Hi All,
Just recently learned that RealBand is a DAW and comes with BiaB. This is about all I know about it. To start with I want to explore replacing Audacity with RealBand for the purpose of recording my electric bass on top of MP3 audio files. The consensus at this forum is that RealBand is superior to Audacity.

I watched the introductory video and followed it’s suggestion of verifying basic operation by opening the Latency Adjust file. This audio played thru my desktop speakers, all seems to be working properly. I then opened up the MP3 file that I want to record on top of and this audio file also plays perfectly.

[A bit about my setup. My bass is plugged into my practice amp. This amp has a Line-Out that is sent to Channel 1 of my Tascam 208i Analog to Digital Converter. The output of the converter is sent to my Win10 computer via a USB port.

In RealBand my audio track is on Channel 1 and I clicked on the “2” to tell it I want my bass recording on Channel 2. I then played a few notes and the Input line of the Levels Meter shows activity but the signal strength peaks at around -18dB(seems low to me).

I then hit the Record button and a countdown display comes up, which is nice. Then my audio track begins to play along with an annoying click, probably a click track.

Q1. How can I get rid of this click?

So I played a few bars on my bass and hit stop. It asks if I want to keep the Take, I say yes. I now have what I believe is a waveform on Channel 2. But when I rewind to the beginning and play it, I hear my audio file but no bass recording. If I bring channel 1’s volume to zero and replay I do hear my bass but it’s extremely faint, which agrees with the -18dB above. So I think my 2nd question is:

Q2. How can I adjust the gain of the 208i from within RealBand?

Next to the Master Volume slider there is an Audio Settings pull-down menu. I selected Recording Devices and the 208i does show up with a green check mark. And drilling deeper there is a “Microphone” fader for it. So I slid it to maximum and made another recording attempt. This time the wave form of the recording is bigger but on playback my bass is still very faint and the noise on that signal increased dramatically.

At the PGMusic website I have viewed
1. Getting Started Recording Audio 4 of 5
2. Getting Started Recording Audio 5 of 5 and
3. Recording Audio with Windows 8/7/Vista

These videos don’t help with my problems and seem dated around 2014 so I’m not sure how applicable they are for a Win10 box.

Q3. Are there more recent videos available for recording in RealBand?
Q4. Is there a downloadable Users Manual for RealBand that is reasonably up to date?

Note that at this time I’m not interested in RealTracks or MIDI. I just want to record my bass.
To get an idea of what I’m trying accomplish, visit my SoundCloud space. Every track there I recorded with Audacity.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.


https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2024 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.