Upon installing Acid Pro, my first impression of the interface was "now
what?" A little mystified at first, I loaded up one of the excellent pre-made
songs that come with the program. Cool, I thought. I right-clicked a track and
voila, I was panning and playing with that track's settings. A quick browse through
the user manual, and I had everything I needed to start making music. Just drag
and drop your loops from the built-in explorer screen and draw the segments you
want to play on screen. That's right, you just paint the music into each bar using
your mouse to color in the length of time you want the loop to play.
I finished my first song in about an hour and a half using the excellent loops
that come with Acid Pro. Being a hobbyist musician, it was important for me to
know how easy it was to create cool music without the background and experience
of a professional. If you're new into music and want to create cool stuff, this
is the program. The loops that come with Acid Pro are fantastic sounding and Sonic
Foundry has thousands of additional high-quality loops available. Panning, envelope,
and pitch shift are some of the standard tools, but you can also use special Direct
X plug-in effects from Sonic Foundry which add chorus, reverb and a host of other
effects to your music in real-time. You can then export your creation to wav,
mp3, rm, aif, or wma.
For the more advanced user, Acid Pro gives you the ability to bring in clips
and entire tracks from your own creations. Have an excellent melody you want to
add some spice to? Bring it into Acid and fill in the background with canned loops
or your own creations. Have a great sound you want to loop but the tempo differs
from your melody? Acid Pro will "Acidize" your loop by stretching or
compressing your tune with an excellent algorithm to match all the tracks' timing
perfectly. Acid Pro will even let you generate MIDI time codes (MTC) and sync
with other MIDI components.
If you are a musician or any type of multimedia designer and want some major
firepower in your audio arsenal, this program gives you the building blocks to
create incredible music with incredible ease. For the professional, it has plenty
of advanced features to give you the flexibility you need to mix and match your
own palette of sounds. Acid Pro has a permanent place on my hard drive.
