Acid is better than you think
Written: Oct 25 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, nearly flawless, great loops included
Cons: stingy on the MIDI abilities. Taunts you to upgrade
The Bottom Line: Acid is a robust hard disk recorder and virtual studio, not just a loop engine.
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| darksentinel's Full Review: Sonic Foundry Acid Music 3.0 Full Version for PC |
Acid 3.0 is loop-based sound recording software, at least that’s what everyone likes to call it. Actually, Acid is a hard disk recorder that also has loop abilities. Let me define it another way in case some people are confused. Acid is sort of like a 16-track overdubbing studio recorder with a digital mixer (except that you’re not limited to a mere 16 tracks). Failure to understand that Acid is primarily a multi-track recorder, and not a robotic Casio emulator, can lead to Acid’s under-use and perhaps weaker music on your part.
Each track is stored in an easily editable Microsoft wave file, and you get unlimited tracks (depending on the speed of your computer). If you have a decent computer, that might be many, many tracks. Acid is one of the best things that’s happened to my music. I have friends who decry it because they just can’t seem to understand that even though you might all loops or only use a couple of loops, the music is still yours and it’s still unique.
Loops are just little ditties, building blocks of music, usually professionally recorded, sometimes by famous artists. The loops you buy from Sonic Foundry are free to use and sell in your original compositions made from the loops. You can have a number one hit, royalty free even if your record is all Acid loops. I recognize some drum and bass loops from Enigma 3 and some other commercial music. I don’t mean that the loops sound like Enigma. I mean Enigma either authored or used the loop in their third CD.
The loops that come with Acid are amazing and creative, but you’ll quickly want to buy more. This is because, though you receive hundreds of loops, you only receive a few from many genres. I tend to record my own loops, inviting my friends and clients over to play their ditties and let me use them. Acid publishes 8 free loops (used in a song) per week. You can also join www.pocketfuel.com and receive eight fantastic free loops per week. These loops are recorded by tech heads, using microphones and instruments you can’t afford. I also purchased Sonic Foundry’s “Infinite Soul” loop library. Amazing!
How does Acid approach authoring music? Picture a timeline. That’s your track. You “paint” music on the timeline. Everywhere you have painted a loop on a track, you’ll hear the loop. Now picture vertically stacked timelines and multiple paintings beginning and ending, starting, stopping, and picking up again from left to right.
You want a track to pan left and right? Draw in a pan envelope. You want to control the volume of a track outside of the mixer? Draw a volume envelope. Use slow and fast fades.
If you simply must use your own loops, Acid helps you record them and chop them up using your favorite sound editor. I don’t usually use loops. I use what Acid calls a “one shot,” or a track that plays along as-is with one or more loops and/or one-shots. To hear what I’ve done with Acid, go to www.mp3.com/rj/ and hear me croon.
One-shots don’t have to be one-shots. You can Ctrl-drag them and repeat them later in a track. You can click on your pieces of music and precisely split them by pressing S, and move them around.
Even after I had purchased Acid, and was impressed by it, I clung religiously to the Jurassic (and now defunct) Digital Orchestrator Pro, which I have been using for five years now. While I was able to create great music with DOP, Acid 3.0 leaves it in the dust as far as handling digital audio, and it performs multiple effects on the fly (without affecting the original recording), a feat incredible to me since I’ve been waiting minutes to hours for tracks to permanently transform with DOP.
My Acid history: On a whim, I originally purchased Acid 2.0 DJ for $29 via the web and relegated it to mere ditty and remix production, but while recording an album for Mocha Blue Blaze, a local poet, I decided to use Acid for production. Suddenly I was hooked. As I because to actually use the product, I discovered power, speed and endless smart nuances. I immediately upgraded to Acid 3.0 for $39 (I think) and was blown away by the array of features.
Acid 3.0 uses track-based effects. This is incredibly nifty in that the digital delay, flange speed, etc can accurately last one measure or one beat without the need for a calculator. You can set echoes for whole notes, quarter notes, dotted eighth notes, etc. This means you can easily achieve precise echoes in your drums, notes and lyrics. Not only that, you get reverb and phasers and chorus. I might mention that I didn’t know I had control over the reverb for quite a while since it appeared off the bottom of my screen. Of course reading the manual might have helped. Unfortunately, this feature is gone if you upgrade to Acid Pro, and you’ll need a calculator to get the much more flexible delay plug-ins and other effects to time themselves with your tempo. Another unfortunate is that Acid 3.0 will not co-exist with Acid Pro 3.0 on the same computer. Acid 2.0 and 4.0 (4.0 available in Pro only) can coexist with 3.0.
Acid can beatmap tracks, but I was disappointed with the process. Beat mapping allows you to figure out the tempo of a track recorded outside of Acid, but I feel it stops short of allowing you to compensate for changes in tempo due to inaccuracy in recording or just plain bad live drummers. The Beatmapper Wizard has you inspect the accuracy of each measure, but as you slide right on measure 23, measures 1-22 are muffed up. The perfect beatmapper would transform the file, stretching and squeezing each measure to make the tempo perfect so that it lines up with your perfect loops.
Acid 3.0 plays back MIDI files, perfectly timed and mixed with your loops and vocal tracks. It will not allow you to record MIDI or to change any voice. This is only available if you upgrade to the Pro version. Acid 3.0 will also “render” the MIDI with your other music to a final song file in many, many formats. The soft synth sounds okay, depending on your DLS file, but doesn’t compare with a real pro keyboard. I normally don’t rely on the software synthesizer, preferring the same music performed by my real Roland.
I hope that one day Sonic Foundry makes Acid work perfectly with Yamaha’s XG soft synth, the nicest soft synth I can think of, and actually wish I could use in my mixes. For now, I can’t get it to sync up. Or be included in a render.
You can use MP3s and other file formats for tracks. If you’re thinking of saving HD space by converting all your loops to mp3s, beware. The extra “Acidized” data (root note, beats per loop, BPM, whether the file’s a loop, beat mapped or a one-shot) isn’t included in the file.
Got movies? Acid will allow you to overdub them or replace the track altogether. You can do make tracks of voiceover and background sounds and then render a new movie in almost every conceivable format with endless options. Acid is fifteen times better than programs like Real Producer for making any type of video file, even real media. Acid is an amazing platform for doing video soundtracks for finished videos. There is only one video track available, no video editing, and no video effects.
Acid 3.0 has a few annoying features. First, it’s a living advertisement for Acid Pro, which I now use at work, but I feel strongly that menu items shouldn’t be there if you can’t use them. I wish Acid would have included compression (dynamics) in 3.0. You can compress your tracks individually in your wave editor, but compression is such a simple thing to do that I don’t think it should have been hidden on the other side of $120 for the pro version, especially when it’s right there, waiting to be unlocked.
Acid 3.0 has a demo mode of Acid 3.0 Pro. You can’t save anything, but you immediately see increased power. I won’t get into the myriad of features available if you upgrade, but I will say that the effects are handled differently. Pro uses a plug-in approach. You will have to re-tool many effects that you did in Acid 3.0, some of which may seem impossible to do with the plug-ins. This is only because it’s a new world. The DX plug-ins you can download are legion, and help you create amazing music. You can use amazing third party plug-ins, like Antares’ pitch corrector, which fixes tiny flaws in your singing voice or maybe your poorly tuned guitar. There’s a whole world of Direct X sound plug-ins.
Acid does crash occasionally, usually when you’re about to record a new track, so save often. If you’re a pure loopster, you may never see it crash. Saving only takes a second since you’re not saving megabytes of wave files. You’re just saving mixing info.
You can download Acid lite for free, but honestly, I don’t know what it can do. It is crippleware, and I remember losing interest in it quickly, especially with no loops to play with. But I can’t recommend Acid 3.0 enough, and I’m shocked there are no reviews of it already.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
darksentinel
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Location: Shreveport, LA
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
I arrived on earth, ten blocks from then toddler, Michael Jackson. He's somehow eclipsed me.
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