Hi all,

I shared some of my thoughts in another post, but thought I would paraphrase them here for those they might help. Here is the original post for those interested:

Band in a Box / RB - for decades and up to today - has anything even come close ? (no)

I don't use BB / RB to create songs, but rather to study music. Music has brought such joy and fascinated me, and I was never really able to hear and reproduce what I heard on the record onto my guitar. Nor was I able to find transcriptions of recordings that would play back for me slowly and with notation. BB / RB was the first program that did this, not only for the guitar but for an entire band. It continues to provide a vast library of recorded music of the best studio musicians of our time that dwarfs anything else available in other programs.

If you study music, one extremely important thing to have is digitized musical examples of the greatest musicians in the world to study within the genre of your interest. BB / RB has provided thousands of these - again, with notation and playback that can be slowed to the point where it can be understood, no matter how slow you have to go. It can change the key with perfect fidelity to be more accessible to your voice or instrument of choice. So in addition to the program features, the critically important thing is the centralization and easy access to recordings by the best studio musicians in the world. If you happen to especially love good music and songs in all kinds of styles, the program has you covered. You can hear, appreciate, and learn how and why a multitude of genres create such beautiful music - from rock to jazz to bluegrass to classical, to celtic, to world, to Latin - and many more.

In a nutshell, there never has been nor is there currently available a program that comes remotely close to providing such a vast library of digitized music created by the best musicians in the world along with the tools to study it.

All that said - I have not even touched on the capability to compose music, which is a major selling point of the software. Though not my personal interest, I have equally high praise for the songwriting aspects of the program.

Happy studying !!!