I'm having a problem right now that I don't recall having before. I'm browsing through a collection of Band in the Box format tunes I've collected over the years, and I've noticed that many of them will get stuck on a melody instrument before I can finally call up a tune that will replace with one that is supposed to go with that piece.

I've looked through all the menus I know to look through and I'm looking for something simple -- like a box that needs to be checked or unchecked so it won't keep calling up the same instrument and replacing whatever the melody instrument is supposed to be for these songs. And yes, I'm sure that they're being replaced, especially when I'm selecting oddball instruments, like English horn or bassoon, and see how, piece after piece, they're stuck on that instrument for the melody, until finally I'll call up a piece that unsticks it. And I don't know what it is about the new piece that gets it to stop, either.

Any ideas here?

HI Michael

Well I am guessing this will depend on if or not, we are talking about a melody made from a realtrack or a melody based on midi voices.
You could get a problem if the original song called for a midi voice that you don’t have, this would assume either the original was using gm and you are not or visa versa. Or that it required a higher bank voice from a pat file and synth that has more than just GM originally.
I say the above because, if BIAB cant find a midi voice for a track of the same patch details. It will not send anything to that synth on that track /channel. This will result in that track using the last voice sent to that synth on that track channel. Thus as you say stuck on its old voice.
The next time you send it a voice it can manage it changes to, it and comes unstuck!
Hope that is clear, and not too confusing.

Mike

Hi Mike, thanks for the response but I don't think that's it. This group of songs I'm browsing through right now date back to the early days of MIDI type I and all the other instruments are plain vanilla types, so I don't think that's it. And the eventual song that comes along and unsticks things is also from this same group of tunes, dating back to the same time period. So I still suspect there's something somewhere that needs to get checked or unchecked, if I could only find it.

The situation is only mildy annoying -- it's easy enough to change the voice to one I prefer, but sometimes curiosity gets the better of me and I wonder what the original selection was.

Something I just noticed -- if I select a song from this group from the "Open" folder, it appears to load the instrument that the song's melody was set up for. It appears that I'm only running into this problem when I'm selecting songs from the Songpicker. Makes me wonder now if there's a setting in the Songpicker I've missed. Nope, nothing I can find. I suppose this is yet another peculiarity of BiaB. Or at least the way it chooses to run on my system. Deus ex Machina and all.

Hmmm
As a mater of interest which midi synth or vst /dxi are you using at the moment to play back these files.
Mike

It doesn't matter, I've seen the same thing. These files are from old archives from around the internet, some of the songs are from the early 90's so obviously they're all midi. All I do is simply change the midi patch in the mixer. Many of those old song are really bad because someone step entered the melody and didn't know what they're doing, others tried to be a player and used a two finger hunt and peck method on a controller keyboard to "play" the melody and it sucks. Many also use an inappropriate style but if it's a song I can't find anywhere else I'll change the style, change the instruments, add a few RT's, clean up the melody and make it into something half decent.

Bob

Bob, well I'm glad to read what I've been running into is "normal." Incidentally, I do exactly what you do when I run across a salvageable arrangement. I've been collecting BiaB tunes for almost 20 years now, and I have amassed about 20,000 of them. The lion's share are songs I've never heard of before and most arrangements are just plain garbage, but there are a few where the creator did a decent job. These are the ones I'll tweak until I feel somewhat satisfied as to their sound. Often, I'll begin substituting the MIDI voices for realtracks, or I'll substitute the original style with one that incorporates realtracks, so I can end up with something that's actually not so bad. Some of the tunes, especially some of the bossas, I'll print out the melody and work it out on guitar, with the goal of replacing the melody with a for-real guitar part.

Mike, because I'm just browsing the files, I'm using Coyote to drive the MIDI parts.