User Guide

Chapter 11: Working With Audio
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Audio Edit Window Toolbar
These buttons zoom in and out to the audio window.
The 100% button sets the Audio Window to display about 8 bars per screen.
This button zooms to the sample level so that you can see the actual sine waves present. The
[100%] button restores the wave view.
This setting allows you to select audio by snapping to a 16
th
note (or a triplet in swing styles).
This button plays the selected area, and then stops. The other instruments are all muted;
you just hear the audio.
This button selects the whole track, useful for applying one of the built-in audio plug-ins.
Non-Destructive Audio Track Editing
The changes you make to the audio track are non-destructive and only become permanent if you save the file.
If you have a song file called MySong.MGU, the audio track is stored in a MySong.WAV file. If you are editing the
audio, the edits are now made to a temporary WAV file called TEMPMAIN.WAV, and not to MySong.WAV. If
you save the song, the changes get written to the MySong.WAV audio file, but if you don’t save, the original file is
preserved.
Audio Harmonies
You can apply a harmony to the audio part – allowing you to automatically create up to 4-part vocal harmonies from
your singing. And don’t worry if your singing is not in perfect tune, Band-in-a-Box can “fix” vocals to the correct
pitch - automatically! Simply record your vocal part, choose a harmony, and Band-in-a-Box will generate the vocal
harmony part for you using the world-leading TC-Helicon Vocal Technologies engine.
Once you have recorded a vocal part into Band-in-a-Box, you can use this feature in many ways, including:
- Record yourself singing into a Band-in-a-Box file. Create a vocal harmony for part or all of the song by
selecting a Band-in-a-Box harmony and choosing the Generate Audio Harmony option. You can now hear
yourself singing in perfect harmony!
- Did you hit a few “out-of-tune” notes when you recorded your singing to Band-in-a-Box? Fixing your “out-of-
tune” singing is easy, by instructing the program to correct the pitches to the Melody track.
Audio Harmonies Tutorial
Note: All of the demo songs are located in the Tutorial - Audio Harmonies folder in the Band-in-a-Box (C:\bb) folder.
Let’s load in the song “Listen.MGU.”
First off, play the song “Listen” – it has an audio track, so you’ll be hearing a male vocal track lasting about 16 bars
(since WAV files are big, we only include a small 16 bar sample of the WAV file).
We’re going to apply some audio harmony to this “Listen” demo.
Since any edits we save to the audio WAV file are permanent, we want to make sure that we keep a copy of the
original file around that is unaltered.
Save a copy of the song as “Listen 4 Part Harmony.”
Press the [Save As] button, and choose a name of “Listen 4 part harmony.” We will now be working
with this file, so our original Listen file won’t be affected.
Choose menu item Harmony | Audio Harmonies & Pitch Tracking. You’ll see the Generate Audio Harmonies
dialog.