When using the daw plugin with Cakewalk the soloist track always shows acoustic piano on track. After clearing that and adding soloist instrument, the bars I have muted in BIAB return to normal which I obviously don't want.

Hi banco49,
I had a similar issue whilst using Reaper.
I believe that you'll find that your soloist is frozen in BIAB...
The plug-in doesn't like frozen tracks.
One work around that I have been using is to save the soloist track as a wave file and import that media into your DAW... Works in Reaper.

Hi banco49, what version of the plugin are you using?

In the main Band-in-a-Box in build 829 we made a song with a soloist and in the bar settings had all the tracks muted for one bar and back to normal in the next bar. We then imported the test song into version 3.4.6 of the Band-in-a-Box plugin. After clearing the soloist, and adding a new soloist, the tracks still followed the mute and the back to normal in the bar settings. We also tested freezing the soloist in the main Band-in-a-Box before importing the song into the plugin and this did not prevent us from clearing the soloist track and adding a new soloist.

If you're still having issues with the bars not muting in the plugin version of Band-in-a-Box, please email your song to support@pgmusic.com for us to test. You can also downloadand install the latest build update for your version from here: https://www.pgmusic.com/support_windowsupdates.htm