User Guide

Chapter 3: Band-in-a-Box 2010 for Macintosh

To edit a MIDI track (bass, drums, piano, guitar, strings), or the MIDI part of a

RealTracks that has a RealChart (MIDI transcribed solo), simply open up the

Notation window (or Piano Roll window), and click on the track and edit it. Make sure

to Freeze the track by pressing the Freeze button and choosing Freeze for that track, or

right-clicking on the instrument at the top of the screen and choosing Freeze. Now your

edited tracks will save with the song.

RealTracks Enhancements

No more long waits for RealTracks to generate!

RealTracks generate much faster, 4X faster on average. A typical song with RealTracks

that took 20 seconds to generate will now generate in about 5 seconds. And if you freeze

some or all tracks in the song (see below), playback of RealTracks is almost

instantaneous.

This “speedup” feature works “automatically;” you should just notice that generation of

RealTracks is much faster. This feature uses CPU resources during playback. If you

have a multi-core machine, you may not notice this at all, since it will use different cores

than the main Band-in-a-Box thread. If you have an old machine, low on memory, slow

hard drive etc., you can disable this “speedup” feature. This will insure that your

machine is doing less CPU work during playback. This is done in RealTracks Settings

dialog.

Soloist generated RealTracks are now saved with the song, so you will hear the

RealTracks play the same solo when you reload the song.

When you generate a solo using RealTracks, Band-in-a-Box will remember this, and

when you go to save the song, Band-in-a-Box will ask you if you want to save that solo

(and thereby freeze the Soloist track). If you say yes, then the solo will play instantly the

same way when the song is reloaded. Of course, you can freeze the soloist track yourself

at any time. Note that only one solo can be saved. You can’t generate a bunch of

different segments of solos; only the last one will be saved.

Shots, Holds, and Pushes

RealTracks now support new features, including Shots, Holds, and Pushes. Simply type

in the chords as you normally would, adding periods (…) for shots and holds, and the

RealTracks will play them.

Note: You need the installer that creates a LibraryM/Holds folder in your RealTracks

folder.

The “H” column of the RealTracks Assign dialog tells whether the

RealTrack styles supports Shots, Holds and Pushes. If the column is

blank, the selected RealTracks style has Holds, Shots and Pushes

available. If there is an “n,” holds are available from PG Music but not

installed. If there is a “-,” no holds are available for this style. The Holds

files are a free upgrade, so you can download them from our web site

pgmusic.com.

Assuming that you have the Holds files for the RealTracks that you are generating, then

you just use Band-in-a-Box as you would normally, and type chords with shots (e.g. C..),

holds (C…) or pushes (^C or ^^C for 8

or 16

note push), or combinations of push and

hold (^C…).