rayc,

One StylePicker preview feature you might find useful is the "Play Using Chord Sheet for Song" area. This preview feature uses the style to playback your chord sheet instead of a premade demo file.

One gotcha' is it will create temporary audio files for the whole chord sheet which can eat up your time when you preview multiple styles. One way around this is to enable the 4 bar preview check box.

Enabling the 4 bar preview check box selects the first four bars of the chord sheet. These four bars likely are not the most interesting four bars of the song. Temporarily program the first four bars to mimic four bars of interest while previewing styles.

I find style demo songs rarely relate to my project. However the demo songs do highlight the strength of program features and instrument voicing.

The "Familiar Song Title" part of the SongPicker window is a relatively recent innovation. I believe it's greatest strength is to help people with little musical background find a tempo, feel and time signature that works with a well known song performance. Closely matching a well known performance arrangement has never been a strong point of Band-in-a-Box.

Here are some real life examples of the works well but not matching principle. The instrumental versions of well known songs heard in elevators (lifts) and doctor offices. Instrumental groups that cover hit songs.

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StylePicker window with Chord Sheet Preview highlighted

Jim Fogle - 2024 BiaB (1111) RB (5) Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home