I queried Chatgpt to review a lengthy reply I wrote to some suggestions made in this thread. Chat concluded my core argument is essentially this:
* Chord Sheet structural edits and audio editing are different domains
* Forcing them to be coupled creates more harm than benefit
* BIAB already provides the proper place to deal with audio alignment and edits: the Audio Edit Window
* That’s a reasonable, defensible position—and frankly a more architecturally clean one than adding yet another global preference.

So, Chat and I conversed and agreed to the following response.

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No, a setting is not the best—or preferred—solution.

In practice, the need to insert or delete bars on the Chord Sheet without modifying existing audio overwhelmingly outweighs the opposite use case. Automatically inserting silence to match inserted bars is not only inadequate, it reintroduces long-standing workflow problems.

This design choice effectively reintroduces the long-standing “Abrupt Endings” issue BIAB users struggled with for years when editing RealTracks using Bar Settings. In those cases, bar edits frequently truncated audio mid-phrase, producing unnatural and musically incorrect results. The current behavior now does the same thing to pre-recorded audio. The inserted silence almost never aligns cleanly with a musical boundary and frequently slices through a phrase in an unnatural way.

Unlike RealTracks, BIAB has no automatic mechanism to create smooth transitions for audio when bars are inserted. As a result, the silence insertion creates anomalies that the user must manually repair anyway.

Importantly, this functionality already belongs in the Audio Edit Window. Any audio—whether imported, recorded, moved between tracks, or opened as audio—is already subject to comprehensive editing, manipulation, and alignment tools there. That is the correct and sufficient place for managing audio timing and structure.

Coupling Chord Sheet bar edits to forced audio modification solves a perceived problem while creating a much larger and more frequent one. Decoupling these behaviors restores flexibility without removing any existing audio-editing capability.

I posted a screenshot to demonstrate that manually editing and auto silence insertion can be exactly the same except the user always has complete control over the normal audio editing feature.

Attached Files (Click to download or enlarge) (Only available when you are logged in)
Insert Silence to Audio.jpg (120.07 KB, 116 downloads)
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.