Band-in-a-Box- Audiophile Edition

[kris]

Anyone here using Band in a Box Audiophile Edition?

[Gabor]

...the "biab audiophile edition" is a candidate to the Contrvesial Statements thread :-)

[kris]

...the "biab audiophile edition" is a candidate to the Contrvesial Statements thread :-)

why?
do you have any version of biab?

[micklerd]

Anyone here using Band in a Box Audiophile Edition?

Yes. There is a noticable difference in audio quality. If I were regularly using BIAB to accompany me for an audio or video recording, the higher cost and bigger file sizes could be justified. As I currently use BIAB (almost exclusively for practice), I would have been better off with the standard audio file version.

[jzucker]

Anyone here using Band in a Box Audiophile Edition?

what would be the point? At least for jazz, it'll never be good enough to make a real recording with. IMO, it's unnecessary since it's just a practicing tool. On a related subject, if you let the real band tracks loop for more than 10 minutes, the synchronization gets noticeably worse and worse to the point where it's unlistenable. I have made a few videos of this. pgmusic is completely uninterested in diagnosing and apparently most folks don't care. Too bad ireal is so mediocre. Wish they'd give ppmusic some legit competition but to me , ireal just sounds like an '80s wedding band playing the dinner music set...

[kris]

what would be the point? At least for jazz, it'll never be good enough to make a real recording with. IMO, it's unnecessary since it's just a practicing tool. On a related subject, if you let the real band tracks loop for more than 10 minutes, the synchronization gets noticeably worse and worse to the point where it's unlistenable. I have made a few videos of this. pgmusic is completely uninterested in diagnosing and apparently most folks don't care. Too bad ireal is so mediocre. Wish they'd give ppmusic some legit competition but to me , ireal just sounds like an '80s wedding band playing the dinner music set...

Thanks Jack,
I have BB 2019 .
It is an exercise tool - easy and fast.
I heard version 2022 is revised.
Audiophile version has very good quality waves-I hope.

I mainly use Reason Propellerhead for my recordings.
Best
kris

[grahambop]

I’m still using BIAB 2011 (with real tracks), somehow it’s still working even on Windows 10!

Good enough for my purposes. Although if I use it to make a recording, I often tweak and edit the tracks in Reaper (usually to chop out some of the more clunky/annoying piano chords).

[jzucker]

Thanks Jack,
I have BB 2019 .
It is an exercise tool - easy and fast.
I heard version 2022 is revised.
Audiophile version has very good quality waves-I hope.

I mainly use Reason Propellerhead for my recordings.
Best
kris

I have the 2021 ultra version, I think the 2021 (and by proxy) 2022 ultra pak will be fine. The main difference between that and the audiophile version is that the audio real tracks are in uncompressed format. Which would be important if you were making professional recordings with them but for practicing the compressed real tracks sound fine.

I thought about upgrading to 2022 but didn't really see much that interested me in the jazz area. I'm still kind of pissed that they don't make a couple realband tracks with fast accompaniment like 1/4=285-300. As it is, you have to take the 1/4=190 and scale them up which sounds bad because as the tempos get faster, the rhythm sections tend to compress out the swing feel and don't just play the exact swing feels but faster. But I've been asking pgmusic for this for 10 years and they are not interested. They once told me that they are more interested in developing soloist features which I could give a !@#$ about...

[kris]

I have the 2021 ultra version, I think the 2021 (and by proxy) 2022 ultra pak will be fine. The main difference between that and the audiophile version is that the audio real tracks are in uncompressed format. Which would be important if you were making professional recordings with them but for practicing the compressed real tracks sound fine.

I thought about upgrading to 2022 but didn't really see much that interested me in the jazz area. I'm still kind of pissed that they don't make a couple realband tracks with fast accompaniment like 1/4=285-300. As it is, you have to take the 1/4=190 and scale them up which sounds bad because as the tempos get faster, the rhythm sections tend to compress out the swing feel and don't just play the exact swing feels but faster. But I've been asking pgmusic for this for 10 years and they are not interested. They once told me that they are more interested in developing soloist features which I could give a !@#$ about...

Thanks for the info...;-)
Best
Kris

[kris]

I’m still using BIAB 2011 (with real tracks), somehow it’s still working even on Windows 10!

Good enough for my purposes. Although if I use it to make a recording, I often tweak and edit the tracks in Reaper (usually to chop out some of the more clunky/annoying piano chords).

I also noticed that the piano makes strange notes sometimes.
Maybe PG music will clean it in the future.

[tbeltrans]

What often happens with software of this type is that the company continually piles on features to attract new buyers. The software code base becomes far too convoluted for any one person to comprehend and you end up with different people understanding their own parts of it and the overall cohesiveness that the original release had, is lost.

Timing in software such as BIAB is very critical, and can be easily upset if somebody adds a new feature without realizing the impact it has on some other part of the software. Unless you have somebody carefully overseeing and orchestrating the inclusion of each new bit of code, you end up with all the programmers involved effectively working against each other.

To what extent this is a problem with PG Music, I don't know since I don't work there. However, after over 20 years as a software engineer, I have observed this problem all too often.

Maybe it is poor marketing of such a product to have a smaller feature set, but that everything in that feature set is rock solid.

I would not be surprised if the programmers themselves are surprised that it still works as well as it does.

Tony

[jzucker]

What often happens with software of this type is that the company continually piles on features to attract new buyers. The software code base becomes far too convoluted for any one person to comprehend and you end up with different people understanding their own parts of it and the overall cohesiveness that the original release had, is lost.

Maybe it is poor marketing of such a product to have a smaller feature set, but that everything in that feature set is rock solid.

I would not be surprised if the programmers themselves are surprised that it still works as well as it does.

Tony

yep, i know that syndrome well but about 12 years ago, I contacted them and spoke with peter gannon who wrote the software. I explained that the way they treated polychords and slash chords for jazz needed some work and offered to help them with either engineering work or with chord/scale relationship work (voluntarily, i did not want money). He said they weren't interested. That they wanted to focus more on the soloist features and that they were pushing that feature into various jazz curriculums for schools to study the styles of people like Bird, Coltrane, Martino, etc. I remember thinking, "WTF?!?".

During the discussion, I concluded that like many engineers, his ego was tied up in his work and he saw it as his art and that my critique of it was like I was criticizing one of his children. At that point, I knew the software would never evolve. It still sports basically an MS-DOS user interface that was just ported to use windows API calls and virtually no thought was ever given to usability.

If they ever submitted the software to a UX team for evaluation, I suspect people on both sides would experience heart trauma!

[kris]

Is there anything better on the jazz market than BiaB?

[tbeltrans]

yep, i know that syndrome well but about 12 years ago, I contacted them and spoke with peter gannon who wrote the software. I explained that the way they treated polychords and slash chords for jazz needed some work and offered to help them with either engineering work or with chord/scale relationship work (voluntarily, i did not want money). He said they weren't interested. That they wanted to focus more on the soloist features and that they were pushing that feature into various jazz curriculums for schools to study the styles of people like Bird, Coltrane, Martino, etc. I remember thinking, "WTF?!?".

During the discussion, I concluded that like many engineers, his ego was tied up in his work and he saw it as his art and that my critique of it was like I was criticizing one of his children. At that point, I knew the software would never evolve. It still sports basically an MS-DOS user interface that was just ported to use windows API calls and virtually no thought was ever given to usability.

If they ever submitted the software to a UX team for evaluation, I suspect people on both sides would experience heart trauma!

Possibly since I worked below the application layer in the embedded side of things, any customer contact I had was with system level folks. In the environments I worked in, we relied on customer feedback to insure that our products met real needs and performed properly.

To me it seems counterproductive for a company to refuse such input from customers, but I know that does happen. Maybe the situation you describe is because it is Peter Gannon's "baby" and his company built around that "baby" (i.e. his vision and brainchild), where I was an employee being paid to produce for an employer so that whatever ego may have been involved was secondary to doing what I was paid to do.

Tony

[jzucker]

Is there anything better on the jazz market than BiaB?

No unfortunately. They have no competition. I occasionally use iReal but as I mentioned, it often reminds me of a wedding band playing a dinner music set. Not in the same league with BIAB although I do love its simplicity. It only runs on android and IOS though I use it in an android emulator on my windows computer.