PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist I made a dream: Band In a Box on Linux

Dear PGmusic development team & product managers,
After my return of experience of using BandInABox on Vista, I would appreciate a Linux (e.g Ubuntu) version of BandInABox. Is it a dream ?
Your comments are welcome
Gargoyle
http://gargoyle.free.fr/

I wonder how many more users there would be with a Linux version available ??

Also original post from 15 years ago.
A +1 from me, of course, assuming I don't just walk away first ... they also need to fix a lot of quite fundamental issues, IMHO.

Musoline, you got to much time on your hands brotha!

YES ! because I had to quit my day job of creating tracks for artist on a daily basis because of the sheer frustration and constantly crashing RB, so I tried hard every day to get PG in a better place even though it seems to be flogging a dead horse like I did with RealBand.

Hmm. Never considered Linux! Open source competition. Seems impossible but more power to ya. PG Music wants to charge people for switching from Win to Mac whereas it doesn’t cost them anything. I’m out of here. I have been a loyal customer of BIAB since mid-80’s and am current with upgrades, UltraPak etc. and have referred many a new client to PG Music and all they give me is a 20% off coupon while punishing me for the switch? Ha! I’m not having it. If ANYONE can find a way to give them a swift competitive kick, let’s go!

FWIW, whilst Linux itself is OpenSource, not everything on it needs to be and I have a number of paid-for programs on it, a number of paid-for programs under Wine. In any case, OpenSource does not preclude charging for software and a number of companies offer support services for their programs.

BIAB can be made to work under Wine, but it can be quite a bit of work and needs the audio like RealTrack files in .wav format.

I use Linux for around 95% of everything I do. The exceptions are probably just BIAB and my PCB CAD.

I doubt that there would be many more.

This is the latest survey I've seen:
Sorry, Gordon, it's never been 5%.

Anyway, that leaves out a very important statistic: Most of the Linux desktops are business machines. Motorola's few million seats is the reason that Salesforce has a Linux version (I was working for SF's second biggest customer when those first 2.1M seats were sold). How many of those machines would run BIAB if available? Zero? None? Something in between?

Outside of business, Linux is a hobbyist's toy—fun, yes but it's never been more than a niche market. I'm an old UNIX head living smack dab in the Silicon Valley and I've never seen evidence of anything more.

Development and marketing takes about the same effort and resources as it would for Mac or PC. Once released, it would further consume support resources. Running it over WINE or other emulation must still be supported if an official release.

If Steinberg/Yamaha and Presonus/Fender started making serious noise about Linux support, perhaps the rest of the world will take notice. Perhaps if pro music production desktops climbed past the less than 1% they are now, then perhaps maybe. The same hundred people posting on chat boards for years ain't gonna do it, however.

No one is making anything like BIAB for iPadOS. If PG Music is looking for a new market, that's the place to go. Unfortunately, BIAB Audiophile takes about 2.1TB on my M2 Studio — it's going to have to be a lot more resource efficient to make it to the iPad.

Probably true, though also according to statcounter it's often been greatly outnumbered by "unknown".

Surely outside of business, every desktop/tablet OS is essentially a toy. Most users browse the Web, email friends, write the odd note, make the odd spreadsheet whether for calculation or as a "database".

I don't know the numbers but I rather imagine both Android and iPad/iPhone now vastly outnumber all of the desktop environments, probably combined. That's certainly the case in the local U3A "computer groups" in which I assist.

Understandably, Microsoft have fought very hard to try to block/disable/cripple/dissuade Linux use, very often successfully. Why would most people struggle to install Linux on a PC that came with a pre-installed Windows and an EFI BIOS that needs some probing around "under the hood" to get something else installed. It's similar with MS Office ... people subscribe to Office 365 which came 'bundled' rather than try the OpenSource alternatives.

Yes, I would like a Linux version, though I hold out little hope. The reality is that most development is done on Windows, for Windows, and even the Mac versions are only produced with reluctance. In business environments I've often been told that the company standard is Windows and that an end to it.

What I do find frustrating is that I have long found Unix/Linux to be a far more productive environment for software development, though I certainly accept that Microsoft Studio does many things very well, but again it's a deliberate lock-in. Well, they do have a business to run and profits to earn. WSL is almost certainly also a way to make Linux desktops "appear" to be Windows. Again, why wouldn't they?

Most software I've developed on desktops I've done with Linux, making the ports to Windows and Mac part of the process. It's usually fairly easy to do that, though I don't normally get too close to the sound hardware/drivers. I've never had a Mac, but the times I've had my Mac ports run by other people, they've worked as they should, so I've never justified buying one even for bug-fixing.

I don't mind being considered an oddity, in fact sometimes I quite like being an oddity rather than a sheep. But I do find it very frustrating that MS often try to stop me being an oddity ... it's none of their business!

Others' mileages undoubtedly will vary

Gordon.

loved the oddity comment...my wife says im an oddity...lol.
would be a boring world if we were all the same.

om

You can make a wish Biab for Linux, but it won't happen soon. Dream On

Indeed!

I have many times been said to come from a different planet. The more I understand of some of the people from this planet, the more I'm inclined to agree ... maybe I do.

Vincente, Putting an item in the wish list and actually expecting to get are really quite different, especially where PGM is concerned. I have had BIAB running under Wine, but there were gaps and it was a bit frustrating to achieve. In practice, I've now pretty much stopped using BIAB, partly because I'm so rarely in Windows and the reboot to Windows is mostly just a waste of my time, especially so when I have to fight BIAB so hard to do what I want when I get there. Shrug.

talking about linux...

https://www.musicradar.com/news/14-best-linux-plugins-daws

nice article...even big boy daws now on linux..

happiness.

om 🇨🇦 🇬🇧

I have most of those, actually, and also MixBus. I think my BitWig is probably a trial version, but I bought most of the other commercial software and I usually donate for the freebies, quite a few of which are very good. I don't have u-he or Vital.

I've always been able to operate my Ui24R from a browser on Linux and I've also recently discovered how to use a DAW to host plug-ins for it. I hadn't even considered that. I suspect that I could use any plugin that works with jack as that handles all the patching, routing and the like that Windows just doesn't do natively. There are a few patch tools for Windows, though.

This is what Robin over at Ardour.org stated:

Gordon..

my…comments about linux…more of my odd opinions…lol…

..let's say win and mac os didnt exist and only linux os running the software listed in my link above…would this stop the abbey and martin and the beat wells ? i dont think it would. they would think they were in creation heaven compared to the limitations of recording gear in the 60's imho….
..i find it telling that some big daw names now run on linux. Are they odd too ? lol....i think it fair to say however
that some newbies to linux who dont know linux need a one click install approach....then bam...up comes the main screen with all the music apps.
..much as i love the new mac m processor tech…I could run a music rig on a refurb pc for a few hundred bucks…eg very powerful hp Z series or lenovo workstation series….both of which used to be used by big boy studios cos of xeon processor power etc…and in the process spend the 1.5 k saved on a stonking good interface and other gear….
(btw as an aside as you're into tech like me check out the sterling audio p30 mic videos on you tube. it has the gain booster built in..thus usefull re some low gain interface mic pre's..…friendly price too. )
..the daw battle i'm really watching for is on the PI. which already has big name daws running on it. Maybe I'm odd…but..as we see more powerful processors on PI (now PI 5)...i suspect we will see some interesting market situations develop….
..as to phones/tablets (my wife loves her motorola phone)...i remain a sceptic until the tech develops further. the underlying hardware platforms i feel need to evolve further.
I can't see them doing high track and plugin counts and running terabytes of pg content and bb and rb....etc etc.

(btw…mini ryzen pc is still rocking my world…my 3 songs in my sig were done useing it.
(thanks for suggesting mini pc's kudos.)
win or bb or rb boots from the cold in a few secs. and will do more tracks than I will ever use in a song. and amazing ultra ultra low dpc microsecond latency.
fyi it continues to amaze me that people still go out and buy any old pc without testing it and the inherent microsecond latency without adding any gear like sound interface etc. no wonder they often get probs.
it's not wins fault if the users pc has high dpc (and bloat…and a ton of background processes running that might interfere with the primary recording task etc….)...
fyi…here's a site that checks inherent pc dpc latency for loads of pc's.
from highest to lowest latencies.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/DPC-Latency-Ranking-Which-laptops-and-Windows-tablets-offer-the-lowest-latency.504376.0.html

as you can see it's a very interesting chart…highest down to lowest dpc.
maybe someone reading this will find it interesting.)

respect and happiness.

om

I think that Ardour was originally developed on Linux and then ported to Windows and Mac, which would give it a head start on Linux. OpenSource and free also helps! Mixbus is a derivative, so not surprisingly is available on Linux. Reaper's guys noticed and supported the many people running it in Wine and worked on a native version. The native has been out for some years now.

That business of disabling version checks is significant. There have always been quite a few people in corporate environments who disable (or falsify) version reporting because they use a Linux box against company standards. I kind-of did for many years, particularly for things like version control, where the Windows alternatives were just incompetent. In my case I had an agreement to go against 'policy' as I proved my case. A great many people just go with the flow.

I don't really want to write too much here for fairly obvious reasons.

I'll write a quick aside relating very loosely to the Abbey Road & Martin observation ... Most, possibly all, of the cinematic CGI stuff runs on Linux. Nether Windows nor Mac were capable of that in the early days. I'm not sure they are even now.

The reasons that Windows and Mac are most popular desktop OSs is because of the power of marketing and because they're the path of least resistance.

I saw this, but haven't checked it all out:

Here's one reason that I dislike Windows. My notepad PC is dual boot as occasionally I want to run Windows on it. I just did to test something (which didn't work), Windows(8.1) did an update. Now it always reboots to Windows ... it's somehow even bypassing the bios, so even resetting to Linux as the first boot, the PC boots into f***ing Windows! I need my Linux on this PC, no ifs, no buts! I need it urgently!

There are times like this when I could actively get to hate Microsoft and Windows.

Edit ... Rather than bypassing the bios, I wonder if it modified the boot details on the Linux drives. Either way, it has cost this particular Windows installation its life. It's gone!