Hello all,

I purchased BIAB and RB in Dec 2020 and - whilst it crashed once or twice in Dec/Jan) since the last 3 weeks or so I have noticed the program crashing a lot more. This is starting to make me save my work every 10 mins or otherwise I have to repeat a lot of editing. Basically it is starting to get annoying and I am grateful for any advice.

The crashing seems to mainly happen when I copy and paste within my mixing of the tracks. In addition RB always offers me to recover my latest work and it [/b]never works! [b] In fact if I say "yes" to that (of course I want to recover!!) I have to engage the task manager and "end task" as I am then unable to shut RB down!

So going round in loops atm.

I have the latest version of BIAB and RB (7 Feb I believe) and this is my system info:

Device name DESKTOP-M7TSNRE
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4030U CPU @ 1.90GHz 1.90 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB
Device ID BB4CD8ED-BB71-4560-8C40-522F597BD4CC
Product ID 00330-80000-00000-AA977
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display


Thanks in advance for your pointers or any other questions you need me to answer to solve this.

Tina

crashes are likely to be a pc related issue rather than RB......do you have other programs running in the background?

often people are advised to run RB as an administrator so you could try that.

do you get crashes with other programs?

difficult to know what to suggest..........are you running a synth that needs to load large samples into memory?

maybe someone else can be more helpful.

RB uses what they call a Temp Audio Directory to save your edits and new recordings.
Once the SEQ file gets saved, it writes all the new stuff to the original file, and also creates a backup in your RBBackup folder
Where this folder is located depends on where you run RB from.

From your description it sounds like this drive has become an issue.
Do you have enough disk space?
Have you paid attention to the Backups options in Preferences - Options?

The backup control is on the File tab (how many, how much space, whether to delete or just move to Recycle Bin,which still eats drive space, etc)
The Temp Audio Directory is specified on the Audio tab.

Do you have available a second internal hard drive?
Are you running Realband from C: or the external hard drive?

These questions may help narrow it down.
You posted your specs but not the drive options.

RBBackup, as I mentioned is on the same drive as you run Realband from.
The Temp Audio Directory is assignable. This helps alleviate issues where the system is is trying to Read and Write to the same drive at the same time.
If you think about it, most programs do not have to do that, but when recording audio you need to hear the existing tracks (Read) and also store what you are recording (Write) at the same time.
In the image below, I use the 'T' drive for writing to (edits and recording) and one of the other drives for reading the tracks.
Now after a while, even with this situation, the 'T' drive will start reading/writing at the same time until I Save, which interweaves all the data into a single SEQ file.

The Temp Audio directory does not get cleared out until you actually exit Realband, then any temp audio chunks are deleted.

Not sure if all this will help, but it does seem to point to a resource issue and the drive(s) is the unknown right now.

In the event you do have an issue, using File- Open Special allows the option to open a recent backup .. which would have been your last known good point (most likely).
However, I think the recovery process does exactly this; opens the most recent backup, so if those aren't good, there is something else going on, but by using the timestamp on the backups available you can tell when the problem started occurring. Work backwards in time.

Aside from the above, are you using any new Plugins? Sometimes plugins can either put extra drain on the system, or 'not play nice'. The above mentioned method (working backwards in time) helped me discover a free plugin that was the issue, so thought I'd mention it also.

Thank you for all your pointers. I am using RB on my C: Drive. I have a feeling it is to do with backup as well. I have cleared my RB backup folder (do not have "Backups" as an option under Preferences in RB?) ... if that doesn't help I will work through the suggestions one by one.
STILL don't know how to copy & paste an image into a thread on PG Music so cannot show you in more detail.

You have to click the Reply button and then use the File Manager feature to load images.

I'm pretty sure you would have the same Backup options I have in Preferences

I had similar problems with Realband crashing on my old pc. It turned out to be a memory hardware error within the PC that was causing the problem.

Forum member Noel96 has provided a step-by-step guide of how to include screen shot(s) in your post in the Tips and Tricks forum section +++ HERE +++.

I notice Jim's link to Noel's post mentions opening BiaB in step one
If you can do a screen shot of RB you can skip step one.

Basically just save a screen shot to your computer
Then when in the forum, make sure you open the full Reply window (not the Quick Reply offered at the bottom of the thread when in Reading mode). Once you open the full Reply you get the File Manager options.

Thank you everyone, especially rhav for the helpful screen shots. Clearing the backup files did not work. I didn't know about the read/write dilemma, this is very useful since I am still pretty new to all of this.
Seems like I only have little space left on my C: Drive - so I will purchase an external hard drive and run the audio temp directory via that. See if that helps.

Little space left on C: could very well cause the issue.
Once you get another drive you may want to clear some space on C: by moving files to the new drive. Photos, music, etc.

I was importing a wav file and RB locked up. Any attempt to close RB resulted in an annoying windows donging noise. After multiple "End Task" and re-start RB, I decided to uninstall RB and re-install. That failed. Then I re-installed BIAB along with RB. That was successful and allowed a WAV file to be imported successfully.

After getting RB back up and WAV imported, ran *Analyze* to get chords from the audio file. Next ran *Analyze* in BIAB on the same WAV file. The differences in BIAB vs RB are significant.

Original Key = Bm
2 bars Bm7 A/B and 2 bars Em7 D/E

Comparison of BIAB AND REALBAND
Results of RB: B D/F# F#m Bm7
NO REPEATS
Results of BIAB: B F#m F#m B7

Neither results are what is expected and are not close enough to use as Lead Sheets!

My question is this. Are either BIAB or RB analysis reliable as to the accuracy of CHORDS displayed in ACW? How does one use this feature in either program with any degree of confidence?

Welcome to the forum. What wave file did you analyze? When you drag or import a wave file of a song both programs are listening to a mixed song. there may be several instruments in it. Different instruments could be playing slightly different chords. Maybe the piano is playing the slash chord ad the guitar is not. Often when i play with a couple friends i might play a F# chord and the piano player a D/F#. The point it the ACW will get you close, but you may need to make a few corrections. They are not perfect for sure but close. If you look at a website like guitar chords plus you will find several versions of a song posted, each may have a few variations these are sometimes due to what people "hear".

I hope that helps. These tools are not perfect as there is no meta data in a wave file for the most part, unles it has been acidized.

Next time it might be a good idea to start a new thread. Just a suggestion.

Thanks Rob for your viewpoint on the RB freezing part of my post. Now that I have uninstalled RB and re-installed RB, the WAV file played and shows a tempo of 150+. When a very good guitar player/instructor listenrf and TAPPED along to the beat he concluded it is at 60 BPM.

Fast forward to today and I used a different method of detecting the tempo and that one show 77 BPM.... Go figure. they are all subject to multiple variables.....Unless the author provides an exact tempo, who knows what any app may show.....

As you pointed out, it may be a good idea to start a new thread, and since I am new to the forum, I will take that under advisement and try to learn how to better utilize the forum...

The wave file is of unknown origin and is Titled *B minor Blues*

Thanks for the reply!

Another thing to consider is RB analyzed it at 150 .. 75 is half of that .. learned long ago if the Tempo seems way high in RB, cut it in half.
There is a command inside the ACW (that I would use for such a task) .. I'll post a screenshot in a few ..

You can quickly double the speed, or half it by right-clicking the Tempo box .. don't ask me how I stumbled onto this, just institutional knowledge I guess (see image)

what ive found with acw as ive vision problems is its darn hard to set bar lines in it when its speeding along.
ive found it easier by as rharv says halving the tempo and playing the song at half speed to set bar lines.
i might be wrong but it seems in 2024 the acw has been changed ? nothing i can nail down.
frankly im not sure due to so many variables if any app to do this will ever be perfect.

I just tried acw chord interpration to two songs i know inside out. acw wasnt bad but as usual i had to change a few chords.

happiness
om

JAOM, if i am not wrong the ACW was revamped either this year or last. I really don't use it much but used to. I found that most of the issues i had were mostly pilot error. Tapping out a tempo was not as easy as i thought.

Regardless which version of the ACW used, BIAB or RB, both require accurate setting of Bar 1 by the user. Bar 1 is not necessarily the beginning of the song. If you did not take this step, the silence at the beginning of the audio is factored into the analysis and the ACW is also not properly calibrated to align with the song's bars. Without setting Bar 1, the ACW analysis can't achieve an accurate analysis of tempo or chord progression.

I've posted two screen shots of an audio file to be analyzed in BIAB with Bar 1 set wrong and the other set correctly and also with lead-in notes prior to Bar 1.

<< How does one use this feature in either program with any degree of confidence? >>

In BIAB, which I believe is better integrated with BIAB that should make analysis easier and more accurate, a user can apply advanced settings to help enhance the chord analysis accuracy.

yes, setting Bar 1 and then letting ACW re-analyze in either RB and BiaB is a great tip.

Another trick is to tap F8 key on the one of each measure for a few measures.
Not sure about BiaB, but RB will (after a few bars) start looking ahead and adjusting the tempo to the wave form based on your first 6 or 8 taps of F8 .. it now knows the approximate desired tempo, so the tempo map and Chords will both be a little better.