Overview
What is Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is an intelligent automatic accompaniment program for your multimedia computer. You can hear and play along to many song ideas and go from "nothing" to "something" in a very short period of time with Band-in-a-Box as your "on demand" backup band.
Band-in-a-Box is a powerful and creative music composition tool for exploring and developing musical ideas with near-instantaneous feedback. Over the years many features have been added to Band-in-a-Box - Notation, Lyrics, Melody Tracks, Harmonization, and a programmable StyleMaker. The Soloist and the Melodist are two major "intelligent" features; the Soloist generates professional quality solos over any chord progression, the Melodist can create songs from scratch with Chords, Melodies, Intros, Solos, and even a Title!
Band-in-a-Box for Windows® can also record an acoustic instrument or voice to add to the composition, with processing through DirectX audio effects. Its built-in audio harmonies will turn your audio track into multiple harmony parts and even adjust its pitch by tracking the Band-in-a-Box Melody track. The inclusion of digital audio features makes Band-in-a-Box the perfect tool for creating, playing, and recording your music with MIDI, vocals, and acoustic instruments. You can print out your finished creation with repeats and endings, DC markings and codas, or save it as a graphic file for web publication or to e-mail to a friend. And when you're ready to let others hear your composition, you can burn it directly to an audio CD. Or save your composition as a Windows Media File or in other compressed formats for a file that's "Internet ready."
Band-in-a-Box version 12 is fully Mac OS X carbonized. We have a huge number of new and improved Styles, Soloist, Harmonies, and Song Demos, making your Band-in-a-Box program sound better than ever! Program operations are much faster, including up to 3 times faster notation redraws, song, and soloing generation. Playback timing is improved and rock-solid with Mac OS X. You can export your Band-in-a-Box files and import them into Apple's GarageBand program for further processing. And we include a great QuickTime video tutorial, showing you all the newest features in version 12!
The styles have been greatly enhanced - we've edited the existing styles, and made many more styles using the newest features. This automatically makes your existing songs sound better! New Soloists, Melodists and Harmonies are now included, making this the best-sounding Band-in-a-Box ever!
The user interface has been enhanced with improved menus, and other enhancements, giving Band-in-a-Box a much better look in the OS X environment. Improved OS X 128X128 "high resolution" program and file icons are also included with this upgrade to enhance the user experience. Timing has been improved to microsecond accuracy for tighter playback.
MIDI support for Band-in-a-Box 12 for Macintosh now includes CoreMIDI (for support of external MIDI devices) as well as improved support for QuickTime Music synthesizers, making it work and sound much better in OS X. Additional MIDI driver enhancements allow users with controller keyboards such as the M-Audio Oxygen 8, or the Roland PCR-1 to play thru the QuickTime Music synthesizer from their MIDI keyboard.
Other enhanced features include: odd-time signature support (7/8, 11/8 etc.), maximum number of Soloists increased from 256 to 1024, count-in types now include choice of drum pattern or regular count-in, addition of "low root harmony" setting to Harmony Edit dialogue, "Strauss-in-a-Box" to automatically transform any 4/4 song to a Waltz 3/4 feel, "De-Strauss" to transform any song with a 3/4 time signature to a 4/4 feel, StylePicker Dialog enhancements, bass player plays better "5ths" over some Jazz chords, support for audio and video memos for songs, options to set the note density in the Soloist and much more.