Just in case you don't understand what Mac is saying he's perhaps American. I'll tell you in Canadian. MIDI is a standard. It was a huge effort. It's very old technology. And the Midi standard does NOT include chords eh? Like they took off and did it like wrong, it's a whacked job. I think it was mostly American. Had it been Canadian it would have been 5% less, and had health care. As it is it's sort of dying.

Many people cling to it. But like all standards it's too standard. So you have most companies going in other directions.

When your big Yamaha's are too busy trying to make snow machines, you know their midi stuff is going to suffer.


So if you don't like how MIDI works it might be for sale eh?

Until then, Band in a Box was just to make music. The printing feature was an add on. To bad troff wasn't ported to run in Win 7/64.

Perhaps MusicXML support could be a solution. It's a widely accepted standard for music notation programs, support chord symbols and many other features, and would allow easy communication between BIAB and most notation programs.

It's interesting that in the PG Music online store you can buy a BIAB / Finale bundle. There seems to be some sort of relationship already between these two players.

Honestly, I don't really care how they share the information, MIDI, MusicXML, pseudo-scanned lead sheet or something proprietary that they develop between themselves.

There just has to be a better way, and probably it isn't BIAB. Let's let BIAB produce the music, and Finale print it.

Like a lot of the posters in this thread, I've been with BIAB since the time there were version numbers rather than years, with PowerTracks as the complementary product. Over the years, I've created many arrangements of commerical and original music using BIAB/RB, and have been glad to see the new features available with each update.

However, like Dave, I've been "tolerating" the need to hand-modify leadsheets, and have been stymied attempting to quickly create PDFs of the final marked-up material, when something like a quick key change is requested by the vocalist. I agree that Finale and Sibellius are the professional tools of choice for such tasks, but without the ability for BIAB/RB to export the arrangements, lyrics, varied rhythms and tempos, etc., I feel that this "ignored" piece of BIAB/RB will remain that way forever.

Someone mentioned MusicXML, which from my perspective, provides the perfect import/export medium because it includes the performance info (complete Midi data), plus the layout and publication information that is not represented by Midi. What is needed is an export tool that can parse the BIAB/RB file formats and produce the corresponding MusicXML files. Because Finale and Sibellius can import MXML, this provides a solution for getting arrangements out of BIAB and into a music editing tool for publication.

I doubt that PG Music has time to write such an export tool, but since there are likely some technical users who could do so if they had documented BIAB/RB file formats, it shouldn't take too long to implement this approach. (There is always the possibility that PG Music is unwilling to cede any portion of their product's feature set development to outside sources, in which case we can never expect to see officially-supported export methods from PG until they feel like doing so internally.)

Having studied up a bit on the MGx file contents, one additional "improvement" in the BIAB/RB file formats would be that some of the layout and printing settings are not saved with each song file, but rather are kept in the "current default" settings. If PG MUsic could let the MGx files contain a bit more of this type info, it would help in more-completely porting arrangements to MusicXML.

Thus, this thread is something of a challenge to PG Music as to whether or not they will be forthcoming with enough details about file formats to allow export (and hopefully import) with BIAB/RB and public-domain formats like MusicXML. I think it's realistic to recognize that each BIAB/RB release will have possible changes to the file format, but as long as the changes are documented, it shouldn'g be a problem.

Anyone at PG Music care to comment?

I find the previous post quite condescending. It seems that every few weeks someone wants to rewrite the software. And it seems, people who use music software seem to understand how to write code, in any language.

EVERYONE wants perfect leadsheets, printed in a fashion that any publishing house would be proud of the kerning, and the whole software process understands you number of stanzas and your lyrics and the need to print 4 bars and all that stuff, AND they want it to have the sfz etc in the right spot and to Sound! Wonderful.

The throwdown challenge. I'd find that insulting.

I had to put up with this attitude for years with my POS system. I remember hearing nothing from a client for 2 years, and then a call ..."please help". My Unix system was in the back room, the terminals still working but all pulled out of place. A 12th grader genius friend knew everything about computers. DOS. Did not understand that there were 4 terminals and cash drawers and ONE inventory and computer. He put in a PC, it did nothing. He added 2 terminals, 6 months later they wouldn't even work. This went on all the time.

The users, put their proposed items in the wishlist. The development team decides based on market conditions, users, demands, timelines, difficulty and other considerations what to implement based on the wishlist.

Perfect leadsheets. Imagine. I have RealBook stuff, it's garbage. Full of 'stuff'. Missing things. Yet people pay good money for it.

I have used 3 different programs to print music. Every one of them misses something, or is too difficult to understand. 10 hours or more per page. Great fun.

Someone please tell me, how long it takes, from scratch, to enter something like "Satin Doll", so it looks just awesome, with 4 verses, intro, outro, and put in some solos. I'd like to know from the viewpoint of an average user, no importing a midi file and just putting a title on it, I want a bass track, a piano track, a melody, and if you are using such a great program a proper drum track.

Thanks.

Yikes - everyone must have cabin fever or something, so easily set off by this printing thing. I've followed John and Jazzmandan in these forums for years and have not seen such energetic responses to a forum post that they disagreed with. But this isn't about personalities, so let me restate part of my previous post with more "sensitivity" ;0).

First, there is a lot of music software available, some public-domain and some from private companies like PGMusic. Many, but not all, of the creators of these apps will acknowledge that their products have great strengths and capabilitiese, but also have some areas where the decision has been made to limit development and improvement. If you look at many of the apps, the developers made provisions for linking or coupling or importing/exporting with the other apps, particularly where another app could supply needed functionality.

For example, I think that PGMusic made an smart choice by not developing their own midi synth, but by integrating their product with synths developed by other companies (i.e. coyotte, Roland VSC, etc.). I'm glad that PG has spent their development efforts on the features that make BIAB/RB unique and useful (and since I spent 12 years in the 80's and 90's developing wave-table and modeling synths used in major commercial products, I know it's not something one can just pick up and easily create great-sounding synths).

My first post was in response to @Dave's request that PG develop better printing capabilitites for BIAB, and I was saying that rather than having PG spend time on improving the printing, all they really need to do is not hinder others who are developing export and import tools for BIAB/RB that would accomplish this.

Right now, I don't see that PG is trying to hinder such development, but it now requires considerable effort and time for an outside software engineer to reverse-engineer the song files that BIAB/RB produces so that import/export tools can be developed. Thus, my suggestion that PG make a small effort to make such development easier and less error-prone by making details of the file format available. I can't see there is much risk for them to do so, probably entailing the release of a few "header files" with the file format definitions, without disclosing their own intellectual property that makes BIAB/RB what it is.

The "challenge" I spoke of wasn't meant literally, but rather to see if PG would rise to the occassion and make a bit of information available for download by developers. There are already several tools of varying quality that import BIAB files into other products, both commercial and open-source, but these could be higher quality if the file formats did not have to be guessed at.

As Jazzmandan says, this is a user-supported forum and PG doesn't openly reply very often. However, it's likely the support folks (yea!!!) at PG do read these and can pass stuff like this back to PG. I know that the wish forums are the proper place for such stuff (and my request for opening the file formats has been up there for several years), but it seemed that this thread would be a good "use case" to substantiate the need.

My hope is that this thread dies with a quick hand-mute, and those who are interested in developing export/import tools for things such as improved printing arrange to talk directly with the developers. Those users who don't care about printing or exporting can go on helping others with their sage advice, as they have been doing for years. Sorry if I offended some of you.

Please feel free to take this off-line if further admonition is deemed necessary.

Jerry Schneider
Career hardware/software/firmware/music engineer, and member of Hot Club of Boulder, a gypsy-jazz-swing quartet.

I'd love to be able to export the chord sheet into Sibelius and be able to to do notation editing in there.

Support for Music XML export has been discussed here over the last several years, and it would be great to have. However, I have served as a beta tester for a music notation software program for many years, and their XML import implementation was buggy. Apparently it isn't as easy to program as they thought.

MusicXML isn't the slam dunk that it should be, but it's the best thing that's currently out there. It would be nice to have.

I think that PG Music have at least 3 take aways here.

One: fix what they have. Clean up the bugs in their notation printing function

Two: Consider strongly working with Finale since there seems already to be some connection, to allow a seemless transfer of a BIAB song including all the elements to a superior print engine

Three: Consider providing a file, probably in MXML, that can be imported into any music software that supports the protocol for printing.

Let's hope PG Music is listening. This thread has shown that there are many of us that want to have better lead sheet printing, and we tend to agree that BIAB probably isn't the best tool for the job. Let BIAB create the arrangement, and pass off the printing to a product that can do justice to the notation

May yer sfz get supinated. Sometimes times are tough.