Originally Posted by AurealiusB
This specific behavior (the green button playing the original style instead of the highlighted one) appears to be a point of contention in the current 2026 builds. Even if the manual says it "previews the song," if it isn't swapping the engine over to the new style for that preview, it’s essentially just a "Play" button for your current track, which makes it useless for auditioning.

It’s a classic "feature vs. bug" debate. When developers say, "it's not an issue," they usually mean "the code is doing what we told it to do" (which is play the song), ignoring the fact that it's not doing what the user—or even their own manual—expects.

For long-time users (like me) who point out that "The Manual says X, but the Software does Y," the harder it is for development to categorize it as a "user preference" rather than a functional oversight. Hey, I was once a programmer folks! That said, I will use Ghost files as a workaround but this is definitely a functional oversight.


I disagree the new StylePicker is useless for auditioning.

Comments about what the manual says:

AurealiusB: The BIAB 2026 Manual (PDF) says this on page 74 (per the StylePicker):
"You can also audition a style by actually playing it over the current chord progression of your song.
The green arrow button plays your song with the currently highlighted style."

Noel96: On page 74, the instruction manual says: "The green arrow button plays your song with the currently highlighted style."

As quoted above and shown in the Screenshot of page 74 of the 2026 manual, the manual doesn't say it "previews the song,". Both you and Noel96 quote the manual to explicitly say, 'plays your song'. The wording is confirmed in the screenshot.

The StylePicker is doing what developers programmed it to do, which is play the song in audition mode. The redesigned StylePicker eliminates the need for Ghost files to workaround. It eliminates the need to redesign the program to create and activate undo (which doesn't currently exist) for the StylePicker. Some forum members and users may recall older versions of the two play buttons (Duplicates the Chord Sheet 'Play' and 'Generate and Play' Buttons) were restricted in audition mode to the default of generating and auditioning only the first 4 bars of the Chordsheet in order to create quick auditions. Later, the number of bars auditioned was adjustable, but the audition was still constrained to the beginning of the song.

The main question of this thread is only the green play button and it's function or functions. Different from earlier 'play' and 'play and generate' buttons, the StylePicker itself is expanded, upgraded and improved and that redesign in itself indicates a more sophisticated, intuitive (because of user preference and customizing) advanced and powerful tool.

Your last post served as a prompt to me to have Chatgpt assist me in producing a discussion detailing some of the advanced techniques, theory behind 'new' uses for the StylePicker and examples. Ignore the tone and pointed questions to Chat some may take offense to. These are to prompt questions intended to direct input from Chat not to be constrained to it's internal 'learned' biased answers it generates generically from its training. A post of this discussion with Chat will follow soon.

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BIAB 2026:RB 2026, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.