Hello,
First time posting a question here. I've have my chords and style chosen in BIAB for mac. When I open the AU Daw in Garageband I cannot find the same style. I've looked high and low and cannot find it. How to I get the style and chords I've been practicing with from BIAB over to the VST Daw? Is this even possible or is the only way to enter the chords and choose styles all over again in the DAW?

Thanks

Hi Jeffrey A and welcome to the forum.

Have you tried opening a saved song file? Tempo, style and chords are part of the information retained in a song file. If you saved your style and chord sheet in a SGU or MGU song file then the information should show up in the DAW Plugin.

Thank you, Jim. Yes. I did some more reading about the VST DAW and did just that. One question that still remains is when I add a track to record my guitar in garageband, the VST dialog box disappears. I was hoping to be able to record my guitar part while the dialog was open so I could see the chord changes as they go by. Is there a way to do this? I appreciate your help.

Jeff

Hi Jeffrey,
Unfortunately, that seems to be a limitation in GarageBand.

I just tried it here to confirm that, but it seems that only the plugin windows for the selected tracks get displayed.
As soon as you select the audio track for your guitar input the instrument track plugin disappears.

Do you have any other AU hosts to try ?
I know this is not a problem in Logic anyway,

Alternatively, I know it's not ideal, but you could try to record guitar track into the audio track in the BIAB main application.
Sorry wish I had a better answer.

- Jay

Oooh wait a second ! Update !

So in playing around with GarageBand, it seems like if you open the on-screen keyboard (Command+K keys), and leave the on-screen keyboard up then the instrument window stays open !

At least it works that way here.

Wow, you learn something new every day !

EDIT : Wait a second, now it's not working !
Arrgghh, I don't know why it worked a minute ago.

Now I'm mad, I'm going to try to mess around with it tonight, and see if I can figure out why I got it to stay open that one time.
May be the sequence that I did it in, I will try to figure out what I did that one time if I can.

Sorry !

- Jay

Thanks JayO. Really appreciate your reply and you taking the time to confirm the issue is with BIAB and its interaction with Garageband. Now I can move on and not waste any more time pulling my hair out trying to figure out a solution. I'll take a look at Logic.

OK, so...I think I know what I did that one time...

If you "record enable" the audio track for your guitar first, (set all your input monitoring and whatever else you want to set up).

Then, select the instrument track that has the BIAB plugin on it, load your BIAB song and set the plugin to follow Garageband (by double clicking plugin master track button).

Now without clicking on the audio guitar track, you can hit the big red record button on the top toolbar.
You will be able to record the guitar audio track in the background, while the BIAB plugin window is still in front.

I think that's what I did when I got it to work that first time.

Unfortunately, as soon as you hit stop it disappears again though.
But at least you can follow along while it's playing.

Hopefully this helps !

- Jay

Thanks for that! I'll give it a try when I get home. Really appreciate your help.

You can try MiniHost load that in the track then load Biab Plugin into it
https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=510428#Post510428
Or PluginFlipFlop if you have JBridge, same deal as MiniHost
https://jstuff.wordpress.com/pluginflipflop/

If you want to have the chord chart in front of you, another simple solution is to do a screen grab of the BIAB VST window. On Mac it's Cmd-Shift-4. Then use the cursor to select just the BIAB parts. Then you can display the picture without the DAW being involved in the window management. Of course, multiple monitors make this even better...

This also gives you a quick overview of everything about the BIAB components you're using in your DAW session.
I save one with the DAW session files and audio for every song. It makes it easy to recall, for example, what bass RealTrack was used on a previous song when working on a new project.

And don't forget to move the audio generated by the BIAB plugin from its default folder to your song's session folder so they don't get separated. If you happen to clear out the BIAB VST default folder while cleaning up a different session, ALL your files generated by the VST plugin are gone. Been there, done that already.

Thank you for the feedback Jeffrey! You might want to try pressing the "Rebuild" button when you open the style picker from the plugin. It may be that the list generated by the plugin is not up to date and rebuilding will ensure that all the available styles are listed in the style picker.

RayL, I'm not sure if you are experiencing different behavior but the plugin is designed to not delete a generated file if it has been dragged from the plugin. So if you were to drag a generated track from the plugin into your DAW timeline, then when the plugin clears files, it will skip over whichever ones were dragged. Hope this clears things up!

This is in Cubase where any plugin will disappear if you click outside but using FlipFlop will fix it:

Keep Cubase VST Plugin Window Always On Top

Thank you, Adar. Yes, I saved my project in BAIB and then was able to open the saved project to the VST DAW. But I'll go ahead and hit "Rebuild" in the plugin to update the list. Appreciate the advice very much.

Thanks Pipeline, I'll give it a try.