Hacker News Reader

This looks very much inspired by Band-in-a-Box.

A commercial software to generate backing music that my teacher recommended for training jazz improvisation.

The performance was okay. I found it too sterile. It didn’t really swing … especially for the target audience of jazz musicians. It was helpful though!

Judging from its look and feel, Band-in-a-Box is around since the 90s.

View on HN

This uses accompaniment styles from Yamaha arranger keyboards, which have been around for ages. It's a much simpler format (really just a special kind of MIDI file) than the BIAB one, and more open. This project has details: https://github.com/bures/sff2-tools . There's a site that's popular with users of Yamaha keyboards, www.jososoft.dk , that has tons of styles in various genres.

I messed around with JJazzLab a few months ago, and, while I did encounter some annoying MIDI problems involving the drum patches, I liked it enough that I wrote myself a script to import a song from another program, Impro-Visor, for auditioning in JJazzLab. It's a lot easier to use than Band in a Box.

Since they allow you to import Band-in-a-Box files, I'd say they're well aware of the prior art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com