With the vocal stem playing, the tempo of the enabled style is altered to fit the 2/4 bar in a bar of 4, which sounds terrible. However, I did as you suggested, changed the measure to 2 beats in ACW, but then had to go to Bar Settings to fix the "Change the Tempo by xx", where I changed it to zero. That worked.

What I'm having problems with is putting together a demo of New Orleans tunes that have more of a two-beat feel, but I want to change to a 16th-note shuffle in 4. When I define the bars in ACW, counting 4 makes the measures twice as long. I go back and try to tighten up the barlines with the vocal, but the vocals may be a little loose timing-wise, due to originally being sung over a two-beat feel. I get go through the whole tune, getting the barlines to match as closely to the vocal performance as I can, but then apply Equalize Tempo, to try to match tempos between two different songs that I want to put together.

Doing this seems to get the vocals to sound late and off from the groove. My idea is to find a vocal phrase that comes in lazy and to move the barline to where the vocal starts. This may make the rhythm section elongate and tempo sound slower, but then I Equalize Tempo to tighten them up to proper tempo.

This isn't necessarily working as well as I would like. Vocal stem gets behind the beat a lot, and this whole process has somehow completely gotten the Master Stem and the Vocal Stem out of synch with each other. I'm muting the Master Stem anyway, only using the Vocal Stem, but I'm guessing that there might be a better way to do this. The vocalists sound drunk because they're all over the place, phrasing-wise.

What to do?

Band-in-a-Box® for Windows
Version 2025 (1128)
64 bit application
RealBand 2025 (5)
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Intel Core i7 4800MQ @ 2.70GHz
Haswell 22nm Technology
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)