PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Time for a fundamental rethink?

That link works, Ray. I had to click on the URL to load the picture, which is not a big deal. If you want it to show automatically, enclose it in that "image" function I mentioned. But it may be better your way.

That BiaB layout is very handsome and clean. Putting the title stuff at the bottom seems to concentrate the mind on the music. I think I'll do that when I figure out how. (What's the method? I'll try to pretend I've forgotten, but I doubt I ever knew.)

Somehow I knew you'd be doing something good. Thanks.

Rats. The picture on the second trial is not showing and it's not clickable. It was better before.

I copied the code from "Direct Link for Layout Pages" and pasted it into PGMusic's "image" function from lower down on this forum-message composing page.

Could you post how you get your toolbars like that? Later, Ray

...

Larry,
Yes, there should be more constuctive examples of BIAB's GUI, instead of complaints. Everyone has a little personal tweak they use to make their work easier.
Getting rid of the Keyboard is OK for me as well. Being a Guitar player I don't need to see it either.
Your layout is nice and clean. I like it.
Wayne,

Re: Putting the toolbars on the bottom. <Window-Put notation/chords on top>. Is there a way to make this permanent? When I close BIAB and re-open the setup reverts back to the toolbars on top. Later, Ray

P.S. I've re-posted this to Tips and Tricks.

I concur that of all the features of BIAB the gui is of the least importance to me. I've used a few versions over the years, but nothing recent- yet when I bought the 2011 Mega Pack, it was easy to use and intuitive. It's just a tool. I don't care if the hammer I buy looks like the one my Dad had as long as it hammers in nails and is durable. I'm not saying that I don't have issues with BIAB as I do, but my concerns are functionality not appearance.

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

Once again i remind you that what you want is there. REALBAND!!! it allows you to use what ever VSTi you want, TruePianos, lying-like-a-rug-pianos, and whatever. It has a MIXER, it allows use of a convolution reverb, or any kind of reverb for that matter. There are hundreds of free and for purchase effects and instruments that work with it. It has the ability to add RTS, and RDs, just like BiaB. You can drop a BiaB song into it and add more to the hearts content. You can add up to 48 tracks (I would love to see that expanded). You can use busses, and effects sends. You can choose what tool bars show. It has ACW, it has lyric windows. It uses ASIO, it has what you want. If you can't get it to work, call or email support and get help. If you can use cubase RB will work. Get support to help seriously.

Every now and then there is the cry for PG to completely redo BiaB into a combo of Sonar/Cubase/BiaB/Reaper/Fruityloops/Reason/microsoftoffice2015/photoshop/julieanne frymaker. They spent a lot of time and effort to give us a melding of BiaB and Powertracks. Best of both worlds. It is after all only three years in and I am sure will continue to grow and advance. More cool features will be added, existing ones refined, and better and more useable work flows. think about it, this year we got Elastique stretching!!!! Wow, that is way cool! I hope that Better ASIO and VSTi is on the table for next year, along with automation envelopes. Add those three and you got something here. Another cool area of upgrade would be to the mixer with a bit more flexable routing of groups and subgroups capability, and or some input as to how to really use these features better.

Imagine that RB allowed you to drag BiaB files over to it! (it does) that would be really great, but actually you do not need to you can simply open them!!

Can it get better, sure! Some things need a little care, like the VSTi coding so that it allows things like jamstix to work fully, and ASiO to work a little bit better. But does it all need to be scraped for a full on rewrite? NO! There are many folks here that like it as is, with small refinements.

Personally i use RB almost all the time now. BiaB only on rare occasions. But there are folks that use only BiaB, for practice, teaching, writing, scatch pad, live playing, making breakfast. How in the heck do you make that work for so many different needs by rewriting it as a new application? I understand the desire to want a basic facelift, re arrange some buttons, a newer looking GUI or skinable feature would be cool.

But why keep asking for something that already exist? Why not get it working and learn it? You might be stunned how good it works.

RealBand works just fine on my new systems and old systems.

ASIO is and has never been necessary. When I tried it I got a whole month of grief. It was badly written. Actually very badly written.

As to several small buttons that say guitar, even my 60 yr. old eyes can see I put a fiddle there. Point taken, some people need to get different levels of input, but say i put that fiddle on strings, I know that Westering Home, that I spent several hours getting to work, has a fiddle there. There are only 4 instruments playing.

The LSB spinner, I have 2 good sounding hardware synths and I use them all the time.

I can record fine in both Band in a Box and RealBand. And I can start up Audacity, hit record and run everything back in through the mixer and I have a stereo track of the instruments.

I have a Behringher power mixer with 10 inputs, and a non power one with 5 and a Bose one with 4. 2 Work on stero in, the last on usb. All record fine.

I have lots of VST's I can use, I don't need them much.

At the end of the day, I can see a screen for newbies, a screen for recording, a screen for practice etc. But I'm doing ok as it is.

Now if you want to hear complaints about software...just try and talk to Bill Gates about the problems with his O/S. I'm sure he'll jump into the forum, or reply in person to your email. OTOH, Mr. Gannon sends me messages, replies, and works hard to offer great products, good customer support, and value for your dollar.

And you can get your money back. Try that one on Bill Gates.

Cant use Real Band here so I can't comment on it. I have a windows 7 64 bit system running on a Core i7 processor with 12 gig with a Focursrite Liquid channel 56 asound module. After several cross atlantic phone calls PG gave up on me. I tried the forum too and got some good support but no result. So I have to buy RB but not use it, just to get BIAB.

I suppose my system is not good enough? Well it runs everything else like a dream

I still think there should be one properly coded app.

"Every now and then there is the cry for PG to completely redo BiaB into a combo of Sonar/Cubase/BiaB/Reaper/Fruityloops/Reason/microsoftoffice2015/photoshop/julieanne frymaker"

That's just hyperbole,

LSB well some poeple still use it I know, but does it have ot use up GUI real estate? That was my point. Things like that could be hidden or pop up.

Other apps get a new GUI every so often and a back to the drawing board rethink, its in the nature of improving a product. Just adding new modules and not rethinking the connection between them is poor programming. Cleaving a program in two and saying you can do this in bit A and this in bit B.. well, I am lost for words...its such a dissapointment as there is also some amazingly good things going on
.
Bill Gates has nothing to do with anything, nor is getting your money back. This is wish list forum. I wish BIAB had a mixer and proper VST support and proper Asio support.

Zee if everything runs but RB and support can't help, and no one here can help you are just stuck my friend. If i remember correctly there was a lot of help offered, but you did not follow thru on all of it. I beleive we even offered to shadow your screen and take a look.

I mean RB and PTPA for that matter is not hard to setup. I have not anywhere near the machine you have and mine is solid as a rock, as is everyone elses. It has to be one small issue, either a IRQ conflict, or a driver issue, or something simple. RB runs so similar to BiaB that is is hard to understand.

I can see why you feel frustrated and want a rewrite, but really if you just worked through the RB issue you would have what you want.

Why not take another try at it. use the online chat feature for support, toss it out here again. Get one of the RB/PT gurus like Rharv or Mac to use crossloop or team viewer to shadow you and look at your setup.

it is well worth it.

I have a Windows 7 64 bit system with 1 tb hard drive, and 8 gigs of memory, plus another 8 gigs being used to boost the speed.

Band in a Box runs in either the current hard drive OR the external hard drive as shipped by PG Music.

Real Band also.

I run Pinnacle (Avid) software also.

All other systems and development work are done in Kubuntu or Ubuntu, and Android 2.2.

But I've never had any problem, except for the spurious idea that so much stuff was going on here pertaining to ASIO, I decided to try that. I went back to MME and everything is coming up tulips ever since.

Now that I have a new Korg keyboard, and that the stretching software is so much better, I am almost done with midi, though I use it once in a while.

I suspect your problem lies in the ASIO needs to run this stuff, when in fact you have to be some sort of guru to get it to work. At the end of the day, enjoy the RealTracks, explore them, and be happy.

Some here seem to get joy from messing with ASIO and Realband. I just don't need to go out and find the latest vocal plugin for ch 5 and take it to some gig. In fact, I found the complexities of any gigging solution where you need a computer/ Then an interface, then a proper screen keyboard and jacks to be detrimental to my mental health.

The wife plays her instruments, I play mine, and we get along fine.

When I did take it out NO one came up to me and said "That's a really cheesey guitar you've got there, what is it a Fender recorded from a casette tape you got at the dump?"

I think "Z" you are missing a very important point here. PG is not cleaving a program in two, it is melding two programs together, just what you asked for. BiaB was never intented to be a Full on DAW recording system. It is in PG's not my own words:

"What is Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is an intelligent automatic accompaniment program for your multimedia computer. You can hear and play along to many song ideas and go from “nothing” to “something” in a very short period of time with Band-in-a-Box as your “on demand” backup band."

You on the other hand want a DAW type sequencer to replace cubase in the tool box that is more akin to BiaB which you like but it does not do everything you want or need. You want to take the project from creation to finish in one system. That is why PG developed RB, so you have a choice or either starting in BiaB, and moving over to RB, or just start and finish in RB. The problem is not that the tool does not exist, but the fact that yours does not work.

Again from PG's site: "RealBand is a fully-featured and powerful music arranging, sequencing, and digital recording program. RealBand is a new program that combines the most popular features from PG Music’s PowerTracks Pro Audio and Band-in-a-Box programs into an all-in-one sequencing program with automatic accompaniment."

I look at it this way, if you were building a book case and had a hammer, nails, sand paper, and a hand saw, you could get it done. But to make the job easier, you go out and buy a table saw, a compressor, and air nailer, and a sander, but you have no electricity on the job, those tools are worthless, right?

Rather than complain that the tool maker should take the hand tools, and the power tools, and make you a set of tools that does the job of both without electricity, why not just run an extension cord from a power source and use the right tools.

You need to figure out how to get RB to work for you so you have what you want, not expect PG to abandon their current path just because your system is not working at this moment with their program.

Lastly, You said above all companies do GUI updates, true, but what you are asking is far more than a GUI update, if that was all it is fine. Then it boils down to coming up with a nice face lift. But you want a full rewrite, and actually that has really already happened with RB, you just can not take advantage of it yet. So take another run at it, and let's all see if between Support and the fine folks here, we can get it working for you.

One other thought, take a look over at Cakewalks's Sonar X1 site, folks over there clamored for a big rewrite of Sonar, and they got it!! It has been a nightmare! Bugs galore, Crying and complaining. Actually a rewrite of BiaB to be an all in one program would be far more difficult than the rewrite at Sonar, since BiaB does things no other software can do, and would require a huge project. The way PG approached this to me is brillant. Taking a simple easy to use DAW, and medling in many of the basic features of BiaB, and slowly refining that we have a very handy app it so smart. Baby steps! Keep it as stable as possible. Grow it at a reasonable rate.

Just for the record I was offered a lot of good help on the forum but its still not working here even though I followed it all through.

I dont want BIAB to be a fully fledged sequencer - I have one of those Cubase.'~

"You on the other hand want a DAW type sequencer to replace cubase in the tool box that is more akin to BiaB which you like but it does not do everything you want or need. You want to take the project from creation to finish in one system"

Robh you have a habit of putting words in my mouth, then arguing against them and knocking them down.



At a minimum, I would be happy if I could load a decent piano VST into BIAB and record it along with a song - no can do here. Even if this is possible in RB it should also be possible in BIAB - this is no big deal its just what you would minimally expect from accompaniment software.

RB is not a 'fully featured Sequencer' at least not compared to the big boys - there is so much RB cant do as a sequencer. Your not going to find a Pro studio running RB - its OK as far as I can see, I am not saying its bad, its just not fully featured.

So over in Cakewalk Sonar X1 they may be having grief - well what is hte lesson you expect me to draw? - never update?? Never rethink an application? Doesn't hold water that argument.

Asking for a mixer in BIAB well, really I should even have to ask its just basic common sense

Maybe I dont understand RB but then I can't use it here, I did not say that others can't use it.

I have been using BIAB since the beginning, the early DOS versions, and really like it.

Yes, I am surprised that in 2011, the basic UI has not changed since the very first Windows version (made for Windows 3.1.) (Even the fact that it is by default installed in the root directory (rather than in Program Files), and doesn't use the registry. Those are not important at all to me, but just another indication that BIAB remains with its very first Win 3.1 setup, did not ever even adopt the changes of Win 95.)

It might be wise to spend some time and energy, not just in adding more and more similar pop and country RealTracks, but in trying to make some fundamental long-overdue changes to the app.

Not only in UI, but also in functionality. For instance, I am amazed that still, after all these years, and so many user requests for it, that chords cannot be changed at more than one per beat! When will that major limitation be fixed?