BIAB for MAC
I have been buying Band-in-a-Box since the Atari version, back in the last century. The last version I bought for Windows was around 2004, it did everything I wanted. Then I switched to Mac and I found I had to keep my old PC laptop going to use the program.
I worked the piano bar on cruise ships and I had my laptop on the piano, BIAB running, earphone port plugged into an amp, and the display where the music stand would be. As it played the backing instruments the notation was presented to me with lyric and chord symbols close by the melody line. It was so easy to read and play that I could play anything! All the standards, Sinatra, Elton, Croce, Billy Joel, bossanovas, anything. (I turned so many passengers on to BIAB that I seriously considered becoming a rep and signed with PGmusic to do that. However, the ship frowned on it so that didn't go anywhere.)
The fly in the ointment was that I was using a PC, subject to annoying interruptions in service. So I switched to Mac and bought BIAB for Mac. The computer was steady as a rock but the program was rubbish compared to the PC version so I struggled on with the PC until I retired.
Yesterday I blew $89.27 usd and upgraded to the latest Mac version, highly touted on PGmusic's website. I thought surely in the last few years they must have fixed some of the most glaring deficiencies, and the price is the same as the full-featured Windows version. What a disappointment. The interface is still clunky, the lyrics still come up in a little box in the control area, hard to read and nowhere near the melody line, impossible to sight-read during a live performance. Basic conveniences that every other program now has, like "Open Recent" in the drop-down file menu, are missing. Yes, the RealTracks sound great but the old midi sounds were quite adequate for the piano-bar environment.
Apple is a major player in the sphere of music and so is BIAB. I am surprised and disappointed to find Mac marginalization at PGmusic.
London Bobby
Time traveller from the last century
Bob, no comment on s/w vendor's bad Mac implementations, but ...
ReplyDeleteIn cases like these I highly recommend you to run (some version of) Windows in a virtual machine on the Mac ad run your working version of said vendor's s/w there. I run (or used-to anyway) Platinum, a Windows-only music workstation, under VMware Fusion on my Mac and it runs *better* there than it did on my old PC.
VMware Fusion and Parallels are the two main contenders for this on Macs, and are $50 or less. But you could also try the free VirtualBox to see if it will do the job for you.
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
https://www.virtualbox.org/
Bob, BTW, I just noticed that VMware has a CyberMonday sale on until tomorrow: $35 US. http://t.co/14bqOMso
ReplyDeleteCheers!
Thanks Bruce. I had Virtual Box installed to run Quicken for the same reason but I upgraded VB and lost the XP machine in the process. So I gave up on VB and switched to iBank for accounting. It's not Quicken but it works. I'm wary about investing more time in VB.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've not had great experiences with VB in the past either. I had expected it to be better by now, but there you are.
ReplyDeleteI've been using VMware Fusion heavily since 2007. I used it for heavy development at work as well as home applications, upgraded it from version 1.0-beta through 3.something and never had any issues. I still have working VMs (eg Win98SE) that I first created back in 2007 and just keep firing up to test something.
Highly recommended, both for robustness and tweakability.
I hear that Parallels is currently faster than VMware, but that doesn't bother me particularly.