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Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production
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Time will tell. But likely it will not take much time to come to a conclusion. Stay tuned.
BIAB – 2026, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud.
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No keyboard, brass, woodwind or strings? And subscription only?  BiaB keep moving forward 
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677BiaB 2026 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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As of right now, no. In the future, maybe. It will depend on things like will there be an increase in instruments , an increase in styles, etc. I think right now Tonalic will attract young people because it is slick and the ease of use. One thing I do like about Tonalic is how the leading tones change with a new chord. If this is true with all instruments then the transitions between chords will be very smooth; that is something IMHO PGM can/should improve. YMMV
My boss calls me "the computer".
Nothing to do with intelligence. I go to sleep if left unattended for 15 minutes.
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
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Ooooooo, they got Brent Mason......
But I hate subscription based software.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.comAdd nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both. The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production
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Joined: Oct 2008
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I'm looking forward to trying it when it gets added to my Celemony account. It is an Essentials version but mine to keep. For the subscription I'm not sure you would be able to use anything you've downloaded if you cancel the sub. The stuff you download may be tied exclusively to the Tonalics program. That's where their tech wizardry is.
Fivehands
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I don't know about the limits of the essential version but the rest of them all you have to do is bounce the tracks and save them and they are yours forever even if you don't continue with subscribing. You can also buy a 30 day sub from music dealers as much as you want.
BIAB 2026 Ultrapack- Studio One Pro 7 Windows 11, Mac Mini M4 with Logic Pro 11, Melodyne Studio, Luna Pro
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I do hope that if/when someone actually subscribes that they will share their experiences here.
Maybe even share an arrangement or two?
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677BiaB 2026 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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Competition? Yes. (plucked instruments, easy of use, quality)
Size of the library? Not for a now.
Is competition good? Yes, It could be the strongest driver for innovation in BIAB
Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).
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Competition? No ======> Plucked instruments, easy of use, Limited in scope, quantity, complexity, and versatility
Competition? No ======> Size of the library? Not for a now.
Competition? No ======> No keyboard, brass, woodwind or strings. And subscription only
Is competition good? Yes, But Tonalic is not a driver for innovation in BIAB. It's a mild, BIAB DAW Plug-in competitor which is a light, partial version of BIAB.
BIAB is light years ahead in instruments, arrangement capability, RealTracks Library, Styles Library, MidiSuperTracks, MultiStyles, Playable RealTracks, as well as features, tools, processes and audio production capability for education, practice and learning. The list could go on and on....
BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.
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Expert
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Expert
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Nope. Tonalic is AI manipulation of samples which explains both the subscription and being browser based. Access to the massive data centers required for that much horsepower is not free. Even if you had a $32,000 NVIDIA tower or a quartet of M4/M3 Ultra Mac Studios linked together via USB 4.2 cables at 2/3 the price, you still couldn’t render the files as quickly. Although it’s been possible to link multiple Macs to combine them as one over 10GB Ethernet since 2017 (Apple showed 20 Minis crunching a single animation file at the 2018 WWDC), macOS 26.2 Tahoe has introduced new protocols for doing this over USB 4.2/TB5 making it much more efficient rivaling the NVIDIA tower. Even still, the studios are now rendering these massive files over the internet because it’s faster. No one is expecting Celemony to ever release this as a stand-alone product. Waiting for my free version. That could certainly happen. Celemony could certainly follow the same model as other browser based AI companies by releasing a “free” or low cost version including a few GBs of use and charging for additional usage by making you buy “credits”. Many companies have gone to this model. One of the AI stand-alone apps that I own is ACE Studio. Rendering a simple 3 minute, acapella 4-part choral demo can take well over an hour on my Studio M2 Ultra with 192GB Integrated RAM. Since these are demos only, my clients can forgive the fact that the “singers” don’t pronounce English or Latin as well as I would like. Fortunately, it wasn’t all that expensive. If I anticipate more of this work into next year, I might spring for the upcoming M5 Ultra with 1TB Integrated RAM.
BIAB 2025 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5
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Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production
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Posts: 3,858
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Competition? No ======> Plucked instruments, easy of use, Limited in scope, quantity, complexity, and versatility
Competition? No ======> Size of the library? Not for a now.
Competition? No ======> No keyboard, brass, woodwind or strings. And subscription only
Is competition good? Yes, But Tonalic is not a driver for innovation in BIAB. It's a mild, BIAB DAW Plug-in competitor which is a light, partial version of BIAB.
BIAB is light years ahead in instruments, arrangement capability, RealTracks Library, Styles Library, MidiSuperTracks, MultiStyles, Playable RealTracks, as well as features, tools, processes and audio production capability for education, practice and learning. The list could go on and on.... What you may be missing is there are almost certainly many BIAB users (most?) who do not care about 90% of the things you mentioned; I am definitely one of those! To me, as a quick seeker of great guitar, bass and drum tracks, this looks like a serious competitor that will only get better. And I would bet they won't wait a full year between upgrades! Education, practice and learning are something I would suspect are not widely used BIAB features; when I bought the tutorial paks they appeared to have not been updated for over a decade. There are soooo many learning resources that are much easier to obtain and use than BIAB. As for being "light years ahead in instruments" I will admit BIAB has a LOT of instruments but honestly, they are starting to sound a lot alike! I mean, how many times can you hire Brent to play jangly country guitar and not start to sound the same?  And so many of the instruments, at least a third, target music genres the vast majority have little interest in. Keys are available everywhere in advanced products like EZ Keys. Every other instrument you mentioned is also quite available and quite good in a variety of VSTi libraries. Finally, the BIAB search feature truly sucks so finding something in my massive pile of RealTracks is only getting more difficult with each release! As for subscription vs. purchase, I too am not fond of subscription-based software. But, form a purely financial perspective, my cost to own and upgrade BIAB has cost me more than $300 per year since 2012 so the cost of this subscription would not at all be out of line for what I already invest in BIAB. Obviously, as a BIAB deep power user, you are less inclined to see this product as a competitor. But, as a BIAB weakling, I welcome competition that provides just the tracks I need without 500 years of accumulated dust and grime and tacked-on features I'll never use!
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Thanks for your response, John. I appreciate your perspective, and we actually agree on more than might appear at first glance.
“What you may be missing is there are almost certainly many BIAB users (most?) who do not care about 90% of the things you mentioned; I am definitely one of those!”
I agree and this actually supports my point.
It’s common to see users say they only use 10–15% of BIAB’s capabilities. The issue is that many of the strongest claims about BIAB being “challenged” by AI tools or Tonalic are coming from users who don’t use, or aren’t aware of, the majority of what BIAB already does.
I regularly see wishlist requests for features BIAB has had for years. When someone evaluates a new product without knowing what BIAB is already capable of, it becomes difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
“To me, as a quick seeker of great guitar, bass and drum tracks, this looks like a serious competitor…”
That’s fair speculation, and I don’t dispute that Tonalic may suit your workflow well. Especially if your priority is quick guitar-based parts.
From what’s been demonstrated so far, though, Tonalic is operating in a very narrow slice of what BIAB covers. Plucked guitars and arpeggiated patterns are fine if that’s your lane, but that’s a small subset of BIAB’s instrument depth, arrangement logic, and stylistic variety.
“Education, practice and learning are something I would suspect are not widely used BIAB features…”
BIAB has long been respected in educational settings. It’s not a replacement for a teacher or YouTube. Just like YouTube isn’t a replacement for a teacher. It is a powerful learning environment. The User Showcase alone is full of examples of musicians who dramatically improved their skills through BIAB use. Floyd Jane and Rodney Gene’s reworked “Wrong Mailbox” is a good recent example.
“As for being ‘light years ahead in instruments’… they are starting to sound a lot alike!”
This one made me smile—especially given that Brent Mason is a featured artist in Tonalic, and he appears in one of the Tonalic videos linked here in the forum. In effect, you’d be subscribing to an artist already included with BIAB.
Beyond that, instrument count isn’t just about quantity. It’s about arrangement context, substitution logic, medley construction, genre adaptability, and compositional scope. That’s where BIAB operates on a different level.
“As for subscription vs. purchase…”
Subscription versus ownership is ultimately a personal choice. Financially, if someone only uses a small fraction of BIAB, Tonalic might feel like better value for them. I think that’s perfectly reasonable.
“As a BIAB weakling, I welcome competition…”
Ironically, being a deep BIAB user puts me in a better position to evaluate competition, not a worse one.
There’s a 19-minute Tonalic tutorial discussed elsewhere in the forum. Around the 6:30 mark, the narrator demonstrates editing a highlighted section where the algorithm alters data outside the selection to “intelligently humanize” the performance.
That exact behavior was recently criticized here as a BIAB “bug” during partial regeneration, when in fact it’s BIAB doing the same thing, smoothing transitions and preserving musical continuity. That feature has existed for years.
This is really my core point:
When 90% of BIAB’s functionality is ignored or misunderstood, it becomes easy to misinterpret what competing software is doing, or to mistake long-standing BIAB features for innovations elsewhere.
There’s nothing in that Tonalic tutorial that BIAB can’t already do. BIAB does with more instruments, more stylistic depth, more arrangement intelligence, and more compositional control.
Tonalic may be a fun, focused tool, and competition is always healthy, but it’s far closer to a specialized guitar oriented idea generator than a true peer to BIAB.
BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.
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Charlie, you make excellent points but my needs/interests are different than yours. It is not that I don't know about the 90% of BIAB that I don't use, rather, it is that I simply don't need that functionality. Just because Elon Muskrat can build a self-driving truck doesn't mean that my old Ford isn't perfect for me!
I'm not even advocating for this new product but I do think a simpler product that delivers what RealTracks provide will be very serious competition. I have even said in the past that if Toontrack were to release a "studio" product that used their drums, bass and keys, along with a new guitar module, in a similar fashion as BIAB they'd have a killer competitive product.
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Charlie your right to compare it to the BIAB plugin, not BIAB.
Both tools can be used together.
One is far superior to the other but one has more instruments. (for now)
Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).
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