I am a person of a certain age, who started using computers in the 1980s, and BIAB is almost as old as I am. I hear tell that the original version of BIAB was for Atari STs. As Midi, General Midi, and the DAW revolution rolled on, BIAB has kept on evolving and growing. BIAB is a mature and complex (and weird) product.

Here are some initial reflections from a brand new user of MAC BIAB 2023 who is also a professional mac and windows software developer:

* The choice to use the Applications folder to hold the main Application bundle (binary) is commendable. Everything else about file locations gets weirder from this point forward.

* The choice to create an application folder tree under that application bundle where all kinds of other stuff is stored is really really problematic. This reminds me of the Windows31 era were you would install to c:\BIAB and then have c:\BIAB\Prefs and everything underneath it.

* The modern choice for user-specific preferences is to store that in the user library application support folder (~/Library/Application Support/BIAB/<whatever>)

* Documents should go in documents. That includes my own style and song files or anything I save or export for the program. Having autosave of my working copy of a song go into the Applications folder or a folder beneath that is beyond weird and confusing.

* Global content like sound packs, presets, etc, really should go in the global library (not the user library) which is usually found at the root of the main disk on macs (/Library/Application Support/BIAB). If preferences files aren’t going to be in mac preferences format then they should be in this folder unless they should be per user, in which case they should be in ~/Library/Application Support/BIAB/…

Managing this current set of choices is going to make life harder for users, and for your tech support team, as you move onwards. Both Apple and Microsoft are getting saltier over time and not wanting applications to access the Applications folder and write to it for very good reasons, including the fact that this kind of behaviour is now typical of malware. If BIAB itself was written in a manner compliant with apple’s guidance, BIAB app itself could run from anywhere on your disk and not care where any other file is relative to its own position. Typically a preferences folder in a standard location (~/Library/ApplicationSupport/BIAB/Preferences) would be located and read and then the rest of the content could be found anywhere, whether on external volumes or the main disk.

I really hope that some future (2024+) version of BIAB MAC will be written with regard to the Apple’s recommend and industry standard file and folder locations for all the style and other product content. In the meanwhile, my more modest overall requests as a new user:

* Don’t store my auto-save songs into Applications/ folders. Please store it into a Documents subfolder on my mac. I want my documents saved where documents go. I hope this is already possible somehow and I’ve missed finding the preference option for “store documents in the documents folder”.

* When I save a new song I expect to start in My documents folder or a custom subfolder of My Documents folder on my mac. Not in a subfolder of the applications directory.

I love BIAB, but learning it for the first time is confusing, and it does things that modern mac users in particular are really going to scratch their heads over. If it’s truly possible to already set up BIAB to not write and read content that is inside Applications other than the main application bundle itself (the .app), please advise, as I would be glad to try that out. I’d also love to beta test upcoming versions, if you could use some beta test help from someone who can read crash reports and write detailed bug reports.

Warren

Last edited by Warren P; 10/14/23 08:18 AM.
BIAB Mac 2024
Mac Studio 2022, M1 Max, OS Ventura 13.6