Today I finally bought 2025. Same old story. Same old styles, all of them (or almost). And collecting all the new 2025 ones, essential or not. Same old bugs, almost all of them, and collecting a good bunch of new 2025 ones that of course I do not need or appreciate.

I just fired my first song testing a random style (_HEATWAV.STY). Well, it sounds so good! Then I tried to use micro-chords in bar 8. This did not work as expected (OK, possibly user error). I just reverted to continue my quick evaluation. One track (Horn Section) failed miserably in the 1st 8 bars! Closed. Opened again, the track is still broken. But 8 bars later this track, playing the same chord progression works OK. Next chorus is OK. So yes, rendering the song is now faster... but it fails. Possibly I can live with this by some ingenious copy and paste... Therefore I will waste my time in different, unexpected tasks instead of living with the older bugs.

When I fired BiaB for the first time I had dozens of errors scanning VST3's. Fortunately my system did not crash. There is no user error, I just happen to have certain plugins with 2 versions, VST2 and VST3 IN_DIFFERENT_FOLDERS! No other application has the slightest problem with that. I learnt long ago the hard way that forcing to use complex VST's inside BiaB sometimes resulted in crashes, so I personally prefer to export to Reaper and use VSTs (or VST3's or whatever) in a much more robsut environment. Not a deal beaker for me, but definitely a bad experience in the first minute of use. Come on, this has not been tested in a real computer intended for music production!

The downloader was fast... AND ALSO FAULTY. I downloaded whole Audiophile in some 4 or 5 hours. I cannot complain about speed. But 3 or 4 out of the 46 files failed. OK, these things happen (almost never when I use other downloaders managing equally large files, but let's say I was lucky before).

I retried and for some reason most retrials did not work... Visibly, but actually they were still downloading in the background, causing a terribly incoherent information on the downloader application. I retried like 4 or 5 times each problem file so the downloader tried to download multiple versions with different names. I finally found it inspecting my files and the traffic: The app was stubbornly downloading copies ( realtracks001-448-flac.23.7z.part, realtracks001-448-flac.23.7z (1).part, realtracks001-448-flac.23.7z (2).part.....). Information on the downloader windows got inconsistent. When I manually determined that all the pieces had at least one copy, I stop the process trying to re-install so many multiple copies and fortunately everything was properly installed. So I succeeded, but not really the kind of software to pass an IT engineering degree.

In the next few holidays I will try to find if the new DAW features (especially tempo changing and no need to store rendered files for Reaper) will compensate for the new bugs. If not, I think I will return BiaB in the next few days. Today I have ZERO hope that old or new bugs will get fixed, I already reported and debugged the exact trigger for some bugs in 2024... and they are exactly the same. My totally uninformed guess is that resources have been 120% busy trying to offer new fancy features when coding for MacOS (that now happens to be a lot of extra work compared to a few years ago).

The situation is not getting any better year after year. And I totally agree, what happens with all the many bugs reported in 2024?

Last edited by parapente; 12/27/24 11:23 AM.