After posting an idea to fix the dreaded "255 bar limit" in the BiaB forum, jazzmammal (Bob) informed me that this limit does not exist in Real Band. And when I also discovered that RB also can open .XML files and generate arrangements like BiaB does, I decided to try it with a 9-minute song I wrote in January 2013 that consists of 325 bars. In the process, I discovered a weird glitch that keeps occurring between bar 240 and 241. But before I elaborate on this glitch, I'll explain the process I went through before I discovered it.

The first problem I encountered after I opened my .XML file is that RB truncated the song at around bar 220. So, I tried to resolve this by copying and pasting about 100 bars of chords from a previous section in my song into the section that got truncated and then manually entered the rest of the chords at the end of the song. While this did indeed result in the complete restoration of all the chords and bars in my song, I wanted to understand why RB had truncated my song in the first place and went back to MuseScore (the music notation software I use to create my lead sheets and .XML files) to study what was occurring around bar 220. The only thing I could find that I suspected as the culprit was the word "INTERLUDE" that I had entered at that location. However, I had also entered the word "INTERLUDE" at bar 105 because the interlude in this song occurs between the first and second verse and between the second and third verse. To be safe, I deleted both occurrences of this word and created a new .XML file that I then opened in RB. Sure enough, RB did not truncate the song at bar 220 like it had done before.

Then I switched to the Tracks window and clicked on the Generate button so that RB would generate a full arrangement of my song using the style I had selected. Because I had previously clicked on the "start from beginning" button in the Chords window, the first 50 bars were visible in the Tracks window as the arrangement was being generated. But before RB started to generate the drums track (the last track to generate), the Tracks window shifted to show a later set of 50 bars that has bar 240 at the midpoint of the window. So, I clicked the Play button and listened to the arrangement from that point onward. Sure enough, a weird glitch and chord change that I had heard previously (before I had removed the INTERLUDE words from within MuseScore and after I had tried the copy/past operation to correct RB's truncation of my song) was present again at the 240-241 bar transition. But when I switched to the Chords window to check the chords at this location, I saw that a chord change doesn't occur until bar 244 (an Am chord) with the most recent chord change occurring at bar 238 (a Dm chord). To make sure that a chord change was indeed occurring at the 240-241 transition, I muted every instrument except for one of the acoustic guitars and played the section again. Then I switched to the other acoustic guitar and did the same thing. Both times I could hear a chord change occurring where there wasn't supposed to be one at bars 240-241.

My next idea was to insert a Dm chord into bar 241 so that a chord change wouldn't occur in the arrangement when RB generated it. But instead of just regenerating a few bars on both sides of this transition for each instrument, I had RB re-generate the entire song from scratch. While this did prevent the chord change from occurring, RB still tried to briefly make this change and ended up creating a weird glitch at the transition between these two bars. I don't know what is going on at this location in the song, but this shouldn't be happening. Does anyone know what it could be? The next thing I'm going to do is insert a Dm chord into bar 240 to see if the glitch goes away completely, even though I shouldn't have to do this for either bar 240 or 241. In the meantime, perhaps someone can give me an explanation of what's going on at this location along with some other suggestions to resolve this issue.

Last edited by muzikluver; 06/07/19 04:36 PM. Reason: changed "tracks" to "bars" in third paragraph

Tom Levan (pronounced La-VAN)
BiaB 2024 Win UltraPAK Build 1109, Xtra Style PAKs 1-11, RB 2024, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, Intel Q9650 3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD & 2 TB HDD, Tracktion 6 & 7 (freebies), Cakewalk, Audacity, MuseScore 2.1 & 3.4, Synthesizer V