Originally Posted By: Jim Fogle
One big difference between Band-in-a-Box and RealBand is how the two programs approach track generation.

Band-in-a-Box generates a few bars of each track then begins audio playback. Band-in-a-Box then continues to play audio while also continuing to generate tracks as a background task. Sometimes the program will stall because audio playback catches up to track generation so there is temporarily nothing to play. If that frequently happensns a user can go to preferences > RealTracks and remove the check mark for, "Speed up generation of RealTracks (disable on slow machines)". When that feature is disabled Band-in-a-Box will completely generate all tracks prior to starting audio playback.

Another way Band-in-a Box works is when the generate button is selected, ALL tracks are generated unless a track is frozen. By-the-way, Band-in-a-Box use to have only a combined play and generate button so every time you clicked play a new arrangement was created.

Finally, when a track is generated all the track is generated.

Now for RealBand. RealBand does partial or complete track generation; it depends on what is highlighted. Nothing is generated until the generate button is pressed. Audio playback does not begin until all track generation is complete.

Corresponding to the difference between how these two programs perform track generation is the time it takes each program to accomplish these tasks, which I didn't mention in my previous reply to your post, Jim, though I did mention this in a subsequent post and explained that the quickness of BiaB's approach makes BiaB more suitable than RB for working out the kinks in a song that is being developed (as an example). However, this has not deterred silvertones from abandoning BiaB completely and suggesting that I do the same. But as I've thought about the speed differences in these two programs, it occurred to me that RB would be much faster if it took advantage of Windows' multi-threading capabilities. For example, I have a 3 Ghz Quad Core PC. This makes it possible for a program like Format Factory to convert four .WAV files to four .MP3 files simultaneously because each of those files is processed independently by each of the four cores. Why doesn't RB do the same thing with songs that have four or more tracks? I know that silvertones likes to generate one track at a time after he selects a RealTrack that he wants to use for a particular track. But for someone who prefers to use a BiaB Style that has at least four instruments and wants to generate all four of those tracks at the same time, RB should be able to hand each of those track generation operations over to separate cores in the CPU to handle, thus reducing the amount of time it takes to generate those tracks by a factor of four. The same would be true of the generation of an eight track song on a PC with eight cores in the CPU, except that the time would be reduced by a factor of eight. If PG Music would make it possible for RB to multi-thread, it would be much more desirable for me and other users to use it instead of BiaB more often than not.

Tom Levan (pronounced La-VAN)
BiaB 2024 Win UltraPAK Build 1109, Xtra Style PAKs 1-11, RB 2024, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, Intel Q9650 3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD & 2 TB HDD, Tracktion 6 & 7 (freebies), Cakewalk, Audacity, MuseScore 2.1 & 3.4, Synthesizer V