PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist 10 things that I'd love to see fixed or improved...

These are a list of issues that I would love to see addressed in BIAB 2019.

Keep in mind that I am a Mac BIAB user and these items are all things based on my current BIAB 2018 for Mac... so some of them may be already fixed in BIAB 2019 and perhaps some of them have not been issues in the Windows version at all...

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(1) Style Picker Bug. Since the Style Picker was redesigned in BIAB 2016, there has been an issue where adding favorites would cause us to lose our place in the Style List rather than staying right where we are on the list with the style still selected. If the list is short it's not a big issue, but when we are auditioning a list that might contain hundreds of styles it is SUPER inconvenient to lose your place while going through styles and flagging favorites for future consideration.

(2) Song Autogenerate and Autoplay disabled. Songs are not autogenerating --OR-- autoplaying when you load a new style, --OR-- autoplaying when you open a song from the desktop, from the file menu or change a song via PREV or NEXT. This was working all the way through the 2017 beta testing until Beta 6, and has been missing for the past 2 years. Blake confirmed that it was changed in the linked thread, but nothing has changed since.

It would be really nice if this was an option that we could turn on or off in the preferences, if the reason that it is currently not auto-generating is because some people didn't like it. Just a simple checkbox would solve the problem and allow the user to customize their experience.

If the song is frozen, I would like it configured to autoplay when opened, and if not frozen or with a freshly loaded style I would prefer it to automatically generate and then start playing. Only when I load something new from the Melodist does it still autogenerate and play automatically.

(3) Lead In Bars and Progress Bar. The way the Progress Bar handles intro bars could be improved by allowing the user to deselect "Allow Lead in Bars" in the preferences, but still get lead in bars by simply double-clicking on the lead in bars on the Progress Bar if they want to have them for a particular playback. This would also allow the user to easily have a half Lead in, by simply double-clicking on the second Lead in bar.

These are the pre-bars I am referring to:



When double-clicking on either of these bars, the lead in bars are temporarily activated for that playback (1 or 2 bars depending on which one you double-click on) would play with the metronome click when playing back song.

When not clicking on these bars, the song would play instantly, as the "Allow Lead in Bars" preference would still be deselected.

This allows the option to use Lead in bars or not use lead in bars without having to enter Preferences and make the change each time.

(4) Date Created Issue. All files are resaved with their original "Date Created" obliterated and overwritten by the "Date Modified". This makes it impossible to determine the date and time a song was first created the song, which is quite undesirable. This is important for basic file management and a pretty serious bug which puts BIAB out of step with pretty much all other Mac or PC applications. I assume that this is an unintentional bug that has simply been overlooked.

(5) Recently Loaded Songs issue. Ever since I've been using BIAB, there has been an issue which causes the list of Recently Load Songs to often be flushed so that they are no longer available when I launch BIAB on another day. That is so inconvenient when you might want to go back to something you were working on or to refresh your memory about what you last created or worked on. That list should be retained for at least the last 50 loaded songs (or whatever reasonable number can be remembered).

(6A) Melodist scrolling non-functional. The Melodist window is not mouse scrollable the way the similar lists are scrollable in the Soloist window.

(6B) Melodist preferences issue. Melodist is not remembering just one user preference "Allow Style Changes" when quitting BIAB. I think it remembers everything else as the default for when you next open the window and would be nice if it could store *all* changes just as a point of consistency if nothing else... (But also because I regularly forget that it checks itself on again each session, and then I lose all my loaded instruments and fader settings when the style is automatically changed when OK is pressed.)

(7) User Styles flakey. I'd love to see Improvements in the saving of User styles easily and reliably so that we can easily customize styles with alternate drums and added instruments and easily load them again in future. This is partially working again in BIAB 2018, but it is still buggy and not always remembering and loading customized instruments properly.

(8) Break Bars bug. In Practice mode, the Break Bars feature is still broken since it's introduction. It works for the drum track only and does not silence the instrument tracks.

(9) Woodshed Tempo On/Off. Can you please add an on/off checkbox to the Woodshed Tempo preferences so that we can keep our preferred Woodshed Tempo entered by default and simply turn the feature on or off instead of having to change it back to zero to disable it? That would be a helpful addition.

(10) Audio Chord Wizard. There are some issues with BOTH the original and the new Audio Chord Wizard. Each have different quirks and deliver different results, and both have unnecessary messages and holdups that make the process more difficult and confusing than it needs to be. It would be nice if it was turned into a more user-friendly experience, and ALSO it is confusing to have 2 different versions of it in 2 different places. I wouldn't want you to remove the original, since I actually preferred the results I got from it the last time I tried them both and compared the results, but it would be more sensible if they could both be easily found in the same places.

I should probably create a whole post detailing the issues I have had with Audio Chord Wizard, and will try to do that at some point, but will wait to see how things are looking with BIAB 2019. I really love this Audio Chord Wizard feature, but really wish it was more streamlined or at least if the messages were more sensible.

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Hopefully some of these things can be looked into and improved if they have not already been addressed. Many thanks in advance.

I would be very interested to hear from PC users which of these issues have existed in the Windows version and which of them may have been addressed with the release of BIAB 2019.

My regards to all,

Zedd