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Edit Integrate Review — Sony Acid Pro 5

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon

The updated program maintains leadership with new features and additions.

It seems like years since the last update of Acid Pro. Probably because it has, in fact, been years: I reviewed Acid Pro 4 in the October 2002 Video Systems.

Sonic Foundry released the first version of Acid in 1998, and Sony purchased the company a few years ago. Both companies have been good about doing incremental updates and fine tuning and tweaking features. But it's been a while since a new version of the program has been released. Has it been worth the wait?

Well, if you are expecting ground-breaking developments, that's not quite what Acid Pro 5 offers. In fact, a good part of Acid's charm has been that the basic interface has worked so beautifully, and it's so feature-rich that it has been hard to top the existing versions. However, if you are looking for some cool new features that will make you think about using the program in new ways, then Acid Pro 5 dishes up some interesting surprises. But first, a little history.

It's easy to take Acid for granted now, but when it was released it helped usher in a musical revolution. No other music program made it so effortless to create music. It was a very powerful program that users could grow into. The interface made creating music very easy, so that anyone who spent even a short amount of time with the software could use the included loop collection and produce a sweet soundtrack or song. In some respects, Acid was just like Apple's iPod: it did it first, it did it well, and it did it effortlessly.

But as with the iPod, where there is smoke there is inevitably fiery competition. Just as a glut of portable music players are now available, so are loop software programs. Since Acid came out, just about every popular music creation tool has included Acid-like tools to work with loops (not always as well, though). Many music programs now also support Acid-format WAV files, which have hooks in them for making looping seamless.

In the two years since Acid 4 came out (a very long time in the software industry), the music software landscape has changed dramatically. Music software has branched off beyond musicians. We review music programs in Video Systems because video producers and media artists use these application to score all kinds of productions. Years ago you might have purchased royalty-free music collections on CD, but today you may be banging out scores yourself using a loop program.

Down the line we may have desktop video editors that have a loop track for adding a score right in the program (think Adobe's Audition incorporated into Premiere Pro or Apple's Soundtrack/Garage Band merged with Final Cut Pro). Today, most music programs have not only incorporated Acid's feature set, they have in some ways gone a little beyond what some of the tools in Acid can do. So how can the new Acid Pro 5 stay relevant? With some unique additions that can completely change the way you use the program.

For example, quantization is an area of most music programs that allows you to change the feel of the music, or the beat, to make it sound a bit more natural. Acid Pro 5 takes this to a new level. It has made working with loops as easy as drag-and-drop by introducing Groove Mapping.

When you would lay down an Acid loop and then add some layers, you used to be at the mercy of the original loop as far as musical feel. Yes, you could change tempo and some of the other parameters, but achieving that live sway of jazz or the immediate kerbump of hip hop with limited loops could be tricky.

Acid Pro 5 ships with many Groove Maps that have titles such as bounce, blues, hard swing, funk, reggae drums, samba, warble, polyrhythm, and lots more. These can be dragged over any loop track. Then you'll then see the track change to display which Groove Map is affecting it.

What do these maps do? You can actually see how they will affect the loops by looking at the diagram of the Groove Map. It shows a pre-groove and post-groove series of incremental lines that give a sense of how the map will make your loop sway. Some are very subtle; a rock Groove Map may slightly vary the tempo of a guitar riff or drum beat to give a live edge to it. Some are much more dramatic; an overstretched Groove Map may sway and swing the loops very dramatically. You can create your own Groove Maps — you can copy existing ones and alter them, or create new ones from scratch.

This sounds cool, but why is it such a big deal? Because you can breathe new life into your existing loops. You can load them back in and slap some new grooves on them for a completely different vibe. You can even map multiple loops or tracks to one specific groove map to keep the feel in sync. The groove cloning tool lets you pick up a groove from one track and slap it on another.

Acid 5 features improved support for VST effects and virtual instruments. With native support, you can now add these effects and instruments and automate the parameters for creating entirely new sounds. Acid Pro 5 even throws in some free VSTi soft synths from Native Instruments called Xpress Keyboards. They are fun to noodle around with, and for many they will be a great introduction to the world of virtual instruments.

Once you progress, you will see there are many other virtual instrument packages available out there. (Check out some of these great VSTi ones: SampleTank, Stormdrum, MachFive, Absynth, and Atmosphere, among many others.) Instead of working with WAV loops, you may begin to incorporate virtual sounds into your mixes. Virtual instruments have endless possibilities, and while they are not as drag-and-drop as loops (plus an inexpensive MIDI keyboard is handy to play them), you will be able to give your productions a much more expansive edge with scoring.

A dramatically improved media manager in Acid 5 now adds ways to sort your large collection of loops by genre and sound type. Many of these parameters are already standard if you buy loops directly from Sony. If they are from third-party companies, you can easily tag the loops and organize them any way you wish. Once the program searches your hard drive for all loop files (it can also track video and images), you can very easily do keyword searches whose results pop up amazingly fast. This tool has been long needed, and anyone who has amassed a large loop collection — even one loop CD can house hundreds of WAVs — will certainly appreciate this new library tool.

Other new options include ReWire support for synchronizing Acid with other programs such as Project5, Sonar, Cubase (see next review), and Pro Tools. MIDI support has been improved, with new piano roll features such as snap-to-note (perfect for latency-challenged setups, as well as for keeping things on beat while playing a MIDI instrument). There's also the ability to move your notes up or down a scale with a single click. Tempo-based DirectX effects are now included for adjusting flange, amplitude modulation, and delay.

In Acid 5, you can nest tracks into folders for better organization and to save screen space. You can preview and downmix 5.1 surround, instantly reverse loops in realtime, time-stretch with 19 new presets, burn CDs right from your projects, and click on a metronome for precise timing (very handy when you are playing a MIDI instrument or punching in loops via the keyboard).

I recommend exploring the constantly evolving Sony loop collection. You can preview loops at Sony's Acid Pro 5 website. I have been sampling several, and have discovered that once you leave the beaten path, you can procure some truly amazing sounds to add sonic dazzle to your productions. We'll all hunt for scoring loop collections, and indeed Sony offers fantastic soundtrack loop sets for film and video. But once you head into uncharted territory, things get very interesting quickly.

Be sure to check out offerings such as Esoterik Beatz, Headstrong Grooves, Machine Language, Electronic Point-Blank, Underground Soundlab, Ma Ja Le' — Ethereal Textures, Robin Storey's Rapoon, and some of the other amazing sound collections Sony has available. Journey into dense textures of techno, hip-hop, and more to make your next Acid score unique and a little less industrial-video-like. You can preview packages online, as well as buy individual loops or collections.

Also worth a surf is Acidplanet.com, a community that has exploded in recent years to offer a forum for artists to share and connect. Since Acid Pro 5 offers a video track (you can load footage to score to) as well as a new FireWire preview, Acidplanet now offers videos that can be shared, as well as video competitions for artists. It's a great place to get into the mix.

Is Acid Pro 5 still relevant? Absolutely. It has a few new killer additions that keep it the powerhouse it has been, as well as lots of little touches that users have been asking for. I did not like the fact that you have to pay extra for MP3 export. And I still find the interface huge — windows and requestors take up much more room than they need to. But I have been using Acid for years and will continue to do so. You really can't beat it for loop-based music creation.

It's the king for a very good reason. The program is smart and makes it very easy to be creative. Acid continues to be the leader in loop scoring. I highly recommend it for a first purchase, and the upgrade price is low enough to make it a no-brainer.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Sony
Park Ridge, N.J.; (201) 930-1000
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com

Product: Acid Pro 5

Assets: New Groove Maps, advanced support for VST effects and virtual instruments, improved media manager, ReWire support for synchronizing with other music apps.

Caveats: MP3 export costs extra, interface is huge.

Demographic: musicians, editors, postproduction musical scorers
Price: $299.96 / Upgrade $149

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.