It had to happen…

After 4 years of not releasing any new country music, I finally went out and got some software help from “Band in a Box”. BiaB is a super useful and horribly designed piece of software. You really cannot understand the depths of how terrible it is until you work with it.

Band in a Box interface awfulness

Yes. Those are icons of floppy disks. Many of you have never seen a floppy disk. The last time a Mac had a drive like that was 15 years ago.
So the “Save” floppy has a useful tooltip… “Save Song, [F2 or cmd-S].” F2!?? ARGH!!!

The “Bass, Piano, Drums…” part is awful. You double click on the radio buttons to get a drop down menu.

So, putting aside the stupid, ugly, and completely non-customizable interface… we’re left with baffling buttons.

“F” That means “Folder”
“Song” Brings up a non-standard dialog of things in the “F” folder that you selected. ok…? hmm…
“M” and “S”! YES! These are standard buttons in DAWs. Mute and Solo!
Except that they are not Mute and Solo.
“M” is for “Song Memo” – a window that shows a bit of text including Key, Tempo, and Length.
“S” is for “Additional Song Settings”.

Okay, okay… I’ll be here all day if I keep this up. Anyway – designers, PLEASE help out the Band in a Box people.
But I wanted country… so I had to work with this craptastic interface. I hope you all appreciate!!

Back to country music…

Bam! River Valley Breakdown!
Six minutes of non-attention grabbing bluegrass music!

Get it here!