PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic BiaB White Paper (May 2024)

Mario.

yes pg does very well re accessibility.

All.

i would just like to mention a wrinkle in cleaning up legacy systems and i DO realise lots of pg users want various legacy and other issues fixed....

heres a case study...

once i was called into a very large organisation to manage the renovation and modernisation of a huge legacy system...
the issues were...
...a zillion lines of source code
...lots of hard coded tables which couldnt be updated rapidly as users wanted.
...execs who didnt understand the rea!ities of making changes untill i sat them down with the coders and heard the execs then apologise.
...a massive internal user base of thousands
..a external customer base of more than a million people.
and that was just the start...lol.

in summary a challenge even though the programming team was the best available on the market...brilliant in fact.

now lets look at how the above system came about.
answer was basically a desire in the IT group to keep everyone happy always.
but the problem is a systems group can never achieve nirvana.
its just the nature of the system development beast.
one major issue is often user groups cant agree....for various reasons.
in the above case i often felt like a referee...lol. even with user sign offs still one user group might be happy but another might not.

you still see the same today viz 'everyone wants certain standards as long as its theirs'.

now re pg i suspect the legacy and other things the user base want addressed built up over time...ie pg didnt purposely decide to create problems.
they were just trying to keep all the different user camps happy.
eg maybe one group of users might want feature A but another group
of users might want B.
so things build up over time. the positives being bb has a plethora of features no other music app can match...the negative being sometimes it takes a time to locate bugs.

lets take modernising the gui for example.
some user groups might want the same gui they have got used to.
others want fancy shmancy modern groovy graphics.
other users might want to customise the gui any way they want.
i might like the gui one way but another user might think my way is junk and want another way the gui is presented.

thus its a real challenge for the coders.
the major issue being how do the coders keep everyone happy without ballooning the amount of source code to be maintained.

in the case i first described we had to make very difficult decisions so the system didnt become unable to manage.
this of course teed off some users as they didnt get their needs met.

frankly i feel for pg because keeping all the diverse user camps happy is one heck of a challenge. also a coder group is often limited by the platform and os they are developing for. ive got a few grey hairs to prove it...lol.

do i have bugaboos with bb ?...sure...but haveing been on the developer side of fence i look at what pg have achieved as rather remarkable...warts and all. given the many challenges.
lets look at the glass as half full because where would we all be without the tools provided by pg.
here is a small canadian company that has built a world wide diverse user base.
with this come various challenges at both the technical and the user level.

i know some people get frustrated...but lets also look at the positives
at the same time.

hopefully pg can reach a point of all users being happy...but its incredibly difficult for any tech company to do so.

happinesx to all...

om. 🇨🇦🇨🇦 🇬🇧🇬🇧

Bass Thumper,
good effort and thank you for including humble bits of my contribution. This resonates very well with Poll thread in BIAB Windows forum section started by Rob.

Skipping "new" feature wishes & ideas aside, I think it is safe to assume that most of us, with very few(!) exceptions want:
Bugs & underdeveloped features fixed, redundancy gone and significant workflow enhancements which includes UI (BIAB and PLUGIN)

It is my firm belief that those 3 items are essential / pre-requisites going forward. One cycle of fixing and deep cleanup would go a long way.

I believe that the two most significant responses so far are from J Pettit and the last one from Rustyspoon#. These are very concise and clear objectives. Let's just say for the record that PGM has always listened to the customer/user. they have consistently added valuable feature sets to the software to make users happy. The problem sometimes is US! we ask for things that may or may not be prudent considering all the things that have gone before. Sometimes what happens as mentioned above is features get added and never quite get done before the cycle repeats. This is why for the last few years many users ask for a halted new feature year. Completed or upgraded features can be considered "New" in a sense because they make the system better.

The workflow enhancements mentioned in Jeff post to me are super vital. BiaB is an incredible piece of software, it is not just wide but deep and rich with features and tools. However there are many things that are difficult to find, can be done multiple ways, some of which are less intuitive. Clean up and simplification in my opinion will not drive away older customers, it will instead enhance their experience. Especially if the improvements are detailed in nice tutorials. BiaB is the best single creation software available. It takes two three or more other titles to do what it does. I urge Peter and his incredible team to work to keep it ahead of the game. What this paper urges is to trust your customer base we are out there looking at the industry and tinkering with other things, hut our heart is here with you. I do believe this software has a long future and can be viable to younger users. To do that it need to do exactly what was detailed in the synopsis provided in the white paper and especially in J Pettit's short concise list. To me the following three things are vital and important.

1. fix all the longstanding and features and bugs that are constantly asked about.
2. clean up redundancy and workflow items making the program features easier to access.
3. continue to refine and update the plugin along the lines of how it was improved this year.

One really strong suggestion i would like to add is to go over to the reaper forum and watch the Kenny Gioia videos. They are very short and very informative. We get tutorials here but to me personally they are more slanted towards marketing a feature and less about really teaching how to use that feature in an everyday setting. Many features in BiaB remain hidden under a deep layer of confusing menus. Lack of clear instruction i personally believe has also hurt RealBand over the years. I firmly believe it is better than it gets credit for.

+1
Back in 2015 why were more users not onboard then rather than knocking things ? there would have been big changes by now
programming language upgrade delphi to c++ [CONFIRMED]
I post so much stuff that seems to go over the top of most and it usually takes years for users to catch up and see the story, then the penny drops. I posted all the play direct Reaper stuff also will virtually no interest or support from other users, I keep posting all the stuff about 6 months Win 6 months Mac craziness.
More users need to get onboard for there to be significant change, try these things out that I show, go deeper into things. I posted stuff on UJAM instruments using bb chord track years n years ago, but it only just catches up now.
When I came to the forum I was not a musician I was a technician that fixed amps for muso's and they wanted me to create tracks for them, I had to learn how all this stuff worked, through total frustration I had to learn and come up with ways to solve issues, I don't create tracks anymore for artist as I gave up and been trying full time to make Biab better so it won't happen to others.
You guys are just starting on trying to get big change, I'm worn out now from giving it all out for years n years and just feel like giving up

MC, what is your point in bring this into this discussion? Not arguing here just asking for clarity. We are having an open discussion regarding the current and future needs. There was a discussion behind the scenes for this paper when it was written but no one felt the need to discuss the language written in. It really does not matter. Delphi or C++ both are kept modern and that is really not the issue. The real issue is to encourage a halt in bolt on new features in favor of completion of existing ones and upgrading the workflow with removing redundant menu commands.

Please share some thoughts along those line we would like to hear everyone's thoughts on what was suggested.

"VST3, Don't understand the delays"
For VST3 to be implemented in Biab Delphi then Mac it has to be done by PG from scratch,
whereas if it was JUCE C++ it would all be there ready to go, things are easier to implement.
THINK BIGGER, NOT LIP STICK.

We are thinking big. The problem is what your thinking is never going to happen. They will NOT rewrite BiaB in C++. I understand your point but it does zero good to continue to push for things beyond the scope of what will happen. If this were not true then you my friend would not be exhausted from asking for 10 years.

My point is let’s discuss what can happen, not what can not. I hope this make sense to you.

Rob.

re goiai vids...spot on.

i often wonder if a very simplified thinned down bb version might be well received. for example for years in addition to rb/bb i used the reaps v2...which has a lower time to learn for a newbie than diving into the latest reaps version with lots more features.
i dont know why i like reaps v2 so much...maybe its cos ive deve!oped lots of tricks. but sometimes KISS just works.

in conclusion maybe small...intermediate...and advanced versions of bb ?? but the negative is added work for coders...
sometimrs unless highly modulised subroutine tricks are used.... for example once we built a lego bricks type app. worked quite well
cos some users only wanted some modules.
maybe others will disagree but lego approsch can work possibly.


just some ideas...

om 🇨🇦🇨🇦 🇬🇧🇬🇧

You are not thinking big, you are way behind, you want to get out of the 90's thinking.
Band aids and lip stick won't work. You have an old car, and you are trying to polish it up and put pin stripes on it.
Have you not seen the writing on the wall with Logic ? Look how well UJAM works, dig deeper and study how it works. I had to do a lot of explaining in the other thread how it all works as users had the wrong notion, once you understand then you can see the potential of it all, and then the penny drops, and you are out of the box.

Go with the lip stick for old Biab but put more focus into a future, "out of the box thinking" it's called:

If I can get any real time signature I like, any number of bars, any tempo map, instant easy nondestructive editing, as many tracks as I like, as many song tabs as I like, direct play of any audio format compressed/uncompressed/multichannel I like, a Win, Lin, Mac version at the same time with the same features, Live Arranging, and they have something called "VST3".
What are you giving me with Biab that will turn me on ?
Video: Reaper-Biab-BBVST-Vocal-Drum-Stems.mp4

Full Screen

Amen!

It's a focus that products, particularly software products, so often lose in the pursuit of features and tick-boxes.

Focus first on a product that's easy and a pleasure to use and have a standard method to get to extended features. I've pretty much always taken the view that if something is technically logical to do, the product should do it, even if I can't at the start see a reason why anyone "would want to do that". Partly because, once the logic is established, it's quite often easier and partly because it's often turned out that there actually is a good reason why someone might want to do it.

Look MC, i understand what you are saying but do you not see that it is insulting to continue to label folks as small thinkers to continue to alienate others by referring to them as living in the 90s this has not done you well in the past. We are thinking of the future, but of a future that is possible, If you can't see that maybe we are not the ones missing the point.

Look Robb, do you not see that it is insulting to PG to have this BiaB White Paper (May 2024) telling them their software has issues and it needs fixing. PG knows what is best and it does what is best for its customers. There is nothing else possible than what PG give, let it go ! you crazy dreaming up these things.

Gordon, very well said.

The other day we watched a short documentary on Steve Jobs and Japan. Apparantly he was influenced by certain simple and beautiful Japanese art. He was also influenced by the Sony corporation (led by Akio Morita), known for simple, elegant, logical designs (think Walkman). I'm not saying that BiaB is not logical (I'm too much of a novice user to make that claim) but as an engineer I definately value logic and technical elegance.

From my experience, the companies I worked for (and our suppliers and customers) did not embrace Apple products at all. Those products were considered to be for the "artsy-fartsy" folks, not for serious engineering work; right or wrong. And I never used or owned an Apple product mainly because I disagree with their closed business model. However, it is clear that Jobs was a genius and his products were innovative, elegant and cutting-edge. I think at one time Apple had a marketting slogan: Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication, or something like that.

And from personal experience I can tell you there is great wisdom in writing code that is logical; especially if others on a team will be editing and de-bugging it. I have certainly made my mistakes especially in my early FORTRAN punch-cards college days by not spending adequate front-end time to design the overall layout of my programs. Later on in my career, I learned from those early mistakes. The pro-programmers I worked with had a term for such poor quality; they called it "spaghetti code". Once, again, I am not linking this to BiaB in any way, but rather speaking generically.

I think this documentary is inspirational on technical and business levels.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/3016148/

[/quote]

Clearly not.
Too busy writing white papers and arguing about programming languages.


The barbarians are at the gate…. Beating the walls down.

Wake up people….. To the WALLS!!! To THe Walls!!!

MC, I disagree.
The White Paper is no more "insulting" than the Wishlist forum; and neither vehicle is insulting.
Moreover, have you not read the 12 items in Section 3?

Fortran is a powerful language for many tasks, but it isn't the easiest language in which to write neatly structured code.

Keeping designs and code neat, elegant, consistent, readable and digestible takes a lot more planning than people often realise, but it usually pays back plenty. In a typical compiler white space and meaningful cost nothing in the final executable. Meaningful names cost when one first writes them but normally pay back when revisiting. Design the the user interface and data first.

I'll try to watch the video tomorrow.

Edit: For user interfaces I often used to make movie-type storyboards, sketched out by hand for people to consider, critique, draw and write over.

Fortran?
Really?

That’s where this thread has gone?


I need to smoke more weed..

"Look Robb, do you not see that it is insulting to PG to have this BiaB White Paper (May 2024) telling them their software has issues and it needs fixing."

I am not Rob, but in my view the purpose of the "paper" was politely summarize what was mentioned earlier in several parts of the forum. Suggesting what was suggested before. Most of us do care about the future of BIAB and it seems the right thing to do - to have a civil and constructive discussion. While I disagree with some points made and some wording, I do believe this document has value as it mainly focuses on feasible changes that will probably make program more appealing to general (and advanced) users.

Don't you think it would be much easier to say: "Rewrite software from ground up and make us all happy"? Probably yes.
My 3 cents, is that very likely in not very distant future AI assisted legacy code refactoring software would be able to do some heavy duty magic. Who knows. For now, it is pretty clear from Poll post in Windows section what users wish to see in 2025. Peter has acknowledged that thread and possibly it will impact some decisions for the next cycle.

P.S. What I think is impolite is bombarding many threads with Reaper "solutions". Musocity, have you ever thought that only >10% of BIAB users are on Reaper and most likely will never switch their DAW of choice? You come up with interesting and sometimes brilliant ideas for BIAB+Reaper, but most of us will not go that route. Perhaps suggest that PGM creates Reaper forum section for Reaper users and I will support you in that request.

It's not insulting ! nor should my comments to think bigger be insulting.
I post Reaper videos/gif/pics to show how modern things should work, this should give ideas to users that can be applied to Biab.

Don't look at it as a competition between Reaper & Biab, learn from Reaper, try it ! AND GET SOME MORE UNDERSTANDING, to help PG, not to say get rid of Biab and get Reaper !!!!!!
Honestly guys, get ya thinking cap on.

Users say things are impossible to do, I just do them and show with actual real working examples.
I can't limit my own thinking and ideas to match an older way of thinking so as not to offend, this is basically what I'm being asked to do.
Again and again and again, with LOGIC the writing is on the wall and it's in bold type.
Do you not remember the fighting PG did against 64bit, they were totally happy with 32bit and JBridge.

It's too far behind as it is to be thinking that lip stick will fix it.