consuming (improvement as suggested above).
II. Another improvement would be to be able to a tick box to “collapse” all variants of the same drum patterns. This will provide a more compact view of the overall drum patterns when trying to find the overall right feel in the drums patterns.
III. Another improvement would be to have an option to go back and forth from the current marked up selection in the style picker and having a drum style selected in the marked up drum list. Then the user can continue to review the narrowed down styles in the selected styles list that contains the particular drums. I know it is possible to add a search criterion in the style picker for this but it would be so much easier and more efficient if one could go back and forth between the style picker and drum picker keeping the selections and trying out various items from the selections. I also know that the drum picker lists the styles that have a particular drum style in a tiny window, this is of some help but it is not efficient having to go back to the style picker to check out those styles one by one and in between each review have to look up the drum styles again to check the list of styles unless I write them down and tick them of manually.

3. General point of table search in the GUIs. A general point to narrowing down the search in tables in the style picker and drum picker and in searching tables in general:
I. Provide a “hierarchy column sort”. I.e to be able to sort one column, this is possible today, then mark up a selection of items from that column and continue to make a sort of another column within that selection (keeping the previous column selection) etc. That is how most table searching GUIs work. In BIAB today all previous column sort orders disappears when sorting a new column.


4. Help to find a good match to the Feel/Groove of a particular song:
The current song title search function as today only helps out by setting four of the filter parameters “Cathegory, Time Signature, Feel, Tempo”. It does not rank or sort the list in any order for how well the styles reassembles the Feel/Grove of the song at all. If I make a test and put in these four parameters manually I will get the exact same result i.e. the same list in the same order without any connection to the Feel/Groove of the song. It is a good start to get this help in setting these filter parameters by the software (but on the other hand it is not very difficult to listen to the song and set them manually).

I think the Drum Pattern Matrix is one major component in order to find something that sounds reasonable similar to the song to match the feel/groove of.
And that is more or less what Henry Clarke uses in his work flow as mentioned in one of the posts and links above, but he does it manually by ear and by help of a midi file.
I. It would be very useful if BIAB could provide some level of support for this in the software i.e. “Best Matching Drums” at least for the case where the user can provides a midi file including the drums.
Preferably resulting in a list of Real Drums/ Midi Drums in Ranking order (like EZDrummer %match). Any level of help framing it down would be useful.
Then from that list of best matching drums a simple way back to the filtered list of styles with all the styles that have the selected drum pattern marked up (as mentioned in 2. above).

II. To match the drums in an mp3 song file is probably not an easy task. But maybe it is possible to provide some simple function for the user to “tap in the basic feel” and the BIAB then helps out sorting out the best and most likely matches from the drum list in the same way as for the midi case above.