Bob, the thread was convoluted only because the respondents made it so. A lot of the questions were on the order of throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Few stuck and I got tired of it. Besides, there at the end, I thought reinstalling the program finally fixed the problem. One of the PG techs I was working with thought that something had gotten crossed up in the program after installation, leading to the problem, which made sense to me, even though I had no idea what that could have been. Turns out, the problem wasn't fixed -- it was merely in lurk mode briefly.

What's the problem now? Same as it's always been. There is so much break up and distortion during playback, it is totally unusable. Often it is so bad it affects the music's tempo -- severely retarding it. Sometimes, when it gets really bad, the program will crash. But this has happened only a few times. Sometimes, if the tune is MIDI only, this helps. Other times, it doesn't make a difference, but generally, the more RealTracks are resident, the worse the playback distortion is.

2017 doesn't have this problem. Neither does RealBand with the same identical pieces. And neither does it occur with any other music software I've used. Cakewalk, Studio One, Reaper, Muse, Pro Tools, doesn't matter.

I don't really feel like discussing this any further. You always come from the position that the PG software product is perfect and whatever the problem is, it is ultimately user error. I simply disagree. And I don't feel like arguing with you about it any further. As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed. BiaB 2017 works and it does everything I need. And I'm thankful it does.