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#745221 12/17/22 04:28 AM
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You can now "tune" your stations with options like Discovery and Deep Cuts.

After playing with it for just 15 minutes I discovered a deep cut I like by Sade I never heard before on my Steely Dan station.


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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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They just discovered that option? Sheesh. Do their employees use flip phones?

Bud

PS Sarcasm aside I do love many of the discoveries Apple Music has thrown at us for years. We’ve become
regular listens of quite a few. smile

Last edited by Janice & Bud; 12/17/22 07:33 AM.

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Also, I'm not being charged as a "Valued Customer". At least, they stopped billing me several months ago! YMMV.

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Originally Posted By: Janice & Bud
They just discovered that option? Sheesh. Do their employees use flip phones?

Bud

Yep, they probably are behind the times a bit but we've got our 100+ stations and it has met our needs over the years; way too much music to listen to. And I'm an Android guy so the Apple eco-system has no appeal to me.

We had a paid satellite radio subscription for awhile in our vehicles, but found their playlists smaller than Pandora's.

Out of curiosity, is Apple Music free like Pandora and can you stream it to your smart TV?


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BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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Nothing is free with Apple - it's a cloistered world that we happily reside in.

Apple Music is $9.99 a month. 33 cents a day works fine for us. There are no free options with ads.

However Apple Music is part of a total package I get that includes huge iCloud storage space that we use for many things and backups. It also includes subscriptions to many, many, many major magazines and newspapers that we enjoy and free Apple TV (lost of great original series, etc.) and Apple Fitness and hundreds of games that we could care less about.

Yeah on the surface things seem expensive with Apple but, for example, their DAW Logic Pro X which is IMO on of the best on the planet (if not the best) that costs $199 for life. That includes hundreds of VST's, loops, amp sims, mic placement sims, speaker sims, pedal sims and effects galore. Probably thousands if I downloaded them all. Stuff is added to this library frequently and Logic Pro is seemlessly updated very frequently ... never charged a penny after the original purchase.

We don't need to stream music to our TV but could as we also have Apple TV. We just walk in the room and tell Siri what we want to hear and it immediate starts on the excellent sounding HomePods. Or we just say play some music and it will go for hours w/o one song that we do not like. There are a huge number of stations that are curated just for us and are updated weekly. Heck there must be 20 blues stations covering all the sub-genres.

So for us it's: 2 iPhones, AirPods (buds), Apple TV, Apple Watch, HomePod, iPad, 2 Mac computers, Apple internet router and likely stuff I've forgotten ... oh and both our vehicles are Apple Friendly--get in and say whatcha wanna hear.

I know there are around a zillion Apple haters but we, obviously, ain't amongst them! smile Pardon the ramble ...

Bud


Our albums and singles are on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora and more.
If interested search on Janice Merritt. Thanks!
Our Videos
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Originally Posted By: Janice & Bud
Nothing is free with Apple - it's a cloistered world that we happily reside in.
Bud

Thanks for the Apple education, it's not for us but glad you guys are happy with it.


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BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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If you like Brazilian jazz, bring up my channel "Matt Finley".

All the songs on my Brazilian Wish CD were composed in BIAB before I went into the studio in 2006, so PG Music has given me permission to mention it here. I had 12 world-class sidemen, including Warren Bernhardt (music director for Steely Dan), Romero Lubambo (Brazil's greatest living jazz guitarist), and Joel Rosenblatt (drummer for Spyro Gyra), among others.


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Matt, I enjoy your Brazilian Wish frequently although I don't consider myself to be a jazz fan. It is nice to hear great music of any genre. I highly recommend it to your many friends on these forums. Kudos, my friend.

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Thank you, Don! You are very much valued.


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Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
I had 12 world-class sidemen, including Warren Bernhardt (music director for Steely Dan), Romero Lubambo (Brazil's greatest living jazz guitarist), and Joel Rosenblatt (drummer for Spyro Gyra), among others.

A few years back a friend suggested I check out Spyro Gyra. I said Spyro what ??? Never heard of these guys. Once I created a station on them I knew who they were from a signature song or 2 played on FM radio, probably Morning Dance was one of them. They are talented indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfWfZwKEZIM

As for Brazilian Wish; is more good stuff on album #2 in the works?


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BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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Thanks! I am on many other artists' CDs where I do arranging and play horn parts, but alas, I do not have plans for a second album of my own. The economics just do not make sense.


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Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
Thanks! I am on many other artists' CDs where I do arranging and play horn parts, but alas, I do not have plans for a second album of my own. The economics just do not make sense.


Matt, just out of curiosity what about the economics are an issue? I have absolutely no intention of getting too personal but would not your obvious talent, a home studio that I assume you have and BiaB make an album release cost free other than the small distribution fee?

Bud


Our albums and singles are on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora and more.
If interested search on Janice Merritt. Thanks!
Our Videos
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It’s a fair question.

My album has compositions I wrote with BIAB but the CD is performances by real musicians. I would want to uphold the same standards. That would cost more than I could ever hope to recover given the streaming economy and free music situation.


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Matt, you've just given me a reason to sign up to Pandora.

Notes ♫


Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
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Hi Matt,

Joel Rosenblatt...now there is a real drummer. For sure, Spyro Gyra and a zillion other great musicians he has played/recorded for. Blood, Sweat, & Tears comes to mind.

You certainly play well enough to hang with those guys. Good stuff!

The economics of producing your own albums with the level of studio musicians you are talking about most likely never was economically advisable.

Billy


“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig?
“Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”
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Originally Posted By: Planobilly
Hi Matt,

Joel Rosenblatt...now there is a real drummer. For sure, Spyro Gyra and a zillion other great musicians he has played/recorded for. Blood, Sweat, & Tears comes to mind.

You certainly play well enough to hang with those guys. Good stuff!

The economics of producing your own albums with the level of studio musicians you are talking about most likely never was economically advisable.

Billy


I admire Matt for doing this while the opportunity was there.
/"economically advisable" may not have been a criteria at the time <grin>

He may have just did something he always wanted to do, and the value to him was worth it, I'll let Matt comment on that.
We enjoy the benefits of the experiment without all the cost.

What I always thought would be fun would be to see how the BiaB file sounded compared to the final product. Not for performance or sound quality comparison, but to discover what the live musicians had to work with and how they interpreted it... and how much it may have affected/helped.
Matt may choose to comment on this too.

//I know, I'm weird like that; looking at things from a different view than most.

Did the performers ever 'hear' the BiaB file?
If so, where any RTs or RDs involved?
Did they just see the notation generated?
etc.
/// sorry for the thread-jack

Last edited by rharv; 12/19/22 12:56 PM.

I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
Make your sound your own!
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Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
It’s a fair question.

My album has compositions I wrote with BIAB but the CD is performances by real musicians. I would want to uphold the same standards. That would cost more than I could ever hope to recover given the streaming economy and free music situation.

Of course deciding or not deciding to produce another album should be, and is, entirely up to you. But to deny yourself and others the satisfaction of new music because of needing the collaboration of live musicians to uphold the same [high] standards compared to using BiaB I don't understand for 2 reasons.

1. As I understand RealTracks (and there is MUCH I don't understand), RealTracks ARE recordings of live musicians . . . in fact, some of the best muscians alive today.

2. Even if the RealTracks were not produced by live professional musicians, the quality of them are so high that most if not all listeners on Pandora and other streaming services couldn't detect the difference anyway. Heck, I have seen postings here where someone needed to ask which (if any) instruments are played by the poster and which is BiaB.


https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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Thump, a lot of that has to do with what your end game is. If you want to put out a high end CD and try to sell tens of thousands of units, live players would probably be a better option. I don't know if you ever heard Matt's CD but I bought it and it is a strong work. A lot depends on your feelings about the genre but then we get into that old discussion about levels of listening again and we've done that in several forms already.

If you write for YOU (and in my case I have pretty much laid it down anymore) then by all means you Real Band it up because you can turn out a good product with it. My CD was about 80% Real band. Nobody would know if I didn't tell them. We have no way to know if we are hearing all manually played tracks or not. We can't spot them like we can spot autotune on vocals.

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Some of the answers:

Although I have played professionally since age 11, I rarely relied on it to make a living. After a career as a computer science prof and dean of academic affairs, I retired with the intention of finding out what I could really do in music if I worked on it full time. The international recognition (especially in Italy, for some reason) gained me some cred.

The songs were composed in BIAB in 2004 and 2005, so that was before RealTracks.

I sent the musicians a recording of the songs and the notation so the players knew what I had in mind, but as Pat Marr and MarioD can attest, I value spontaneity and hire musicians who thrive doing it that way.


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Originally Posted By: eddie1261
We have no way to know if we are hearing all manually played tracks or not. We can't spot them like we can spot autotune on vocals.

I hear ya Eddie.
Just today and in this very thread I realized a piece of truth.

For years I would imagine someone playing steel drums in the Morning Dance song by Spyro Gyra, 6:30 in the above video I posted. Come to find out today that it's the dude playing his keyboard. I still love the song and maybe I can fool my brain into still thinking that it's a guy on an actual steel drum. But the point is, as you point out, you just can't tell anymore. Keyboards, software plugins and RealTracks all have reached a point of supreme realism that very few of us (if any) can reliably tell the difference between live and "non-live" music. I'm sure there are those that agree with this state of technology and those that don't. And soon, you won't be able to spot auto-tune or synth vocals. It's just the ever-forward march of progress. Hopefully those that are negatively impacted by this can find new ways to adapt and remain relevant, successful and even indispensable.


https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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