I recently got a Roland E-A7 "Arranger" keyboard which, unlike my previous keyboard, uses a "USB-to-Host" method to connect to my computer for midi communications (my former kbd used the standard midi din plugs, btw).
Thing is, for some reason when I now try play the BBox midi style demo songs outputted to that keyboard, I'm only hearing some of its tracks via the keyboard and not for instance the Melody nor Soloist tracks. Or rather, I do sometimes hear them when muting all the others but very weakly, even after amping up the velocity levels & volume of those tracks.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Eddie,

I see the E-A7 is an Arranger keyboard. Band-in-a-Box assigns midi channel 4 to Melody, channel 8 to Soloist and 5 to THRU. Does the Roland assign any of it's default arranger patch channels to any of these?

No, and If anything, it's all the channels it uses for the arranger that are sounding just fine. The channels it's not using for the arranger are exactly the ones that are giving me grief.
But in BBox it's pretty easy to change those channels to any of the available 16 channels you like, which I have absolutely been experimenting with without it having any discernible effect to remedy the problem.

Made this discovery: If the Melody/Soloist track has acoustic piano as the set sound,then it's heard, otherwise not.
Also, the keyboard appears to have gone 'dead' after I close BBox, but I've now discovered it kicks back in if I change the instrument.

My keyboard has no problems with this when I'm running it via Cubase et al, btw,so this problem is (most likely) something on the BBox that is failing to communicate the information, and not anything on the keyboard end.

In case anyone stumbles on this thread with ideas/suggestion, here's what I have already tried, without success:

1. Manually changing the transmitting channel of the troublesome tracks
2. Manually changing the instrument patch of the...
3. Activating/deactivating "GM/GS/XG at startup" in prefs (any & all combo of the three)
4. Initiate the "Reset Sound Canvas" (both versions)
5. Activating/deactivating "Local control" settings in prefs
6. Changing the "Track type"

...and I'm running out of ideas!

Hi Icelander,

Is Cubase sending Program Changes on each channel, or are you selecting the patches you want on the Roland?

Patches are usually sent from the DAW and most often as a part of an imported midi file.
I'm glad you asked, though, for that reminded me of a detail on that subject I hadn't mentioned but may matter:

When the midi is being played and sent from a DAW (any DAW I tried), I can see on the LED of the keyboard the names of the patches it's receiving - but NOT when it's being played and sent from BBox! Then these same fields on the keyboard's LED are completely blank.

Right, as much as I complain and [*****] when things go wrong, I thought for a change it worth to mention something gone right:

I don't know how or why (and quite frankly do not care) but somehow the 2021 release has resolved all of this, yayh!!

So that's one thread/issue I'm pleased to be able to firmly mark as resolved

Glad to see the issue is resolved.