I'm hoping for super intelligent new melodists. A super dooper Uilleann pipe. Some Classical Crossover and a more reliable plugin for all Major DAW's.

Also, the option to be able to change sample rates in any of the software that BB uses and in BB itself.

Hurry up crew. Need some pre Chrissy fun.

What say you?

....... Oh and more Midi pleeeeeeeeeeeeze.

Oh, I'd swap midis for RTs any day - but then I'm an analogue kind of guy. Lol.
RTs and RDs that were more British or European in style would be nice. 'Retro' RDs would be great - thinking 60s and 70s drum xtyles.

A SUPER BIG +1

Mal, can you elaborate on the sample rates wish?

i would like for 2022.
1. my wishes posted over the past few years implemented.
2. the pg 90 buk pen drive with biab and rb on....
run like a bunny rabbit on a PI computer.

laugh at me if you wish, but i'm gonna go out on a limb
and say if pi gets an even more powerfull processor,
and stays under 100 buks, it could be a daw disruptive force. bear in mind already reaper and traction waveform and other music software works on pi...thus i suspect some music daw developers might agree that pi might become a force.

@Matt

Well I use an Audient iD22 Matt and us zero latency freaks often get messages like 'you must have the same sample rates in the prog you are using and the external sound module. BB kind of insists everything is done in 44.1 KHz 16 bit. I always work in 96 KHz 64 or 32 bit. Very frustrating at times. Cubase changes automatically when it notices a change in rates but not all DAW's do and it certainly renders the BB plugin useless unless I revert back to 44 KHz etc.

Complex world aint it? :-)

Mal.

Thanks Mal. I understood this. I just thought it would help to clarify its importance for others.

+1 for support of other choices for sample and bit rate

Same here
+1

My specs Matt.

Win 10 Pro x64

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

MB: X570 Aurus Ultra 16 Core

Memory: 128 GB DDR 4 Corsair Vengeance Pro

Display: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT

4 x 2 TB SSD

4 x 12 TB HDD

Sound: Audient iD-22 (External), Asus Xonar Essence STX (Internal)

2 WIDE SCREEN LG Monitors.

My wife hits me Mario if I buy her prezzies. She says she just wants me. :-)

Mal/Matt.
i too am an audient user. in fact i cant complain so far useing the audient for a few months now. hasnt given me one problem. and, comparing the results with big studio gear i once used, i'm very impressed.
i really like the mic pre too plus low latency.

if a song of mine sucks its not because of the audient....its my fault.

but heres my position on sampling rates and bit depths.
and if you peruse various forums youll see
many recording folk whove been round the block a few times agree.
but its an on going debate on such sites
as www.gearspace.com and recording.org etc.
1. i'm of the camp that goes only as far as 44.1/24 bit.
(my reaper daw is set to that, and biab to 44.1/16.)
2. i constantly remind myself that zillions of hits were done before 88.2/96/192 k. also i save a bunch of disk space.
3. ive actually done tests with your "typical man in the street"..who ive found cant tell a diff tween different rates.

i dont want to get into a heated debate, cos its been done too many times on various recording forums.
above is just my opinion after doing real life tests.
somewhere on the net is a scientific research paper that agrees with my position. sorry forgotten where.

merry xmas to all.
om

I have no issues whatsoever using 44 KHz Matt. The argument between higher sample rates and lower will never really be settled. Most plugins have been adapted now except the BB plugin but I'm sure it will come.

I feel comfortable at 96 KHz only because I settled there over time. :-)

@sixchannel

Yes the RT's and RD's are amazing sixchannel. It's even more so when they come with the option of converting to midi.

So many VST's now are at a level that is so tempting. Playing the Garritan CFX Piano is amazing, as is so many vi's now and with so much quality in effects plugins too the challenge when Mixing and Mastering is sooooo much fun. :-)

more RTs please but basically a program that doesn't need patching up until November 2022...............

and for RealBand support for Izotope plugins that means they retain their settings when the vst window is reopened (you have to use Pipeline's KV elements workaround at the moment)

vst3 plugins too - although again KV elements is a workaround

+1 for that Bob.

Yes, stability matters.

I also have everything that I can set, set to 16-bit at 44.1 KHz. However I have on occasion run into hardware that insists on 24-bit, or 48 KHz. I remember one Roland unit that absolutely would not lock at 44.1 when I tried to connect using S/PDIF.

The request Mal made is not just over a discussion of desired recording quality, where we could get into a long discussion (please don't) of dithering and rate conversion. It also includes compatibility.

I am mostly hoping that 2022 comes out sooner rather than later!

more better than worse...

Hoping for the earliest possible release. I am waiting for the 2022 release before my first install....

are we expecting any patches in December for BIAB 2021? and will they continue patches for 2021 in 2022 if necessary for people who don't upgrade?

do people still have issues? and will 2022 carry forward those issues? be interesting to see

I doubt that they will produce patches for 2021 after build 845 unless there is a major issue identified that needs resolving.

Don't worry, we love MIDI!



BIAB only insists on 44.1khz if you're using ASIO. If you switch to WAS or MME it'll run happily at 96khz or 192khz (the highest I can test) as will the plugin. ASIO forces your interface to 44,100Hz as it needs to synchronize your interface and software together, and currently that's the sample rate that BIAB requests. Basically, if you're running Cubase and BB at the same time, set BB to use WAS instead of ASIO.

Actually, there's really no need to use ASIO in BIAB except if you need low latency when you're recording something, and at that point it should be the only program running anyway.



That's very true Matt. I have two interfaces here that only work at 48khz, and they're completely unusable in BIAB when using ASIO. WAS and MME work fine with them though. I've put in a request to the developers to have a choice in BIAB to specify the hardware sample rate when using ASIO, so hopefully they'll be able to implement that.



I like your enthusiasm Mike!



Typically the developers release one, sometimes two, updates for the previous year's version after release of the new version - that's not set in stone though, just my observance over the years. After that they're concentrating on developing the next year's version.

FWIW, there's really no point in sampling higher that 32bit as that's already a huge dynamic range. The DAW itself will likely run floating-point now, so the samples will anyway almost certainly be changed to a float.

96kHz isn't unreasonable, though a bit debatable, though higher than that, again, would be pointless.

gordon. i agree.
i spoke to a programmer once who was deep into digital audio. which is why i settled on 44.1//24 bit recording.
apparently there is often lots of padding going on ?
at higher sampling rates ?
for a ruff demo song i even use reapers flac to record.
sounds good to me.

om

JOM,

I generally use 48kHz by choice and 44.1kHz when there's no choice. Personally I rarely bother with 96kHz because most people's ears can't tell the difference anyway, and certainly not my ears. 24bit sampling is perfectly adequate. 16bit is perhaps a bit restrictive for initial sampling as one doesn't want to accidentally run out of headroom. Once in the DAW, most samples are converted to floating point, so headroom is no longer an issue. For rendering, 16bit is fine unless one's very concerned about the highest quality, though few if any people can really hear the difference.

Where high sample rates do help is for "oversampling" right at the very start of the sampling chain, i.e., right where the pre-amp gets converted to digital, as a higher sample-rate allows better protection against aliases (e.g., not accidentally converting some noise at, say, 48kHz plus 47kHz into something audible) and by avoiding very sharp cut-off low-pass filters around the 20kHz area. One you have the samples, though, there's very little benefit in maintaining sampling above the 44.1/48 area.

One of the benefits of using floating-point data within the DAW, is that the degradations that used to be due to bad gain-staging pretty much just go away. No increase in noise if your signals are low, no risk of clipping if they're high. The maths just does it. Of course one can get the rendering levels wrong as one goes back to the 44.1kHz/16bit or whatever.


I did some comparisons years ago between various sample rates for mp3, ogg-vorbis and similar of flac, starting from some high quality CDs that I used for auditioning Hi-Fi kit.

As you would expect, higher compressions of mp3 and ogg-vorbis were not so good. High sample rates with low compression actually were pretty darned good ... most people wouldn't tell them from the originals.

The .flac files I'd made from the original CD .wav files I converted back to .wav and did a binary comparison with the original from which they were made. They were binary identical. Flac is totally lossless ... it does not degrade the signal at all.

Gordon.
excellent comments.
what i find interesting is...whether one uses the highest of high end gear or the junkiest of junk gear , in the end it all comes down to the end product..the song.

for example i have friends that prefer some of my songs
done on oddball junk gear over ones i did in big studios
useing the best gear.
there is no magic gear solution imho.

i posted one of my oddball songs done useing junk
recently in the pg user showcase forum. it used a diy mic pre i built for 5 buckies with a couple of junk transistors,
and other junk gear. yet my friends prefer it to some songs done that i slaved over in studios.
now of course thats not always the case...but i often
ponder if there are recording forces at work teaching me a lesson...lol.
as in "buddy dont think you can spend your way to a great song".

right now i'm deep in the acw etc and figuring out how to add traks to some old demoes done on junk gear with tape minor fluctuating speeds...ie useing acw to generate tempo maps.
one of my wishes i posted in wishlist for 2022..
ie slow down play in acw main screen to help doing bar markers.

best
om

"- - dont think you can spend your way to a great song."
Best advice of 2021 in my opinion.
I only have old, 'junk' gear (apart from BB2021 that is) and can't see how updating and spend, spend, spend will make me play better or arrange better.
My biggest fear for BB2022 and onwards is that PG will succumb to the 'must have more Tech' mantra, create pretty GUIs, lots of midi mumbo jumbo etc instead of making Music SIMPLE.
End of rant! Feel better now.
Bests
Ian

Actually, you can make a surprisingly good preamp with just two transistors and a few Rs and Cs, so long as you don't try to push it too hard.


+1 ... Good advice any year, really.

I'm not so sure that the tape speed thing is too good, though :-)

G.

Gordon and Ian.
critique me on this wish for 2022.
the subject is drum fills and solos.

normally the method i use to generate the above from pg rd's ...is...
to copy the final chord sheet arrangement and call it drums solos/fills. ie not messing with the original final chord arrange. then in this copy i futz around with part rmarkers all over the place at random and/or different colours of such and/or useing the dot D method to play only drums etc etc. eg lets say a simple song
c/am/f/g...c.d/am.d/f.d/g.d etc etc.

BUT what ive wanted for longest time is a menu option...
thats right in yer face where the user can select a drum solo for certain length // so many bars and/or fills..
sorta AI thats different each time.
twould be a better idea thsan the kludge i go thru' currently.

then of course the user could import the genned drum solos/fills //whatever into the users daw of choice.
thus in the daw you might have one trak of an rd just regular beat, and a second trak in daw with drum solos and/or fills etc. of course you could copy and paste fills in daw wherever you want if user prefers that.

whaddya think ?

best
om

Melodists has been long neglected. The Ragtime is probably the best. +1

I don't know anything like enough yet about using BiaB to be able to critique on that.

Yes indeed Philly.

I think we need some intelligent Melodists. A melody makes a song and if the lyrics are good then job done.

Like that:

"Can't spend your way to a great song."

Exactly.

I have my workflow down to four simple tools on one page: Midi Piano and Strings in BIAB VST, my own piano track, open lyric sheet, a mic turned out to capture any use-able mumblings.

That's it. Only when I have a song will I start adding tracks and making an arrangement.

That being said, anything to make the BIAB VST3 work faster and more efficiently is cool with me. I would like to be able to route midi directly to a DAW track from the VST3 without dropping and dragging it there after generation, if that is possible.

Maybe it already is, but I can't figure out how to do it, if it does.

This is one of the main functions of Real Band. RB is a DAW with Biab added so all the tracks you've recorded do not change when you generate something new. That means you do exactly what you described, change the chord grid any way you want and generate one drum track after another until you've filled up all 48 tracks if you wanted.

And, considering you can generate just the bars you want you have an almost unlimited amount of tracks. If you only used 10% of each track for a different drum part you essentially have 480 tracks. And it's not just drums, you can change the style and chords too and use different midi instruments or RT's. Basically RB lets you treat each track as it's own discrete song and later have tons of fun cutting/pasting/mixing until you find what you want. RB is very powerful if only users would give it a chance.

Can't help you with the AI thing though. I think Jamstix has a function similar to that.

Bob

JM.
re RB. yes of course. ive made same point on these forums.
but as this is biab 2022 related thread i didnt want the "boys sent around"...lol...if i mentionec RB. particularly i like rb bars view for moving drum bits around.
but as pandoras box has been opened ..lol...if you notice one of my wishes in the rb forum is "please sir can i have more bars view". i would like the same wish for
biab 2022. so there is commonality.
if you chek the rb thread pipeline did a lovely new bars view graphic that i love.
essentially the idea is to expand the bars view features to make bars view a central repository for bars/parts of bars/trak settings for a song, by right cliks over a bar or series of bars. etc etc.
for further info please read "please sir etc"...in rb wishlist.
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=663620#Post663620
and heres pipes graphic. notice the song sections at gthe top. thus daw relateable re daw markers etc.
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=16716&filename=Muso-Bar-Window5.png

best
om

Have you checked out the new Biab 2022? If not please do so, it's almost unbelievable what it can do now starting with 24 tracks that can be used for anything. It can't do everything RB can but man, it really is something to talk about now. The biggest knock about RB is the generation times while Biab is very fast. That and all the new features may start to drag me away from RB.

The whole focus this year was on Biab while RB just got a few incremental fixes, nothing major. That may be a hint RB will never be fully upgraded but given what they did with Biab it may not matter to me anyway. I'm not sure but I don't think any of the new Biab features will get picked up in RB other than just dragging the generated tracks over. Since Biab has 24 tracks I don't need RB to generate all those comp tracks I talked about because 24 is plenty for what I do.

Bob

JM.
well its all getting a tad pricey for me.
i'm being forced more and more into free orch libs to get real sounds in my songs.
eg like bbc spitfire driven by midi.
so i'll prolly get the pro upgrade. to upgrade my old ultra pak. including bonus....that'll give me plenty
to do songs.
your correct tho' bb is looking real nice now.
and 24 jm is enuf for me too.
i'm a tad disappointed not more rb updates.

ya know possibly one way now of working with both bb and rb to cut gen times , start off in bb till chord sheet
and rt's finalised...then mix down from bb a guide stereo
wav song mix. and load the guide into rb plus the chord
arrange finalised. then test out more ideas useing rb features ?

i'm useing rb right now plus acw to revitalise some old
songs o' mine done originally on tape.
i would be real happy with a slow done feature in acw 2022 main screen.

best
om

Band-in-a-Box has a built-in slowdown or speed up feature located in the Tempo area of the Control Panel.

jim.
but i want it in acw main screen,...
go to acw main screen and youll see no such feature.
when i'm in acw laying down bar lines i want to stay in acw ....and use slow down to certify ive put bar lines
in correct place.
at normal play speed its very easy
to place a bar line incorrectly.

jim.
try this n youll see prob.
1. in main bb screen set to 75 per cent.
2. now in acw with audio loaded acw reverts to 100 per cent not 75 per cent.
i just ran a test just now.

best
om

I'll play with it some. Sounds like you may have found a bug. If you go to Help > About what build does it show?

Too late for '22 but perhaps for 2023...

Preamble/story: about the time I first purchased BB (2020) I also purchased Ableton Live, Native Instruments Komplete Ultimate 12, a Native Instruments S88 Mk2 keyboard midi controller, and a reasonably-priced studio desk. To help fund all of that I sold my Yamaha Clavinova CVP (this was also a space-saving endeavor).
Before then, I was looking at the latest Yamaha digital pianos and keyboards and simply unimpressed at how similar the latest products seemed to my older ones despite the huge price tags. There had to be a more revolutionary option to keep one set of hardware and be able to have much better sound/instrument quality and add new instruments/styles.


Whilst I'm happy with my new toys, I do sometimes miss mucking around playing with a live accompaniment/style which instantly follows the chords I play or my button-press requests for a drum fill or outro, etc. If I think of a song, I'd like to be able to select a BB style and play it instantly without spending time writing the chords in advance. I can't help but think that this should be possible with today's enthusiast-grade computers and SSDs and ASIO drivers.

I wouldn't mind if it was as a small standalone app (select style, tempo, map shortcut keys (or MIDI CC buttons) to Drum fills, A/B variations, ending, [un]mute common tracks, select RH instrument (MIDI patch or external plugin). Similar to an arranger keyboard, you'd have to specify which key is a split point and maybe allow transposing keys or octaves.


That is my biggest wish. afaik there is no software product available that compares to play styles and melodies on a Yamaha PSR or Clavinova with good quality. BB seems like it would already be halfway there.

Jim Fogle.
i'm on ultrapak
1. bb 2020 (730)
2. rb 2020 (5)
in both apps no matter the slow down setting in acw it plays at normal 100 per cent.

maybe a bug as you say.
tell me if happens in 2022 plz.
i'm doing lots of tarting up of old songs right now .
i'm prolly gonna upgrade by xmas just programs 90 buks..
pen drive.
best
om

Justanoldmuso,

My results differed from yours. I'm using 2022 Band-in-a-Box build 905.

I copied a fingerpicking track to the audio track. The tempo followed whatever setting I selected from 150% down to 50%.

Jim.
maybe i'm not being clear enough.
thanks for your help.!!!
per your graphic..no not like that .
try this procedure.
1. open bb.
2. load in wav.(no acw)
3. set play in bb chord view 50 %.
4. now open acw for that wav loaded in step 2.
let acw do its thing .
5. notice play button top left in acw screen ?
clik PLAY > does it play at 50 per cent ?
here 100 %.

best
om

2022 Audio Chord Wizard does not have an integrated play button.

I believe you are using the original Audio Chord Wizard which has no tempo adjustment. The new Audio Chord Wizard is integrated into the Band-in-a-Box program and is part of the Audio Editor.

Press the ACW button and a line of tabs appears with different ACW functions on each tab.

jim.
ok i'll try again when i get 2022.
best/merry xmas
om

Jim Fogle.
well i'll be a frozen doodlebug...lol...
zee plot thickens...crazy laff..lol.
SO i came at things a different way.
instead of useing the main acw screen (with play button at top left etc.)...after loading the wav and then >>
audio edit screen and then >> INVOKING ACW WITHIN AUDIO EDIT WAVEFORM DISPLAY...in my 2020 slowdown DOES WORK.
so i can more accurately enter the bar lines.
but it dont slowdown in the main acw display. crazy huh ?
the start stop within audio edit is kinda bonkers ctrl g
and esc. but what the hey.

have a merry xmas.
om

OM - there's an update available for you: https://www.pgmusic.com/support_windowsupdates.htm#734