This is my first post on the forum here, but I've been using (and loving) Band-in-a-Box for years.

The issue of "substyles" is one I've grappled with for a while. There are two issues here, first of all what the instruments are PLAYING when it comes to intro, verse, chorus, bridge, etc., but second is just simply the VISUAL aspect of it. If you're writing a song, you want to be able to, at a glance, look at your Band-in-a-Box song, and say to yourself "right, there is clearly the bridge section that I wrote".

The first issue, what the instruments are playing, is tricky. But, it's the second thing I'm going to talk about here, the VISUAL thing. There's a feature where, when you have a style loaded, you can right-click on a bar and "define c/d". The feature is there so you can actually CHANGE styles using c/d, but for myself, I've always used that feature but selected the SAME style. The reason for this is that now I can toggle through FOUR different substyles, clearly indicating a bridge, intro, or other section on my chart.

And, they've actually added a cool new feature at Xmas where it removes a step, and you can just select "Define c/d using the same style" right in that menu, which eliminates that step, and I use that all the time.

It's likely not in the mac version yet, but of course you can still do it the way I initially indicated.

As far as the issue with what the instruments are PLAYING, I find that often the most important instrument to delineate the difference between sections is the drums. With THAT, you can also right-click on the bar numbers and select MORE than just the two options for drums. So for example, you can pick "sidestick" for intros, snare/closed-hat for verses, snare/open-hat for choruses, and ride for bridge, or something like that (different RealDrums have different options for substyles). So I frequently make use of that feature to separate song sections. That one is tricky though, because there's a bit of a weird connection between that feature and the actual part markers, which really confuses things. That's a small beef though as I do love being able to switch those drum parts, though there's certainly room for improvement. And for other instruments, there is also of course the F5 dialog to change RealTracks.