A ‘WAV’ button in the File section above the Song Title window opens a menu named Render to Audio File. You can export BIAB material as audio, MIDI or both, and there are three methods to do this. This approach provides a lot of flexibility, much like comping multiple takes from a recording session. A very useful extension of this approach is to fully regenerate a song several times in BIAB, export stems of each version to your DAW, and then compile a master version from your favourite parts. Or you can use BIAB’s Melodist and Soloist to create a more complete song before exporting. You can create only the backing tracks in BIAB (these, as we saw last month, are tracks 1-5, nominally bass, drums, piano, guitar and strings) and send the results to your DAW to add your own melody, solos and vocals. Let’s start by exporting an unfinished song to a DAW. There are many ways to gain more variety in music created with BIAB, both within the program itself, and by exporting MIDI and audio to your DAW. However, while these methods can produce some entertaining results, they generally won’t provide really polished songs without further work.

In the first part of this review, we looked at how BIAB’s automatic composition features can quickly create and ‘perform’ a song.

This month we’ll look in more detail at its composition/performance features and have a look at some of its educational devices. Last month, we saw that Band In A Box 2017 is an intelligent automatic accompaniment program, a powerful music composition engine, and a source of educational and practical tools for keyboardists, guitarists, composers and music students. We conclude our review of PG Music’s unique music auto-generation package by exploring some of the more advanced ways you can shape its output. The menu shown here is the file management and options window and includes sending audio directly to SoundCloud! The DAW Plugin button accesses the plug-in mode that shrinks the BIAB window for drag-and-drop action. Screen 1: BIAB’s Master track, or any single track, can be dragged to the Drop Station at the upper left to export tracks to a folder.

Band in a box alternatives