Hi,

I just started with BIAB 2019 yesterday. I don't know if this is the correct place to post technical issues (if not please tell me where to do so). I'm using a realstyle with 4 instruments for an original samba of mine, and when I play it back I get a weird static-like distortion. Any idea of why this is happening? It doesn't seem to happen on slower or medium tempo tunes I've put in so far.

Thanks,

Zac

Zac, welcome to the neighborhood.

Please tell us exactly which style you are using, and what is the exact tempo of the song.

If the song tempo is too far removed from the recorded tempo for those RealTracks, you may be getting artifacts from the stretching algorithm. This is just a thought, but we need a little more information first.

P.S. This is an ideal location for your question.

Welcome.

I would have said what VideoTrack said.

Additionally, since you said you wrote a samba, I have a clarifying comment. I write a lot of samba songs. In BIAB, the samba backing tracks are constructed as if the samba is played in a fast 4/4, at a tempo of quarter note = 190 or so. If you had set the tempo to 100 or thereabouts, you would probably have trouble. It's not impossible, though. Tell us more and we can get into some of the finer points.

Thanks VideoTrack. The style I'm using is _SHSAMBA.STY with bass, piano, guitar, and drums. The tempo I'm using is 200.

I may have (unfortunately) figured out the problem though. My CPU processor is only 1.4Ghz, which although within system requirements is below the recommended level. It hadn't occurred to me before this post to check that, and when I went into task manager I could see it bottoming out a few times. So it looks like a new laptop is in my future.

If you do have any other thoughts or ideas for possible tweaks I can do to minimize that I'd welcome them. I've done quite a bit on the laptop already to eliminate background programs, increase page swap size, etc.

Thanks for you help!

Zac

Thanks Matt! I replied to VideoTrack about this. I think it's a no-win situation with the older laptop I'm using.

Zac, it sounds as though you have narrowed down the source of your problem.

That style is set for 190bpm, so, at 200 bpm I don't think it's artifacts that are causing the problem.

It may be that your system is trying to generate the tracks at the same time it is playing them back (a feature in BiaB that may tax some systems).

Fortunately there is a setting to tell it to generate before playing.

Unfortunately I don't recall that exact setting, but it's in the Options/Prefs area and I *think* it references fast playback or such, and hopefully this post is enough to jar someone else into recalling the exact setting!

Edit: it may be the generation speed option in the image below

Hi zac,

To test if the CPU is indeed the problem...

1. right-click on the chordsheet

2. select 'Song Settings'

3. enable "This song has playback problems... disable fast generation".

4. generate the song

Does it play better?


Explanation regarding the above setting

Normally BIAB starts generating the musical backing and the song starts playing before generation is complete. BIAB then continues to generate the backing in the background while the song is playing. This can strain slower CPUs. By enabling the above option, BIAB is being told to generate the backing fully before starting playback. This means that it will take a little longer for the song to start playing but it should play error free if the problem is CPU related.

Hope this helps,
Noel

EDIT: I see rharv beat me... and with a graphic too!

• Using sounds found only in IKEA, Kurt Schneider remakes Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”

Good point there rharv.

This is done from Options > Preferences > RealTracks as shown:

Edit, whoops, Team Australia were both answering at the same time. As Max would say: "missed it by that much!"
Edit Edit: rharv adds a graphic too

Well, no one can say this forum isn't loaded with helpful members

Wow, you guys are amazing, thank you for all the help!

Okay, so here are the results.

1. I disabled the 'speed up generation of realtracks' in Options > Preferences > RealTracks. Closed BIAB, restarted my computer, opened the samba and waited for what seemed 5 or more minutes for the tracks to generate. Unfortunately as far as I could tell there was no appreciable difference in the amount of distortion during playback.

2. I took Noel's suggestion of right-clicking the songsheet & chose "This song has playback problems... disable fast generation" in song settings, hit play (waited another 5 minutes or so), and that actually did eliminate *most* of the static-distortion. I let the song play continously for about 15 minutes and monitored it. Some slight distortion still crept in a little here and there, but mostly it played back cleanly.

In the end it seems obvious my best solution is to get a newer laptop with a much more beefy CPU & RAM than the older slower one I put this on. I've only been using BIAB for 2 days & I know I'll be wanting to do more ambitious projects, so, time to pony up some $$.

Thanks again for your help. What a cool community! I really appreciate you taking the time to help out a clueless newbie with a tech issue.

Cheers!

Zac

Hi again, Zac.

If you are in a position to be able to afford it, getting a new computer sounds like the way to go.

When you start using a combination of BIAB and DAWs to create songs, you will definitely be pleased with more power.

In 2006, I tentatively bought an entry level BIAB not quite sure what to expect. Ever since then I've been hooked. I love writing and producing songs. Not a day goes by where I don't use BIAB. It becomes addictive!

All the best,
Noel

• my latest song: The Day You Stepped Into My Life

If you are using an ASIO sound card driver, you may have your buffer settings too low. Try increasing the buffer size to see if the static goes away. I generally use 256 samples when recording MIDI (to avoid latency), and then set it to 512 for playback. But on a slower processor, you may need to see it a little higher. Just a thought.

jford's suggestion is worth looking at, regardless of whether you are using ASIO.
The fact that it seems to have improved but not gone away warrants investigating the buffer settings he mentioned.
That said, a newer computer may eliminate the need for this solution also, since it is just another way to compensate for a system resource issue.

Another tip (if possible) is to use a separate hard drive for the music than is being used for the operating system, as sometimes even drive speed can cause these type of issues.
If your hard drive is trying to stream multitrack audio and the OS is interrupting it, it's yet another possible cause.
More RAM or larger buffer sizes can help help alleviate this problem, but so can a new computer. <grin>

Yet another possible cause is a bitrate mismatch (the software being set to 16/44 and the interface set to 24/48 for example). But that usually only happens when a new piece of equipment or software is introduced into the system. I recently added a Focusrite 18i20 interface into one system and it took a fair amount of testing/adjusting to get everything playing nice afterwards since the Focusrite is 24 bit only.

If you do buy a new computer, there are some characteristics that are more important for good performance with BIAB:

1) the fastest CPU you can afford; this speeds the regeneration of songs
2) get an SSD as your drive; it makes loading the program and RealTracks much faster

The graphics capability of the computer is NOT important for BIAB.

Good suggestion, thanks, looks like the laptop uses a RealTek chip, couldn't find any reference to ASIO on it anywhere.

Some people seem to get results with the internal RealTek card, but a highly recommended upgrade no matter what your computer, is to buy a dedicated external audio interface. These can be very modestly priced such as a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or similar.

Thanks rharv for your suggestions.

I couldn't find any way on the laptop to change the RealTek soundchip buffer size. Tried a Google search for it too, not finding anything there. I'm guessing it's not available. However, as it turns out I wasn't on the latest driver for the RealTek, so I'm updating it right now. Hoping that *might* help.



Great idea! I do have an external hard drive I haven't used for awhile which I could try. How would that work exactly? Would I move the RealTracks and RealStyles folders to the external HD, then reconfigure BIAB to stream them from that drive? Or....?



The only thing I could find in Win 10 related to this was under Speaker Properties > Advanced. It says 24 bit 48000 HZ to be used when running in shared mode (not sure what that is). I wasn't able to find bitrate in BIAB. Looking that up now.

Thanks again!

I certainly understand the addiction Just in these few days of putting in my originals & hearing the quality and realism of the realtracks, well, it's a game changer.

I am looking at more powerful laptops, still trying a few things on the old one just to see what happens...

Thanks, I do plan to get an interface at some point. When I get a better laptop I want to run a DAW on it as well, so a decent interface would be a must.

zac,

In BIAB, under "Audio" on the uppermost menu, select "Audio Drivers/Settings".

On the top right of the Audio Drivers' window, there's an option called "Audio Driver Type". This is probably set to WAS or ASIO (WAS is BIAB's default setting). Click on this option and change it to MME. That might make a difference to playback.

Regards,
Noel

P.S. A 5 minute wait is a long time. I have a pretty powerful PC and I usually have playback starting in less than 10 seconds (for full-song generation of a song around 70 bars in length).

• my latest song: The Day You Stepped Into My Life

Try changing your sound card to 44100 instead of 48000 and see if that helps. If not, try changing from 24 bit to 16 bit (at 44100).

Also, I've had good luck running one of my computers with a Realtek using the free ASIO4ALL driver (you can Google it). That will give you low latency for MIDI input recording.

Just a few things to try.

Hi Jford, thanks for your suggestions. I did try changing those soundcard settings as you suggested, but unfortunately it didn't seem to help playback, and then after rebooting my computer Windows changed them back again.

I probably won't be using Midi input into this old laptop, but I will on my new one, so I will give ASIO4ALL a look.

Thanks again

Zac

Thanks Noel, I will try that. Ultimately this isn't the computer that I'm going to run this on long term, but I do want to tweak it as much as possible and use it as a backup.

One peculiar thing I've noticed, the cursor on the chord screen is way behind where the music is, like by about 8 bars. Has that ever happened to you?

Zac, I've certainly never witnessed that before.
What does your CPU and Memory usage peak at when you're playing a song?

No, I've never had this happen.

Well the good news is it doesn't seem to be happening at all today (but the day is still young). At the moment the CPU is varying between about 62-70% during playback, memory is 61%. All of the suggestions & tweaks seem to be paying off though, I'm hearing no distortion (unless I start moving the mouse around, which makes it distort immediately).

Last night when I had the disparity of the music being ahead of the chord screen cursor the CPU was going up into the 80-99% range and was giving me a lot of distortion, speed slow downs, etc. I did notice at one point an annoying windows updater process randomly kicked in, which pretty much killed BIAB performance. I've been trying to eliminate as much of those sorts of things as possible. Today though it seems to be working a lot better than it was. I think the most dramatic improvement was going into Song Settings & choosing the "This song has playback problems, disable Fast Generation" checkbox (the downside of course is having to wait longer for the tracks to generate, but I can put up with that for now until the new comp arrives).

I have a relatively fast computer system but things running in the background can mess things up when recording and playbacks. I always turn off all anti-virus and anti-malware programs. I also disable the Ethernet card. When I do those things I never have a problem. YMMV

Make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date. Also your mouse drivers.

If this is a wireless mouse, consider replacing it with a wired one.

Zac,

One other thought that just occurred to me and I don't think that it's already been mentioned.... make sure that the \bb and \Realband folders are excluded from checking by your antivirus software.

Antivirus checking every time BIAB makes a new temp file can slow things, too.

Regards,
Noel

Zac, I haven’t seen it mentioned here, but have you “frozen” the tracks?
That usually greatly speeds up the loading time.

Also, if you are looking to replace your computer check out the recent
posts by Notes Norton on his recent purchase.

Thanks jazzsax, no I haven't, in fact I'm so new to this I don't even know what freezing tracks is, but I will look it up & do it.

Great idea. It's done. Thanks Noel!

Zacworld,

Welcome to the forum and to Band-in-a-Box. It seems like you're enjoying it so far.

Two file management suggestions: Create a new folder labeled with the name of your song or music project as the folder title. Frequently use the "save as" file command to save a new version of your work in progress. For example create a folder called MySong and save versions as MySong01, MySong02, etc.

Frequently saving can be really helpful if a project file is corrupted (it happens).

Thanks Matt, I did check & the drivers are up to date.

Great ideas, will do. Thanks

If the CPU is running 70%, consider it as being "maxed-out" for the purpose of anything requiring real-time processing. Clearly, there's not enough spare capacity to move the mouse

I really think that replacing that laptop with a more powerful unit is going to be the direction you will ultimately need to take. I feel you also agree.

You mentioned no midi. Midi styles will play in just a few seconds even with a slow system. Try it. As for sound quality that is based on your synth. Midi can sound awesome with a good synth.

Bob

Zacworld, some really good comments here. I remember when I was first getting into all of this.

The 2 biggest things I did, after upgrading my computer and memory, were to setup my AV so it didn't scan my BIAB and RB folders and got a wired rather than wireless mouse. Those helped but didn't completely get me to where I wanted to be.

I started playing around with 2 latency monitors (DPC Latency Checker and LatencyMon...both available free...just Google). Note LatencyMon will not give exact accurate readings on Win10 but will show relative areas of concern.

What these two showed me was that leaving BlueTooth on was causing a problem for my system i.e. it was constantly scanning for available devices. Shutting this off using the Win10 Control Panel helped a bunch.

YMMV

Jeff

check your hard drive for the data light flashing - background hard disc activity kills performance

Thanks Bob, I know MIDI sounds will work, I just really prefer the RealTracks. When I get my new laptop with the SSD drive this won't be an issue any more. Take care!

Hi Jeff, thanks, I might check out those latency checkers. What I've been doing is running BIAB while looking at task manager to see the CPU and RAM usage. Thanks to all the great suggestions here & some tweaks I found by Google searches the problem is not nearly as bad as it was.

One thing that messed me up a couple days ago was, after removing many things which were unnecessary, Windows detected them being gone & forced an update on me. After doing the update I was back to square one, the update added a ton of background processes I didn't need, so I had to go through it all over again. I found a way to delay Windows updating for 35 days, but I hope to find a way to eliminate it completely. Another user suggested the AV scanning idea you mentioned, so I did that too. This is an old laptop (no bluetooth on it) so I really want to keep it the way it is without Windows constantly trying to update it.

Thanks,

Zac

Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I tried freezing the tracks. Strangely though, doing so actually increased the loading time bit. Very odd...

Yep! Ordered a better system!

Is it just one style or anything you play back? Could be many things, your computer vol is up too high, sound card issues. I would start with the cheapest things like cables.

Thanks, I think the primary cause is a slow processor (1.4) that just can't handle any uptempo styles that use 4 or more realtracks. I've done a ton of tweaking on it the last 4 or 5 days and it's helped, but didn't fix the problem completely. Now waiting on my new bigger laptop to arrive.