Thank so much for chiming in!

Noel96 makes wonderful points in the posts earlier in this thread about how to get those pickup notes properly put into the BIAB chordshet measure structure and not conflict with the count-in.

You are so right about having to put in a huge number of bars and I have been tripped up by that 32 bar restriction several times until I figured it out just this last time!

Good point at setting the tempo to 120 and then changing it appropriately (I have done it with the equalize tempo button).

Yes, indeed I do the measure lines manually for all the downbeats by pressing the L key repeatedly throughout the whole song. That works really well and then I make micro adjustments if I have made small errors.

Noel96 made the important point of adding a safety bar line at the very beginning of the silent period at the beginning of the imported audio to "protect" this area from BIAB chopping off some audio information if it screws up the count-in. See his link to the PDF he has made on this process in his comments earlier in this post.

Yes I have now realized that I can do the splitting after the adjustments in ACW which I greatly prefer now.

I an just now in communication with PG about what proper destination to choose in the splitter drop down menu for destination. It appears that if one chooses "Audio", the stems will start populating there and below and the imported audio track will be ERASED. If one wants to keep the original audio, one should choose "Utility #1" to start the populating of the stems. Clearly this is what I am going to do.

Thanks for the back and forth. It was helpful.