Originally Posted By: Simon - PG Music
The Band-in-a-Box VST is meant to be an add-on to Band-in-a-Box, not a replacement. We are keeping features to a minimum on it intentionally, so that it doesn't become a system hog.


Well imo thats the wrong way to be looking at BIAB plugin.

Its the future and offers by far the most wide ranging and productive music composition workflow opportunities of all the technologies PG has developed in the past.

BIAB started as a wonderful MIDI practice aid arguably primarily for jazzers and students of improvisation.

Since Realtracks - this has broadened out into being a songwriting and inspirational song starter tool. But in order to really maximise on this its just an obvious given fact that most decent songs started in BIAB using realtracks will end up in a DAW.

Now given that the whole point of BIAB and the chord sheet arranger mode of working is to be able to try out different options - basically style and chord progression - the speed with which one can try out ideas and chop and change depends on how fast regeneration occurs.

and more and more BIAB users who try the plugin are going to want to maximise the time they spend in the plugin instead of BIAB standalone.

I also disagree about the "resource-hog" issue. that background BB4 plugin could generate to RAM - JUST LIKE BIAB standalone does 0- and then the result could be streamed via interprocess audio-piping in exactly the way other dual-app combinations work.

For examples we have ReWire, IAA on iOS and Vienna Ensemble Pro.

This would avoid the need to have the BIAB plugin take up lots of ram and do the generating itself - and instead keep everything inside that BB4 DAEMON.

A lot simpler because as I understand things BB4 is a modified and optimised version of the BIAB standalone app engine.

In addition to streaming generated audio from RAM in the BIAB daemon to the client plugin ( instead of just reading from file - as the current plugin does ) it really is high time that the client plugin supports multichannel audio and not just stereo.

Clearly having instruments ( real track or midi ) on separate tracks in one's DAW is the way 99 % of users work - and not having to constantly drag regenerated files from disk into separate tracks in the DAW HAS to be a better, more workflow enhancing and time saving method. than the current scheme.

I really hope PG are working hard on this for version 3.0 of the plugin .

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