First, on Wednesday, we had Apple announce the iPhone 5. Once you start using them, the Midi Stuff is just so 1990s. Anyone buying this program needs to pony up for the Real Tracks, or at least the Real Tracks they would be using. The ability to pick a key, type a chord progression, pick a tempo, and then a style and go is amazing. I still rate Band in a Box is an ESSENTIAL tool for anyone learning Jazz. Does PG Music want us to store everything in ONE directory? Yikes! It is easy to have upwards for 5,000 band in a box files (I have something like 12,000) if you download all the free fake book changes and what not freely available on the internet. BUT if you have a subdirectory, it doesn’t open and do those files. It is a great feature, Open by Title, that shows the song name, key, tempo, and style for all the files in that directory. PG Music STILL hasn’t fixed/added a feature I think is essential, the ability to have the Open by Title be able to traverse subdirectories. Some of the new Real Tracks are amazing, and at least one (Euro Dance) is crap. I think it would be VERY useful for making practice for students and stuff. They seemed interested when I made that suggestion. I’m hoping that they add the ability to have the Woodshed stuff be able to be dumped into an audio file at some point. The Woodshed button works by you giving it a start tempo, say 120, and then tell it how fast to get to (say 240) and in what increments. I believe during the 2012.5 Beta test I suggested it would be a good idea to put it in a button and move it out front. Now, Band in a Box has HAD this function for a while, buried in the preferences somewhere.
The main feature for me in this update was the Woodshed Tempo button. They also have some “SuperMidi” things, to make the midi tracks sound better. Easy Buttons for Transposing (Display only) to Eb, Bb and other clefs/instruments.Remembers recent RealTracks that you selected.31 More Jazz RealTracks, 35 Rock-Pop RealTracks.This is one of my favorite programs, hands down. PG Music has released the latest greatest version of Band in a Box for Macintosh.
This is still probably the best piece of software a musician can own. Love the new real tracks, and wish there were like a 100 of them in each style rather than 33 or 36. Not that they need to push out updates to this rock solid piece of software. They also have a save to soundcloud feature but I’ve never used that.Īnother great thing they finally added was that it can now check for updates on it’s own. Not sure how useful the saving a song to youtube is going to be. Useful, but it should have had this a while ago. When they say GUI enhancements, they mean that when you have a track that has a banjo, it shows you where the banjo is rather than lumping it in the string section. There were also some enhancements to the GUI, but if you were expecting a more Mac like overhaul, you are going to be sadly disappointed.
After much delay, PG Music released Band in a Box 2015 for Mac last week.