In my case, I reinstalled BIAB Version 2021 (845) after a disk crash.

I have a song using _JPLMBOS.STY that is 40 choruses of 32 bar length. Prior to the crash It used to take 15s-20s to generate and now it takes 3-4 minutes. Installed to the same disk...Any ideas?

I wonder if you need to whitelist BIAB in Windows defender? I don't think it can hurt to try it and then remove the exclusion if you don't see improvement.

How can I approve an app in Windows Defender?
Stop Windows Defender from scanning certain files
Open the Windows Defender Security Center.
Click Virus & threat protection.
Click the Viruses and Threats option.
Under Exclusions, click Add or remove exclusions.
Click the Add Exclusion button.

Thanks, I whitelisted the entire folder. No change. Is there a temporary folder option that can be pointed to an SSD?

i also tried whitelisting the process itself. Again, no change.

I suggest you call PG Music Support, or do Live chat, tomorrow.

Dare I suggest you find and push the Return to Factory Settings Button? Last time I did that, I got yelled at.

That can’t hurt to try.

What caused the crash, and how did you fix it? Is this the same hard drive? Reformatted? Checked for errors (bad sectors)? Is your anti-virus running full blast to check for errors?

40 choruses of 32 bar length?

Do you mean 4 choruses?

Keith

Keith, I too assumed that was a typo.

There are two settings that can cause BIAB to take a long time to generate Realtracks. This would be noticeable if a song is 40 choruses at 32 bars per chorus (a total of 1280 bars).

1) Go into Realtrack preferences and check that "Speed up generation of Realtracks" is activated.

2) Right click on the chordsheet, select "Song Settings" and make sure that the option for "This song has playback problems, disable fast generation" is not active.

These options may help.

Regards,
Noel

P.S. There is also an option in Realtrack preferences where it's possible to select the quality of "Tempo/Pitch Stretching". If this is set to "High", it will slow things down a little but not to the extent that you are experiencing.

With the 255 bar limit, it definitely cannot be 40 choruses

There is a setting you could check under Song Settings:

I loaded up the style and the demo song and changed the choruses to 40.

Since there are multiple choices in the demo song, I made sure the demo style had the guitar 2 solo track and clicked generate.

The non-solo portion generated in about 13 seconds and the solo portion took 2:14 to generate for a total of 2:27 to complete.

I then closed BIAB, cleared my temp files and this time loaded the demo song WITHOUT the solo track and it took 17 seconds to generate and play the entire song.

I would say that if you have 40 choruses of soloing to generate, that will indeed add quite a bit of processing time to complete.

2022 version with latest patch on an SSD drive.

Out of interest, how long does the song play for (how many choruses) before it stops playing? Presuming 32 bars per chorus, does it play 1,280 bars?

Trev,

My understanding is that the "Number of choruses" is a way around the 255 bar limitation. I think this happens because each chorus is exactly the same and the song doesn't have to generate new material for each bar. I've always visualized that during the generation process, each chorus is stitched onto the previous one to make a kind of audio patchwork quilt. To be honest, though, I've never tried it. I could well be wrong.

Regards,
Noel

It took 38 minutes to play and it did play all 40 choruses with 32 bars.

Someone else needs to try 40 choruses with 255 bars. I'm done with it.

Uh, no thanks. I guess if you wanted to get 38 minutes of practice time in playing the same chord progression over and over this would be a good idea. I imagine you would know the song quite well by the end of that!!

This is a revelation, that it actually works to play for 38 minutes.

To your question, I haven't tried this either, but I would expect a few differences. For example, if you had the setting on for Vary the Feel in the Middle Choruses (or whatever like that it's called), then you would have at least two choruses that would be different, or in other words 80 unique measures out of the 255 limit. And I'm assuming the limit is still there, or it would have been quite a major announcement. Something to experiment with, I guess.

This goes against ALL conventional wisdom (255 max!) regarding how may bars can be played over and over in BIAB.

I actually started the song and turned the volume all the way down and just periodically look at it. Not going to listen to that for 3/4 of a hour.

Did you have the song looped? If so, would you have noticed if you weren’t spending those full 38 minutes listening? I’m not trying to be cute here; it’s a genuine question since I’m still trying to figure out what really happens.

Matt: I loaded the style and demo song and made sure it had a solo track. I then generated the song, listened for about 5 min and then turned the volume down but not all the way so I had some background music playing. I checked the progress every so often and when it got up to chorus 37 I watched it play to the end. I did not have the looping feature on so when the song reached the end of chorus 40, it stopped as expected. Nothing unusual about the playing except the abnormally long duration due to the # of choruses chosen.

The Vary Style In Middle Choruses was on so I would assume it did that also.

Bottom line, everything worked as expected.

Interesting:

Just took the same song, did a copy and paste so it reached the maximum of 255 measures and 40 choruses.

I also turned OFF the fast generate option so it was forced to generate the entirety all of the RealTracks before playing.

After clicking on the Generate button, using a stopwatch, it took 4:38 to generate the song and start playing.

BUT!!!!!!

The chorus number dropped down to 7 from 40 and it will not let me increase it.

Looks like the 40 chorus and 255 measure limit does not apply in this case.

The question of course is, WHY

This might help to explain why generating a song of that length might take a while or even may not be possible: if you were to unfold a song that has 40 choruses with each chorus containing 255 measures, that'd be approximately 10,200 total bars you'd be asking Band-in-a-Box to play and generate and then render if exporting to an audio file. For best performance, the max number of measures you can have would be 255. You may start to experience issues after that with playback or generation, and potentially in other ways too.

That said, I tried to set it to 255 at 40 choruses just to test it, and it did change to 7 immediately after I tried picking 40. As Band-in-a-Box's max is 255, I'm not surprised that a song created at all these maxes may not work as it's basically being asked to generate over 10k bars. I will ask the developers about expected behaviours when pushing the program, but I don't suspect this is a bug so much as a program limitation, but I'll share what I find out!

Okay, so I actually heard back pretty quickly:

So 255 bars is the max of what you can set in the program, but the maximum linear amount of bars you can have including repeats and choruses is 2000. To that end, what you can set Band-in-a-Box to depends on the math. The program cannot do 40 choruses of 255 because it far exceeds that 2000 limit. You could, however, do 40 choruses of 50 bars because this would equal 2000. The program when you enter 255 bars is putting in that limit of 7 because 7 choruses of 255 = 1785 bars. Setting it to 8 choruses of 255 would push it over 2000 by about 40 measures.

We hope this helps!

Ember, thank you.

This is serious news. I hope you will announce this in several ways, such as a new FAQ, and a Tip and Trick post, changes in the documentation, etc. I am quite sure most (or maybe even none) of us who have used the program for 30 years knew this way of considering the measure limit.

But before you publish the new limit, may I suggest some more experiments might be in order. In particular, test with a RealTrack set to double-time time base.

Excellent points. I was certainly not aware of these specifications, and as we have found in the past, tracks set to double-time base are presumably limited to half this amount again.

Well I just tried style _CORDIAL.STY which I use in the song, After Your Gone. Originally I had 3 RT's and 1 RD in that song using that style and it had 80 measures. That would equate to 720 bars the BIAB has to generate. Works just fine in that setting.

Using the formula, 2000/80 = 25, I could have a maximum of 25 choruses. Well it only let me do 24 but that was good enough for test purposes.

I then made all the tracks 1/2 time and generated the song again. The result was the song generated with 80 measures with 24 choruses and played at 1/2 time. That was what it should have done.

I then did the same the same thing but set the tracks at Double Time and the result blew me away. Instead of generating the song at Double Time, each time I pressed the Generate & Play button, it opens up my File Browser program in my Song Directory and it wants me to load a style!!!!!

Tried it 2-3 times with different songs that I made and the results are the same. It opens up the File Browser asking me to pick a style.

So......

I then used the same style, _CORDIAL.STY but this time loaded the built in demo song and increased the measures to 64, since mathematically I would not have enough choruses to max it out as the demo song only had 32. Anyways, setting the measures to 64 and the choruses to 31, the song generated and appeared to play just fine at normal time BUT each time, I loose the audio, no sound at all but the song moves along as it appears to play.

Since we are in uncharted territory, I am giving it back to the developers since there appears to be multiple bugs in the program when you approach the max number of measures vs choruses in it's current form.

Bugs I see so far:

1. You cannot go above 2000 measures if the choice of measures and choruses goes above that number.

2. Using a song that YOU made mght cause your file browser program to open if you set the tracks to 1/2 time using the maximum number of measure and chorus combinations.

3. Using a style with the built in demo song might cause you to loose audio when you set the tracks to 1/2 time using the maximum number of measure and chorus combinations.

Comments?

I can definitely pass this along to the right people for that and see what we can set in motion.

This is good to know and thank you for testing that! I will pass this along as well and make a report for it. Although I will mention that the choruses and bars bit needs to = 2000 total. So if it goes over, it will round down to the nearest possible option. You can see this example with the 7 x 255. While 8 x 255 would have only been over by 40, this wasn't possible because it still exceeded the 2000 limit. So it went down to 7 x 255 because ~1780 was possible while 2040 was not.

Limited to 256 measures TOTAL... I am finding songs to be limited to 256 TOTAL MEASURES no matter what I do, when using 1 big chorus or unfolding 3 choruses, etc.

[BIAB 2023 latest build]. When I attempt to add more measures, it defaults to 256. When I unfold songs, they are cut off at 256 measures.
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Am I understanding the above post incorrectly, or is above stated "2000 measure" limit no longer correct?

Please advise.

Thanks,
-Tom

P.S. When I attempt to get what I need using the 'Song Form Maker' the program simply crashes. [I am attempting to create a 3 verse & 3 chorus song (traditionally speaking), but with 4 or 8 bars difference in the 2nd & 3rd verses. I can use BIAB multi-chorus feature, but how to nix the 4 or 8 bars in the 2nd & 3rd verses [i.e. BIAB 2nd & 3rd "Chorus"] using BIAB alone?]

I don't remember this tread from last year, and I don't know what this stuff about 2000 is. 256 is the limit, always has been.

OK, I re-read the entire thread. My conclusion is that this issue was never resolved. So we still don't know what exactly is going on here.

Okay... then I am seeking solution via new post here...

https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=774381#Post774381

-Tom

Dan, I think you are correct; I do not recall this being clarified or mentioned again until today.