Finally I bought Audiophile... well, not exactly: I bought OmniPAK! I will receive it next week, but I already downloaded the WMA version to try the new features in BiaB standalone and VST3 plugin.

Deciding between WMA and uncompressed WAVs was not easy. Because I think it depends a lot on the type of track. I think sharing what I found could be useful for BiaB users. Very summarized:

1) For real drums (no pitch stretching, and cymbals sound much better in WAV than in WMA), there is a real gain. None will notice in a car or in music shared through WhatsApp in a cell phone. But there were projects where I decided to substitute the drums at the end... just to have some contents beyond 14 kHz : )

2) For organs, some synths, even pianos the differences I expect are less. But it is nice to have higher quality. Especially if the other tracks sound well.

3) For some guitars, especially overdriven guitars... well some of them sounded really bad to me. Even inside a car or through WhatsApp + Mobile. The "voicing" was so different depending on the chords. I suspected this had to fo with pitch-shifting on an instrument "with a strong voicing" (like human voice, we can hear formants). Then someone helped me to run a render of these guitars with the Audiophile version... and as I suspected it was equally bad. Unusable for me.

But then reading the manual of the 2024 software (I was serarching for something totally unrelated) I realized that there might be an easy solution: The DI version of the suspect tracks is available!

So there is no problem, the strong voicing in the overdriven guitars is coming 90% from the FX chain + amplifier + CAB. This takes really bad the pitch shifting. But pitch-shifting the clean guitar (not so problematic) and then applying the "channel" (any VST combination of my choice) this 90% of the voicing is not altered by the pitch-shifting. This converts my "unusable guitars" (same with WMA or Audiophile version) in something really nice and flexible.

Once I could improve by leaps and bounds some guitar tracks (really the weakest link of the chain even in the WMA versions), I was totally motivated to go to Audiophile version. Well... OmniPAK!

To hear what I mean you can listen to anything with some variety of chords in style: _PUNKRK1.STY (Punk w/ Held and Muted Guitars)
If you solo Real Track 2585:Guitar, Electric, Rhythm PunkHeldPlus Ev it does not matter much if it is WMA or WAV.

This one is not much better: 2584:Guitar, Electric, Rhythm PunkMuted Ev 165

Using the DI version and any guitar amp VST (in my case I quickly tested a preset from Guitar Rig 6 that sounded similar to the original track).

My advice: Use DI + guitar channel emulation (after pitch shifting!) and not "amplified" or any overdriven Real Tracks. The cost is like 4...10x more processing power (it added like ~2.1% CPU load in my old 6-core computer, who cares?).

By the way, this works exactly the same with sampled guitar libraries. Add, combine the multiple notes first, then apply FX or amplifier. Never get a chord like the addition of a few overdriven samples. Instead first sum the clean samples, then overdrive them with any model of the amplifier / FX chain.

I hope it helps. Looking forward to receive my OmniPAK. I'll need to finish the other project before I start playing again with BiaB