PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB Can't Change Octaves

First, I'm not bashing anyone here. I've gotten a lot of very good information from this forum and in fact, were it not for this forum I'd have quit using BIAB long ago. So, please don't take the following clarification as finger-pointing or complaining. I just thought that this information was important enough that all users should come to understand that apparently, according to PG Music, this certain feature doesn't exist in BIAB although several users here believed that it did (or misinterpreted the questions being posted).

I wish to clarify a question that I've had recently along with the solutions that users thought would be the answer to the problem I was describing. Since over the course of several days (or maybe even weeks), none of the suggestions was working, I contacted support at PG. Note that at one point or another, I would test the suggested methods posted here in the forum and sometimes these suggestions seemed like they would work -- in the end though, the suggestion would not perform as intended although initially it might have seemed like it was going to work.

A few different times I've posted here in the forum about BIAB not being able to take a selected range of measures and change them up or down an octave all at one time (without changing the key). Simply put, I got tired of manually changing each note, one at a time in editable notation mode -- I'm a comeback trumpet player of 30+ years and I can't hit double C's or even a comfortable-A right now. To remedy this so I could play the songs, I would have to go into editable notation mode and then, one note at a time, change the offending highs to something more suitable for me. Problem is, I didn't intend to change the entire song, just the measures where the notes were too high. I also didn't want to change key since the problem would still exist at the low end instead of the high. So, it occurred to me at the time that there must be a feature to do this and thus, this has been the source of my involvement with this problem. Now often I would receive suggestions that the program could in fact perform this. It appears according to PG Music however, that Band In A Box CANNOT do this but RealBand CAN. The only problem with doing it this way is that once the pitch has been changed in RealBand, the song can no longer be used in BIAB!

As for my posts here in the forum, each time I posted about it I would get a suggested solution which would almost always included wording like, "... transpose ...". Finally, when things were still not working for me, I again posted my problem only this time rephrasing the question so hopefully I would be making sure that everyone understood that I did not want to change the key of the song -- only the tone of it. And obviously, I did not want to use the Edit + Transpose feature in BIAB because that would mean changing the key and this was unacceptable.

So, this week I sent off an email to PG Music support describing the problem. Here is what they said:

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Hello Russell,

I'm sorry but I wasn't able to find a way to do what you're trying to do in Band in a Box- the transposition changes affect the entire song, and you're right in that the transpose will not work for just a few bars. However, it's pretty easy to do this in RealBand (open the Band in a Box song in RealBand, select a region of the MIDI Track, and Edit > Pitch Transpose MIDI Music) ; the only problem is that once you make the transposition in RealBand you can only use it in RealBand.

Sorry that there isn't a direct solution in Band in a Box. If you need any additional support to get this going in RealBand please let us know.

Thank you,
Will
PG Music Inc.

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I hope this clarifies things for everyone about this subject. I intend on adding this pitch change feature in BIAB to the wishlist and after I've tried PG's suggestion in RB, I'll update my findings here.

Thanks sincerely, for all who took the time to research it and reply to my question.