PG is the only company which makes me overjoyed and deeply angry in equal measure

Real Tracks has transformed my studio, and my practice in ways no other product is capable of - I use BIAB more than all of my other equipment and I have a very comprehensive and up to date studio. However

1] I hate the schizophrenic nature of having two seperate programs to perform one set of similar (though not identical functions

2] I can't even get RB to work on a very good and up to date system (using a Focusrite LIquid 56, WIn 7 64 bit) So I pay half my money for nothing.

3] I can even get my VST piano (or organ) to function inside BIAB (or RB) so I cant do the simplest recording.
4] The idea that we are supposed to use the on board sounds of the various synths is a joke to me. I want ot use top class pianos, my B4II Hammond Organ (wth all of its drawbars and leslie speak emulations), even Omnisphere, Absynth, VSL instruments, East West Choirs, Piasnoteq electric pianos, Stradivarious violins all of which I own and can use in ANY other context bar PG products.

4] I want to record whatever VST I want and I cant even record ANY. So much for accompaniment features. BIAB can be utterly hopeless and as for RB well see above.

5] As for the GUI dont tell me that PG have not yet noticed that the buttons labelled strings, piano or guitar often dont actually contain these instruments. Isnt it just basic programming to get these buttons to display the name of the actual instrument?

6] Who on earth needs to play with features like LSB these days? Who uses these tiny little spin buttons? Why no decent mixer?

7] Using MME technology is schoolboy programming - ok it 'will do' in some circumstances, but its not designed to support professional music applications EVERYTHING should be ASIO. No other sequencer technology (And even BIAB IS a sequencer in some senses - it lines up notes and tracks) has a problem with hosting a number of channels, recording them and outputting them - its inexcusable in my view that we are still faffing around with MME.

7] I look at my wholly Realtrack song in BIAB on screen in the BIAB GUI. I can see all the mislabelled buttons, and then beneath them I can see all the MIDI options like BANK Select, lsb ETC.
I can see that it displays 'Vibes' (there are no vibes at all) but even if I were to have a midi TRACK this would not work as the Forte DXI synth overides it without telling the GUI. I can see three buttons marked 'loop' two small ones and one large. If I hit the 'loopscn' one I know that it will also change my screen from chords to notation against my wishes. Why three anyway? Its redundant ridiculous. I see buttons like GM2, F, and +, which all handle very esoteric MIDI features which frankly dont need ot be there and could be hidden on some MIDI Window. All in all, when playing a Real Track the top panel is mostly irrelevent and/or misleading'


Overall, the way I feel about this is like a man in a village who goes to the only cart maker in the area and asked for a cart. The cart maker advertises his cart like others, but when you get it home, you realise that it only has three wheels. You go back to the cart maker and he says he will fix it in some update, you wait for a few updates and nothing happens. Your cart is very valuable to you, without it you could not get your goods to market atr all and even with its three wheels, its the best thing you have and there simply is no other cart maker to go to. You talk to some other villagers, but its clear that they have never seen a four wheel cart and 'like things the way they are'. So you lumber on and wait. You muse about Stockholm Syndrome...

8] Covolution Reverb? No this belongs to a Millenium PG have not yet reached.

9] Surround? OK well thats just funny. Ditto.

Now I am going to play SOUL EYES using BIAB, and TruePianos, I love the sounds I hear, only I cant record it without exporting the whole backing track to Cubase and running True Pianos there. If I do this I loose all ability to use BIAB Real Track Features. On an old Yamaha keyboard I had I could simply play with an accompaniment and hit the record button.

Yes its time for a fundamental rethink.

Zero

Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k