LinuxMusicians

Hi all,

Having recently installed Win7 in a VirtualBox on Linux and found most things working reasonably to well, I thought I'd rake out my old copy of Band-In-A-Box (2013) and give it a try. I did this partly because my bandmates sometimes send me the BIAB files of proposed songs, and I just don't really 'do' Windows unless I have to.

I have to say that I was surprised that it seems to work pretty reasonably like that. The only problem I've noticed so far was that I had horribly jumpy sound for a short while until I'd done "Generate and play". There's loads I haven't yet tried, mind.

I wondered if anyone else has tried this.
I wondered if newer versions worked.
I wondered if the VST worked directly on Linux under vestige, or whatever.

Gordon.

Well, now I want to retrieve a copy of Band-in-a-box from 1991 for my old Atari ST.

-- Well, yes, it's very old because I don't use it. I tend at present to use either iRealPro or BackUpBand, and will likely continue to use both as they have advantages over BIAB (IMHO), but there are aspects of BIAB that definitely are useful, hence the question.

I have no desire to spend probably $/£1000 on a Windows machine if it's realistic to run BIAB on Linux, whether in VirtualBox or as a VST.

I might get an update just to try, though.

FWIW, I started with Unix at around the same time Win1.0 was released (1981-ish), but found Unix more suited to my working style than either DOS, DR-DOS, Gem, Windows or Lisa. From about Win3.1 I've used both regularly, but Unix/Linux has always better suited my work style. I could do things 20 years agon on Linux that Windows still can't do natively.

There's also JJazzLab :

https://www.jjazzlab.com/en/

I've been using it for practicing and it's good. I haven't dug in deeply yet. One advantage over iRealPro is that you can put in kicks or anticipations which helps with some heads e.g. Sidewinder.

I thought I'd update this.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been setting up an AVL-MXE system on my home office PC.
I uninstalled linvst and installed yabridge in its stead.

I went and searched the fora on the PGMusic website and found someone who had BiaB mostly running, so I decided to give it a go. I now also have BiaB (64 or 32) running on AVL-MXE. There were a few puzzles to sort out, but most resolved. The main issues are that I can't (yet) install GM.DLS as winetricks seems to have a sha256sum problem ... the lack of gm.dls doesn't seem to break much ... but there's an "in the background" error pop-up that needs OKing to let the start-up complete; Windows needs some wmp*.dll files to stop BiaB crashing when trying to open styles; the .wma files for the RealTracks and Drums need expanding into .wav files for BiaB to be able to play them.

As part of this whole, I also tried Scaler2, and the Toontrack EZDrummer2, EZBass and EZKeys, all of which I introduced to yabridge and all of which also seemed to work pretty well AFAICS so far.