shaneblyth, welcome to Band-in-a-Box and to the forum. I appreciate your post and find it enlightening. Hopefully, my response will reduce your frustration and help you to understand Band-in-a-Box.

First, forget about comparing Band-in-a-Box, or BiaB for short, to a DAW. The program is not a DAW, never has been. BiaB is an auto accompaniment program. So approaching the program with the expectation it's a DAW doesn't work. Okay, so how should you approach it? What should be your expectation? To create backing tracks for a song. How would you direct other musicians to play that song?

You would likely start by telling the musicians I want to play "XYZ". It's a country song so I'm going to start with a country style. Load a country style and it provides you with a country feel by providing initial instrumentation, tempo, key and time signature as a starting point. You can try other styles or instruments or just replace the instruments you have. You enter the song's chord chart and hit play to see how the instruments sound. You swap styles and instruments until you get the feel and sound you want.

Now you want to get the instruments to play how you want them to play. That's where you use features like partial regeneration, micro-chords, medley maker, soloist, pushes and holds to make each instrument unique.

In real life when you're playing with other musicians you might say something like can you play this line a little differently. You can do the same thing with BiaB but you have to learn what tools are available and how to use them.

One approach that has some merit is to start your song in a DAW to create a guide or scratch track, bring the audio track into Band-in-a-Box and then use Band-in-a-Box to create backing tracks for your audio! Sounds backwards from what you were likely thinking, doesn't it?

Jim Fogle - 2025 BiaB (Build 1128) RB (Build 5) - Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home