PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Macintosh Spacebar key commander playback when practicing is limited

Hello,

Has any other Mac user experienced this?:

Before upgrading to the most recent version of Band-In-a-Box for Mac 2024, tapping the "spacebar" would stop or start playback of a song FROM WHATEVER BAR I HAD SELECTED. For example, if I clicked on bar 5 to commence playback, and tapping spacebar to both start and stop playback, no matter where I stopped it would always start at bar 5 again when hitting spacebar. This is totally logical especially for the many who use BInaB as a fantastic practice tool. I’ve owned BinaB for well over 25 years and upgraded with no issues and the spacebar always used to work this way on my Mac.

It no longer does this on the latest 2024 version for Mac (I don’t know about Windows users). Apparently when checking with tech support about this issue I was an anomaly and it was never supposed to work this way!

The two options in “Settings” for playback using spacebar are:

1. “Plays from start (control+space from current position)”

2. Plays from current position (control+space from start)

My hunch is that this second option is hardly ever used. That is, I question how many people when practicing have use for picking up a musical thought exactly where they left off when stopping playback.

I propose either replacing the 2nd option (or adding a 3rd option for playback if possible?) in “Settings” the way I described in the first paragraph: simply that when the user clicks on the bar that they want to commence playback from, it will always start from that bar when hitting spacebar no matter where they decide to stop playback.

For the many, many folks out there that use BinaB as a fabulous practice tool, either replacing the 2nd playback option or adding a 3rd option has a few advantages:

1. When holding your instrument and you are focussed on learning a particular passage in the middle of the song, the less fiddling with your computer keyboard, the better.

2. Sometimes the LOOP function is not the way one wants to practice a middle passage, so just being able to stop by tapping spacebar and hitting spacebar again to start playback from the user’s chosen bar is totally logical when the player need to pause to collect their thoughts about the specific passage they are learning.

Not to mention the LOOP function is quite cumbersome in that if I stop loop playback, it immediately stops being able to loop until one re-selects the bars one wants to loop - ie, it’s a lot of fiddling with one’s mouse or trackpad and then hitting two key commands simultaneously to start playback again.

3. In a nutshell, when practicing, the less key combos (ie spacebar alone is only one key command and big so hard to miss) the easer it is to stay focussed on the music on his learning!

I did send the bulk of this post to "Wishlist" for upgrade changes but curious to hear of anyone else's experience when using BinaB as a practice tool.

You can change the shortcut key for menu items on Mac that you can't on Win
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2271/mac