SOME REALBAND WISHES FOR 2023.

A..INTRO.

i'm making these wishes in the hope of rb getting a wider user base.
(i wont rehash previous years wishes which ive posted in this forum). also it concerns me that many new users might easily dismiss rb , for various reasons i
suspect which is sad, and i would argue thus they are missing a lot of nice useful features.

fwiw i started with powertraks…before getting then biab and rb.
fyi my fav combo for doing songs (90 songs so far)..is biab/rb/reaper using the strengths of each.
feel free anyone else to post your ideas//wishes.
lets get to it.

B..WISHES.

1..Visuals.
i think it fair to say often people choose other daws cos they find them more visually appealing. i would suggest this area needs attention in rb.
to me i dont care bout visuals but many do. as ive learned in life sometimes beauty (to quote my granny) is only skin deep. yes rb might be a bit like an
'ugly duckling'. but 'under the hood' there are lots of very neat features.
2.. Set up first time.
many people come to pg products for the very first time.
and for many they might not have set up a project studio/daw before.
thus they have often a steep learning curve in understanding not just their pc and OS but also use of music production software. thus they may get frustrated.

i notice most of the rb issues new people seem to have is related to usb sound device set up issues. thus as new people dont sometimes have 'the patience'either to read the rb manual or identify drivers etc etc i think this item needs addressing further to make it as easy as possible.
my concern is sometimes we see comments like 'well i gave up rb cos xyz daw worked'. this is sad imho.
not only sad for pg but also the user that would miss some v nice rb features versus competitors.

its ok for us techs cos we understand the intricacies of usb audio interface set up with music software. but many new people dont. this is not just pg but i see the same set up issues on many competitor daw forums.
thus i feel it needs to be addressed ie 'how to set up driver prefs as easy as we can'
this probably would cut down the number of forum and tech support requests forhelp.
i recommend pg look at competitors and compare.

frankly i think user 'RHARV' , who, like moi and others loves rb...he should get some sort of award for all the newbies he has helped over the years re rb set up…lol.
i laud him.
3..Flac support. please see my wish in the biab wishlist forum re this topic.
specific to rb i would like the *seq to save in the flac format as an option.

i dont know the internal code of rb , BUT i suspect use of flac might speed things up and make things more fluid ? the other area as an aside i would like attended to is the time it takes for audio 'waveform visuals' to be generated compared to some other daws..…sometimes a reason why i often start a song layout in biab.
in biab no waiting for waveform genning.

btw to pg support …i laud you for the mp3 creation feature in rb.
i dont know what you did, and i cant put my finger on it but i really like the feature and how the mp3's i create sound wonderfull. maybe its confirmation bias...lol


just some wishes for 2023. (please see my previous wishes in this forum.)

happiness

om

I am not sure what PG could do in regard to making USB audio easier for newbies.
I am far from a newbie and I still have terrible issues on my windows machine (on my iPad USB audio works wonderfully, although it's very opaque to the user).

I have my Music Laptop set up so my DAW always plays through my USB soundcard while the Windows audio goes through the headphone jack and then into a little mixer I have (where I plug and unplug audio output from microphones, piano, and other hardware devices. When using them in the DAW, I just plug them into the USB card as needed). That lets me listen and record in my DAW but also allows me to fire up YouTube if I need to check on something.

The problem is that Windows 10 audio is diabolical. My Mac is very old, so I no longer use it for music production (or anything else, really), but compared to windows it's a piece of cake.

The problem is that Windows USB audio is just complicated, unreliable and confusing. There is not much that PG could do about it because every user's setup is different.
In my case, I have a collection of sound cards bought pretty much every time Windows got a new version and the manufacturer "forgot" to write decent drivers for their product.
Funny enough, when I finally connected my iPad pro 2021, every USB soundcard, except for the very first one I bought in the late 90s, worked flawlessly. They were recognized, audio quality excellent and so on.
On my windows machine (both laptop and desktop windows 10 with specs high enough to make it a Supercomputer not too long ago) I often get nothing, no sound until I turn off the laptop and unplug/plug. I change nothing, but it's like my USB card isn't there at all.

And don't get me started with ASIO and the Windows proprietary drivers. I have a Behringer card that occasionally lets me use its own ASIO drivers, but more often than not I am forced to use ASIO4ALL instead. No one knows why.

The other card, a Lexicon, doesn't even have a name anymore in the control panel and shows up only as "USB device". It works, but it's temperamental.

I often wonder what people like my wife or my mother would do if they wanted to just fire up a DAW and make some simple music. More often than not, I have a song idea in mind, I turn on my laptop, and by the time I get everything working, my song has turned into a poor version of "Just the two of us" or Bowie's "Is there life on Mars". Because so much time has passed I barely remember the progression, so my mind substitutes my work of genius (right!) with something more familiar.

This has been such an issue that I have taken to recording my ideas on my iPad now, so I have no more excuses and I have to face the reality that I am a talentless hack.
Until the iPad came along, I could fool myself into thinking I was a genius because my constant struggle with my hardware/software made me forget so many tunes I composed.

As far as the UI design of Realband, I agree. We are used to band in a Box, it's not pretty, but we do what we need to do with it and accept it, but Realband truly is butt ugly compared to the competition.

What I would do if I were in charge, I would design a more elegant, more minimalistic interface and give the user an option to load the "classic" style if they wish. I bet it would be taken more seriously (especially by me)

Realband is a clear case that UI/UX is important. We are creative people and the tools we use for our creativity are important.

For instance, I like the taste of Coca Cola, but I cannot drink it out of a plastic bottle. Beside any issue with the plastic "flavoring" the drink and the use of corn syrup, it's really a matter that, on hot days I'd stop at my local convenience store, open the big, red refrigerator, take a coke bottle, open it (not twist it) and drink it's precious nectar. It was an experience I still cherish to this day and probably half the reason I drink Coke at all.

Before I went on a diet, I gladly spent triple the price of a Coke for the Mexican glass bottle experience. Now that I have switched to Coke Zero, I have to buy the aluminum can version, as I still can't drink out of the plastic bottle. It's just not the same. Even if I pour both in a glass eventually (neither are appealing to drink from) I *know* that it came from a cheap, polluting, miserable, plastic bottle, and it ruins the experience.

You may ask, what's the relation between Coke and a DAW's UI?
It's the whole experience. Little details often affect our perception at a subliminal level. In some cases, they affect us at a higher level and some of us just cannot use a DAW with an interface right out of the 90s.

I hope they will redesign the layout, but the USB audio problem is going to remain until Windows finally gets their S**t together and creates a standard that won't take a PhD to use.

conticreative

correct me if i wrong , but it seems you want to have open multiple music production and other apps at the same time ?

if so i would suggest you look at a multi client asio interface.
(rent before buying to see if such works with your pc right and meets your needs.)

heres a list of multi client asio devices to possibly consider..

https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=718708#Post718708

the list is not exhaustive due to rapid tech change.

fyi i have no probs in windows. a year ago i got a new usb interface.
it was a doddle to set up. i registered it as my default audio device in win.

and away i went. i use biab//realband//reaper to do songs.
of course its important in any app to identify the correct drivers to use.

what are your sound cards ? are any multi client asio ?


happiness/best.

om

I will be having RB at the Mac is it a Wisch to realasing by pg?

Great Wisches from Good old Suthern Germany Matze

I can understand wishing for new features and it taking so long, been through years n years n years of that with RB
I remember asking for solo buttons for RealBand
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=19003&Number=122728&page=all and the pic showed a floating mixer 6 years before it was added to Biab.
Volume automation for non destructive volume editing (like that's just been added to Biab).
The one that took the longest was sending VstTimeInfo to the virtual instrument like EZDrummer/Keys to sync playback that took like 10 years.

After all that I gave up on RB as I could not use it in a professional environment working with artist to create tracks for their songs was too stressful and time consuming.

The main issue why it's not popular is the generate time, if it was as quick or quicker than Biab it would be more popular thus having more development time spent on it, but now Biab is being made more like a DAW simply because of the generate time that users like. They don't like going back n forth to their DAW and would rather do it all in one app.
Jeff spent a lot of time on RB but now I think he is maybe working on Biab mostly.
Most users would be creating their song up quickly in Biab then off to their smooth non destructive editing DAW.

I can think of so many things to make RB better like non destructive editing and instant generate and playback (even quicker than Biab) from RT RD source files using internal code rather than getting bbw2 in the background to generate tracks into RAM then render down to wav and put them in the RB temp folder.
No one has spent more time pushing for and wanting RB to be better, but it's just not practical. I have spent 13 years digging deep into it all and see how it all works and the best example is the Biab Track Injector for Reaper . This is the way it all needs to work in this day n age. This way allows for a Live Arranger version of Biab maybe using the Plugin Standalone.
That's why I'm still here even though I have given up many times stupid me gets back in the ring for another swing as I would like to see it all through and become a reality because of all the time and effort spent on it.
If this was done to RB back in 2008 it would be the leading one now and I would not even be here !, but that horse has bolted.

RealBand will still be here for a while with a little tweak added now and then but the future would have to be in the BBPlugin/Standalone as it's a fresh start and looks professional but just needs the internal generate code rather than the slow asss bbw4 route. I can see the Plugin Standalone becoming the new Biab DAW down the track.

Kristal Audio Engine (Studio One) doing non destructive editing back in 2004 ! it just references the WAVE, AIFF, FLAC, OGG Vorbis without creating new wav files. See it has solo mute buttons. Download Kristal AE
Reaper also on it's release back in 2006.





This is Biab 2007 with Kristal 2004, look where Studio One is now compared to Biab.

My wish is likely not even possible.

I would love to have the chord view and the track view be in lock step, so if I go into chord view and add 8 blank bars at bar 47 the software also adds 8 blank bars in track view.

Now I can hear at least 17 people saying "You can just add them yourself and enter your chords and regenerate just those bars." I am aware. I do that now. I just don't want to HAVE to do that.

Cutting and pasting sections is a MESS because of those 2 views not being in lock step. Early on in my PG life I wanted to switch A and B sections of a song. I cut the A section, pasted it below the working tracks, then cut the B, pasted in where the A used to be, then cut the original A from the buffer location and put it where the B used to be. Was the mistake I made was not realizing that the chord chart had not changed to correspond and I hit generate on a section and the whole song became garbage at that point and I had to start over.

BUT...

I doubt that this is even possible. But I can dream, right? Just like I dream I was rich instead of good lookin'!

RB can cut/paste sections and include Chord Sheet and Tracks view. Images below show Section A and B have been cut/pasted and reversed and the Chord Chart chords included.

I'll have to go play with that! Thanks.