I have had this issue for a long time and a week of dedicating myself to solving the problem has not worked.
The issue: all BIAB playback has pops and clicks and artifacts. This happens regardless of which: audio drivers are used (ASIO, WAS or MME), what bit rate, sample rate, buffer size is selected. This happens regardless of track type (RT or MIDI), regardless of style, regardless of plug-ins used, and regardless of BIAB year (I've tried 2023 and 2024) or build (including 1109). I can confirm this issue is not present in any other audio application I have on my system. including Real Band. I can open a BIAB file in RealBand and everything plays perfectly with no noise.

Yes, I've returned to factory settings many times. No joy. Bought and returned a new audio interface thinking it might be my hardware. No joy there either.

I can confirm this issue is limited to playback from within Band In A Box. Tracks generated in BIAB are clean and there's no noise. Yes I can move tracks elsewhere and they are clean. However If I use BIAB to play anything, that anything plays back with clicks and pops.

One more data point: I was listening watching a speech on YouTube this morning and opened BIAB at the same time. Immediately I heard the same kind of noise now affecting the YouTube audio. When I closed BIAB the audio signal that was playing in my browser returned to a clean sound. Further testing with other apps confirms the following: Whenever BIAB is open on my desktop, ALL audio playback contains these pops and clicks. When BIAB is closed, there are no playback issues whatsoever.

Motherboard/Internal Sound Card Audio is turned off in my system BIOS, so the motherboard soundcard is not in play here.

In summary, I can't play BIAB with clean playback, and can't have BIAB open when using any other audio producing app.

Help! Why is this happening with BIAB but not with Real Band?

Bruce Hook - Soprano, Alto and Tenor Saxes
BIAB 2023 UltraPak | Intel i7 | Mackie ProFX10v3 Audio Interface | 1TB SSD | Reaper DAW
| Akai EWI 5000 | M-Audio Oxygen Pro 49