When I was introduced to BIAB, I was a Sonar user, trying to make backing tracks in my peculiar "franken-song" fashion (which is basically a hodge podge of things I like plus my own playing all mixed together with MIDI. )

I started by loading the original as a guide, but at that time Sonar's way of aligning audio and MIDI was not intuitive to me at all. My style of hacking a bunch of misc stuff together to recreate a song's signature sound absolutely requires the ability to tempo map the starting track, so everything added later lines up.

I was pleased to discover that the ACW feature in both BIAB and RB was a way to tempo map that made sense to me! (I rarely use it to extract chords because I've always been pretty good at figuring them out on my own... but the tempo mapping ability is priceless, and I use it on every backing track I create)

This is awesome!!! Glad to hear that the ACW brings your "franken-style" up to its full potential

I don't use it a huge amount, but when I do, it really is a fantastic feature.

ACW is one of the best features IMO (including chords).
Tempo Map & Chords = cool; I can generate now!
Or simply provide a click, or guide track, or chord chart etc ..

If you work with Audio as a source it's invaluable

I previously said that I rarely use it to extract chords... what I meant was that's not my primary intent... but once the song is tempo mapped, and I have the chords too as an additional benefit... GREAT starting point for anything else I may want to add!

And I have to admit that there have been times when the chord I figured out by ear was different than the one ACW came up with... and ACW was right.

I find the ACW an amazing piece of software, and of course the complexity of the song is the driving force as to how well it does, so it's not always going to give you what you want. But you certainly can start the process for getting close.

However, one of the things I do is to run a song through ACW; and then I switch over to MusicNotes.com or a similar sheet music site (since I obviously don't already have the sheet music, as that's why I'm using ACW in the first place) and you can usually get a preview the first page of the music. That's usually enough to see how close ACW is, and then see where it might have mapped the chords a little differently. So between the two, I can usually get pretty close.

Good tip John, doing the additional comparison. Never thought of that.

Yes, what John suggested is good. Since I transcribe mostly Brazilian music, it helps if I can first see the time signature and tempo used (might be 2/4 or cut time). Otherwise, I will have to change it later after preparing the BIAB file. Fortunately BIAB has the ability to expand or reduce the song duration by 2 before I export to a notation program.

I'm an ACW fan, too.

Peter has invented an excellent tool with this piece of software.