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.