Thank you, Jim, for your detailed explanation. By "Standalone" I mean the main program, and I am using BIAB 2022 (923) along with Cubase 12 (286) - which are the current versions of both.

From your observations, as well as other comments, it seems that working with the BIAB main program and drag&drop into the DAW is best for my purposes.

If the DAW plugin had midi-entry (which you suggest could be added) I think I would occasionally pull it up in a Cubase session when I want a particular track or soloist in a song largely created by live recording or with other VST's. That would sometimes be faster than loading the main BIAB program for something small added to other work.

But when writing a song from scratch, relying on BIAB as a starting point, I like using BIAB and Cubase in tandem. I think of Cubase more as my playback and BIAB as the session musicians who record various takes on tracks at certain points in the song. I have other VST's (Kontakt, Play, Opus, etc.)and play things myself or record my own parts and they are easier to combine with BIAB in the DAW. (Sometimes I even make a temporary sub-mix of non BIAB material and import it into BIAB to hear things against it - so the drag & drop is in both directions)

In any case, you suggest that 'Melody Maker" could work for me instead of having several instances of BIAB for a song with different style changes. (I'm thinking perhaps you mean "Medley Maker?") I am aware of this feature, and have used it, but still find that different BIAB files within one song has the type of "flexibility" which I didn't explain very well. I realize there are different uses for BIAB, and one is to put down an arrangement of a song that already exists, or you know exactly what it is going to do, how many verses, choruses, bridges, intros, for example, and where, if any there might be style changes. I agree with you that Medley Maker is great for this.

But another usage is to experiment and write a song that I don't know where it is going yet, and want to try things out. In this case, I like BIAB to generate just one verse, or one chorus or one bridge or any other section and drag them into the DAW, and have the flexibility to cut and paste and move them around to make the arrangement by experiment. Cubase does this faster than BIAB - if I want an extra verse before the chorus, or delete something and bring everything back, etc. - of course I can do it in BIAB, but it is a slower process than a DAW, and I may want to play my own transition between two BIAB segments. Also, in Cubase (and any other DAW I imagine) I can name the sections with descriptive markers easily to navigate around the composition.

So even without style changes, I like to keep my song sections in separate BIAB files. Too much hassle to keep trying to arrange and re-arrange them in BIAB (different keys are sometimes necessary, as well as style changes, etc.) I should say that after deciding on the final arrangement in Cubase, I go back to BIAB and regenerate new versions of any section that repeats, so nothing is played exactly the same, and I particularly like Multi-Riff at that stage of the process.

BIAB is such a great tool for so many different purposes, so this is just the way I have found it useful for me.


Last edited by ThomasS; 09/06/22 02:03 PM.