80. How do I install Band-in-a-Box® upgrades?

The way you should install any Band-in-a-Box® upgrade is to install it to your existing Band-in-a-Box® folder. By default, this is C:\bb, however it is possible that you have previously installed Band-in-a-Box® somewhere else, or have moved/renamed the folder since installing. An easy way to check where you have Band-in-a-Box® installed is to right-click on the shortcut that you use to launch the program and select 'Properties'. However, the installer should normally be able to locate your 'Band-in-a-Box® folder location'.

With Band-in-a-Box® DVD's, you'll also need to choose your RealDrums and RealTracks folder locations. These are the folders where the 'Drums' and 'RealTracks' subfolders are located. It is normally best to choose your Band-in-a-Box® folder (i.e. C:\bb) for these, although you may have previously installed them somewhere else, for example on another hard drive with more space for the large audio files. The installer should normally be able to locate your Drums and RealTracks folders automatically, however in some cases it cannot, for example if you had manually copied and pasted the folders to a new custom location rather than installing them there.

With upgrades that you downloaded or got on CD (rather than DVD), you'll have separate installers for the RealDrums and RealTracks. The same information applies to these, except that you won't be selecting your Drums and RealTracks folders when you install Band-in-a-Box® itself.

Note that if you want your RealTracks files located in C:\bb\RealTracks, you select C:\bb as the RealTracks folder location, and similar with the Drums.

There is no harm in keeping a copy of your entire Band-in-a-Box® folder for the previous version as a backup, aside from the hard disk space it takes up. For example, if you are upgrading to Band-in-a-Box® 2014 from 2013, you could create a folder called bb2013, copy the contents of your existing bb folder to the bb2013 folder, then install the Band-in-a-Box® 2014 upgrade into your bb folder.

One thing to take into consideration if you are keeping a backup of your old folder, is the disk space required for the RealDrums and RealTracks. If you are getting low on hard disk space, you could backup all the files within the bb folder except for the Drums and RealTracks subfolders.

Another consideration with RealDrums and RealTracks is that some earlier versions of Band-in-a-Box® could only use wave files, while 2009 and higher can use compressed WMA files directly, not requiring the much larger wave files to be present. So if you are upgrading from 2007/2008 to 2014, you could delete the wave files to free up hard disk space - there is an option within the RealDrums and RealTracks Preferences dialogs to "Archive" the wave files. Note that you will need to have the WMA files, which will be present along with the wave files unless you had manually deleted them (in which case you would need to reinstall them).


Alyssa - PG Music