The Audacity guys love the new non destructive editing. Biab and RealBand could learn from that. Maybe it would be easier putting this into the BiabVST/Standalone than the nightmare of implementing it in BB and RB.
Ah, being that I avoid RB & don't record in BIAB I assumed that NDE was part of the package. It is, after all, a complete deal breaker if not in a DAW.
Cheers rayc "What's so funny about peace, love & understanding?" - N.Lowe
Maybe I'm not talking about the same thing but with the ability to add four separate plugins to each track in RB there is a huge opportunity to edit - or at least modify - the audio without changing the original track. Using Elements you can chain even more fx so RB can do just about anything without changing the original track.
Yes you can have non destructive FX but when it comes to copy/paste/cutting/resizing it's creating new files on the hard drive so the SEQ is getting bigger and bigger. Where as if it's just referencing the original file, meaning that any section of the file copied will still be able to be adjusted out to it's original length. This works instantly and smoothly without having to wait for RB to re-render the files because a bit has been cut out of them, so if one file has a section cut out and moved somewhere it will need to render 3 new files and delete the original one. Using NDE in RealBand would give you instant track generation, quicker than Biab ! as it's using the original source file sections that will remain untouched and give way more control in the editing of what you need. The SEQ files will be very small like a frozen SGU and has all the track section data. When you drop a file into RB it will create a copy of it to the Temp folder then write it to the SEQ when saving, all this is unnecessary in this day n age.
The reason people use Biab then RealBand or DAW is Biab is quick at generating up the song, quicker than RB and BiabVST, but Biab does not have good DAW editing. All this can change with RealBand and BiabVST giving INSTANT generation of tracks. If my hard drive didn't fill up so many times and Windows stop working from all the wav files that were being created I would not have looked into all of this.
Maybe repost to the RealBand forum to not confuse folks. This discussion applies to RealBand and not to BIAB. SEQ file size is never an issue to BIAB. Hard drive space management doesn't ever have to be an issue with a BIAB project or a thousand BIAB projects.
You have non destructive volume automation in RealBand because it was suggested, before that users had to destroy audio that can't be undestroyed as was stated in clearly in the video above, where as volume automation can be changed anytime, the same has now been implemented in Biab, that is the extent, the others are destructive and destruction will cause wav files to be written and attached to the SGU. The examples show in the forum from years back with Biab having more tracks that gave rise to Utility tracks used NDE in the "OLD" multitrack VSTs so no wav files were created. If I import wav files into Utility tracks it will make hard copies of them and attach to the SGU. A thousand BIAB projects with wav files attached would be an issue. The future can't be anything else but NDE for Biab as this is how most DAW's work, now including Audacity. It all comes back to generate time, that's why you are starting to see DAW features added to Biab because RealBand and the BiabVST are too slow to make changes or regen the whole song, the idea is great but they fall short in practicality, SO they don't want to go back n forth and want to do it all in Biab because of the gen speed, that's it ! How can you make RealBand and the BiabVST/standalone faster, or even Biab faster ????? can you give feedback on how PG can do that, or have we come to the end of development progress because of old users with old hardware ?
I agree there will probably be improvements to audio editing in BIAB if for no other reason than the addition of 16 more tracks that allowed audio recordings and the conversion of RealTracks so they can receive audio editing.
Same with the Plugin/Standalone with self contained code playing back tracks direct from the source files each track can open to display the waveform sections that can be all edited non destructively (NDE) the same as other multitrack VSTs and DAWs. If you drag the green WAV button only then will it render the sections to wav. This will give better editing control and faster generation than the main Biab app, so the Plugin Standalone could become the better way to go. Allowing real project time signatures, real tempo maps and 48khz 24bit audio. It can be released at the same time for Win & Mac (not 6 months apart). Band In A Box Lite® a self contained Plugin or Plugin Standalone.
See in the pic below, Kristal 2004 is playing back the sections of the compressed source files directly from the folder, the source files are not changed in any way, it's all done in the DAW non destructively. The Kristal application worked on 98/ME SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
PC "State of the art" machine (> 1 GHz recommended) OS Windows XP or 2000 (Win98/ME requires latest Internet Explorer 6.0, WinNT is not supported!) Display 1280 x 1024 recommended, 1024 x 768 minimum Sound ASIO-compatible sound card recommended, but should work with everything else, too
It still works on Windows 10 ! there is no way this would be so on Mac as each new weekly version OS needs a new app version. It even works on a 4K monitor
So if Kristal worked on those System Requirements and Biab could not work this way because of old users with old computers, how old are their computers ? DX4 100MHz, Pentium 100Mhz, Pentium 200Mhz ?
If Biab was made to work like the 2004 Kristal DAW now in 2023, how easy would it be to edit/copy tracks, not to mention the speed in generation because it's playing the tracks back directly from the source files non destructively.
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