Today I wasted a few more hours trying to determine in which areas is BiaB 2025 could be any better than 2024. For me. I do appreciate that for some people some new features could be essential. I just want the basic functionality to be accessible and usable.

I ordered the full downloadable Audiophile update. So all my audio files are now .flac. I decided to keep my old "Drums" and "RealTracks" folders just in case I needed to revert to Audiophile 2024. So I renamed these 2 folders BEFORE installing the full Audiophile 2025. Everything is brand new, but I do not have any .wma or .wav Realtrack accessible to BiaB.

BiaB standalone works. Same old bugs and a bunch of new ones. Perhaps more usable than 2024. No need for pre-rendering is a definitive advantage.

Then I gave an opportunity to the DAW plugin. It simply doesn't work with .flac only files! I cannot put the instructions to render audio into Reaper if audio is in the new format!

I could not believe it. I renamed folders to have my older .wav and .wma files accessible and now DAW plugin works. Much worse than last year. There is zero advantage in the pre-rendering because this functionality is not there. Reverted to 2025 .flac tracks and same thing, does not work. At all. When I click "send to Reaper" it takes moderate time (like normal time to generate all wavs), then it generates "charts" (on the right side), then I get a message saying "There are currently no WAV or MIDI tracks to play. Would you like to generate tracks to play in the plugin?. Then again.

Well, this is when I tick "Use Reaper Instructions". If I also tick "Render Wav and instructions", then it is even funnier. It takes the time to generate the .wav files in folder G:\bb\BBPlugin\SavedTracks but when sending to Reaper it starts sending DOZENS of empty tracks (about 3 each second). Each one opening a window asking to also import or not tempo maps. After opening some ~100 tracks and emerging windows, Reaper crashes (Congratulations, this is quite an achievement!).

If I revert to wav + wma it works like last year. Pre-auditioning is unusable (it was usable in 2024 version, I suspect it's an incompatibility with sampling rate but I won't debug it). But rendered files look more or less like last year.

.flac real tracks are properly installed and they work as expected in BiaB standalone (my expectations are not too high). So the problem is not related to installation. In fact the DAW plugin put all the correct audio infomration in G:\bb\BBPlugin\SavedTracks, which means .flac files were found and used.

To me it looks as if none in PGMusic took the time to test 2025 DAW plugin with the default Audiophile install (.flac, without any WMA or WAV). But I do not care at this point what's the root cause. My fault? Possibly.

Finally I decided to test an alternative method: DAW Plugin Standalone. Again it does not go well with .flac-only files. If I tick to generate "WAV instructions", nothing is generated. If I tick "WAV and instructions" it works, of course it stores new garbage in G:\bb\BBPlugin\SavedTracks. But (as the plugin) the audio engine does not work well. There are so many clicks, apparently regular (not totally random) distanced some 1/16 notes (I guess the length of audio chunks in BiaB). The rendered files in G:\bb\BBPlugin\SavedTracks are OK, but the plugin (standalone or accessed through a DAW) is full of such clicks.

My system is rock-solid for ALL of the many audio apps I use (including BiaB standalone and BiaB plugin 2024). Up to >200 tracks in orchestral pieces. No problem mixing a few CPU-heavy synths with some 100 orchestral tracks. But BiaB plugin got my system clicking as hell for the first time in so long time. Again quite an acievement.

For the record, the pluging (inside Reaper) uses the ASIO driver (6.4ms, PCI card) and the "standalone plugin" uses Windows driver at 10ms. Both are perfectly fine for anything I throw inside Reaper (using ASIO) or Windows (most standalone synths in my system are set to use Windows by default).

I think that's too much for me. BiaB 2024 (combined with some scripts to interface Reaper) is good enough to do the job when I need a tool like this. But learning how to use a future BiaB 2025 once the main bugs are solved is not worth the time investment when other tools simply work. Life is too short, I want to make some music in my spare time. If BiaB works for other people, I am happy for them but my experience as an user has been terrible.