6/5/2026 at 5:53:43 AM
Finally an auto-accompanist to rival Band-in-a-Box? https://www.bandinabox.com/by v9v
6/6/2026 at 2:51:56 PM
Everyone I know who is a casual jazz musician / student uses iReal Pro for practicing soloing. It does an okay job. The styles are mediocre and mechanical, and not as good as Band-in-a-Box or as rich as JJazzLab with its ability to plug in Yamaha styles.I also own 4 editions of a new entrant called "Quartet" that uses carefully recorded, individually tracked, time annotated recordings of jazz standards by a real band. Solo sections can be repeated an arbitrary number of times and within fairly constrained limits tunes can be transposed, sped up, or slowed down. Of course the more you stretch or pitch bend the recordings, the more it sounds like garbage.
Something like iReal Pro, where you can key in your chord changes, configure repeats, specify instrumentation, etc. but generate high quality backing would be almost a holy grail for musicians' solo practice.
I also imagine this kind of thing would be a near perfect case to demonstrate "neurosymbolic AI". Backing tracks are constrained by actual constraints, not vibes. Suno does some impressive things, but was useless in my experience for trying to create a backing track.
"iReal, but with AI-generated backing band" is an idea I've even considered trying to build, but honestly I'd be just as happy to buy this app (or contribute to an open source version). Someone build this!
by peatmoss
6/5/2026 at 7:35:45 AM
That’s probably one of the worst website designs I’ve seen in a very long time.by archerx