Originally Posted By: JohnJohnJohn

One of my biggest complaints about BIAB is every time I try to explore some "advanced" feature like you did, I run into limitations and bugs that negate the benefit of it. I know I sound like a broken record but I find the best way to use BIAB is to get in and out as soon as possible. I like (and use) your approach of saving separate songs to combine later in my DAW. Too many times I have run into issues like multiple styles not working properly together or a style change not showing up in the mixer or a new feature like utility tracks not being full-featured (even though they still claim "All Tracks are Equal" in the marketing hype!)

I finally gave up on anything even the least bit advanced and just create my initial song and make copies of it for changing styles or adding tracks beyond the original track set. This approach is almost fail-proof and really doesn't take any longer than diving into (and climbing back out of) BIAB rabbit holes!


I agree with JohnJohnJohn that many new BIAB features don't always work very well in the first few years after their introduction. Of course, there are some that I like already (like Multi-Riff and All-Tracks-Equal.)

But I admire PG-M for keeping up with exploring new advances, relying on us users to help improve them in a multi-year process. Any new feature is really just a beta version and forum users are the beta testers. I don't mind if they keep doing it, but take with a grain of salt the over-enthusiastic hype-advertising of new features, which are really just a way to keep people upgrading. But I guess this business model has worked well if you consider how far the program has evolved since its beginning.

For me BIAB is still mainly a resource for adding content to my DAW, and some things I really like are the ease of drag & drop, multi-riff part generation, 24 "all-equal" tracks, and, of course the great quantity and quality of the real-track players.

I'm hoping they can quickly fix style-changes not showing up in the mixer, and utility tracks not disappearing in songs after save, etc. and I assume this will happen in due time.

But at present nothing really beats just dragging things into a DAW and working on arranging little bits in an environment that is meant to do that better and faster. In this regard, I like being able to open multiple instances of BIAB in Windows, and use it always now - often each different instance called Verse or Chorus or Intro or A Section, etc. I love style changes in songs, which really make a track come alive - to build an arrangement, or break things down, and often just a very subtle new style-change is all that is needed to make a great arrangement.

Maybe users like Triple-John and me are in the minority, (who often drag & drop BIAB bits into a DAW) but if PG-M wants to cater to such users perhaps instead of trying to do everything inside BIAB they should embrace the fact that we use DAW's and continue to make the simultaneous use of both programs even easier. A few ideas would be to make it possible to drag & drop a selection of tracks in one grab to be allocated to separate tracks in the DAW (can this be done now? - apart from saving and re-importing?) Another would be to have a "bundle" approach to a group of BIAB song files so you could load up a set of sections, verse, choruses, solo's etc. all as separate BIAB instances, but bundled under one song name. At the moment I do this already, using the feature to have multiple BIAB's running (enabled in preferences)and carefully name files as main title and sub-section.

Maybe if they increase the capability, speed and efficiency of the DAW plugin to the point that it can do pretty much everything the main program does, this bundle approach could be accomplished by loading several instances of the plugin into a single DAW session. But to make it functional they would at least have to make the plugin window more flexible to size and float apart from the DAW to equal the ease of managing workspace, and improve the speed of generating and printing tracks so that is is close to the main program. The cumbersome nature of the DAW plugin is still too slow to use after one has experience with the main program.

Another - and I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere - is to fix up the Make-Your-Own-Realtracks function which showed great promise years ago, but is still not working (but that is on a different subject)

Last edited by ThomasS; 09/08/22 05:40 PM.