PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows How to transpose frozen tracks in BIAB 2023?

Thank you Charlie
I tried your suggestion. I have a feeling right now that this area of BIAB is buggy, and that should be addressed. The reason I'm saying this is that I tried going from frozen to APT with another song (not the one that gave me problems yesterday) and I got the same problem that I reported in my previous posts (no transformation of a frozen RT into an APT, rendering notification stuck in the middle of the screen). That makes it 2 songs out of 3. I think PGM should be looking at this (the process of transforming a frozen track into a APT, it seems buggy to me).

So, I tried again with a brand new song, built from scratch, just to test what you suggested. It worked as you said. Yay.
But ... there's a but.
Now, I really don't want be annoying, at this point I'm insisting on this feature (or lack thereof) just as a way to suggest a potential improvement for PGM, nothing else. It's not a crucial feature, at all. I'm not bothered by this, at all. I'm just trying to help out for future developments.
Once you go back from APT to RT you have to regenerate, as you rightly said, because once you "kill" the audio, the track is empty. Well, that defies the purpose of it all (or, actually, half the purpose). What I have in mind is not just going back to a RT status (which is half of the story), but going back to the specific combination of riffs / audio segments that constituted my frozen track. Now, again, this may look like reconstituting the beef from a steak, but for the reasons I explained above, I don't think it is necessarily so. I think BIAB has all the information to do, potentially, just that. I'll explain again what the advantage of this would be, maybe for those who didn't follow this thread or never thought of this possibility.

1. Let's say you have a RT that you carefully, painstakingly "designed" by using the partial regeneration feature, or the multi-riff feature (truly wonderful features, by the way). You designed the perfect solo part with all the phrases that you like. Now you freeze it of course, cause you don't want to nullify all your work by accidentally regenerate
2. Days later, or months later, you realize that you need to transpose it, because your singer needs a little help. Or maybe you want to change the tempo a little bit. Whatever. You can't do that with a frozen track. What you need to do is to transform your frozen RT into an APT and that allows you transpose as much as you want, just like Charlie described. That's all fine and well (provided that you don't encounter bugs, like I did).
3. This is half of the story. The other half is ... let's say that, at this point, you want to change just a couple of bars of your beautiful solo, without losing every other part of it. You can't. You can go back to RT status, like Charlie suggested, but now you have to regenerate the whole track. Your well designed solo is all gone, if you go back to RT status. Yes, you can rebuild it piece by piece, like you did the first time, but it's pretty annoying to redo everything that you already did in the past. Not the end of the world, obviously, but pretty annoying. Maybe you don't remember all the beautiful phrases that you originally found (obviously there's workarounds: you could use two tracks for the same solo: one with old phrases that you want to keep, while muting the phrases you want to change, and one with only the new phrases, generated from the same RT, loaded in this second track ... it works obviously, but it's not very elegant, and it can become cumbersome when you want to change more and more things over time)

In summary: either you have the flexibility to change parts of your frozen track (but you can't transpose it or change tempo etc) or you have the flexibility to transpose and change tempo if you go from frozen to APT (but you lose the ability to change parts of the performance: at that point, either you change everything or you change nothing). This seems the current state of affairs to me. And, it seems to me, that this limits somehow the wonderful flexibility that the multi-riff and partial regeneration features potentially provide.
Again: this is not too important. I'm not claiming that it is. There are many more important issues or potential improvements to be made, for sure. It is just another suggestion for PGM. Hope it helps.
Thank you again Charlie.