Reviewed by Tony Thomas
Every once and a while, a program passes the smile test. If I can pull it out of the box, slap it on to the hard drive and start smiling within five or ten minutes, the program passes. Well, I must say, after just a few minutes of fiddling with Acid, I wasn't just smiling, I was downright giddy.
I can't think of any program that delivers instant gratification the way Acid does. Although a lot of my serious musician friends turn their nose up at the thought of using loops, I can say that Acid takes loops to a whole different level since the loops that come with Acid are of individual instruments which lock up at the tempo you select. Amazing!
Using just the loops provided on the CD that comes with the program, you can come up with thousands, yea millions, of original sounding compositions. The interface is a tutorial in user friendliness. I got started making music without a manual within seconds of booting the program. I had a finished composition done in mere minutes. After you open the program, there is a track-based interface with a familiar Explorer-like window. You click on a loop to audition it, drag and drop to include it in your composition, and drag out a timeline with the mouse to determine when and where it plays. What could be simpler?
There are controls for volume, tempo and other critical adjustments, as well as facilities for exporting the loops individually or as a composite WAV file. You can also route loops to different soundcard outputs which is very handy plus use up to two plug ins. And by the way, the real magic of Acid is its uncanny ability to allow loops to run at almost any tempo without varying the pitch. You can also record your own loops while playing back others, but this is a little trickier since there is no count-in. However, being able to roll your own loops adds greatly to the value of the program for the serious composer. Even if you don't, Sonic Foundry has provided a nice set of loop libraries to keep you satisfied for a long time.
Acid is valuable tool to anyone interested in instant inspiration needs to create original music under a tight deadline. With Acid and a sequencer, you can create powerful tracks in minutes rather than hours. As a result, it will be in the toolkit of composers, producers and film and commercial scorers. It certainly beats fumbling through cuts in a music library, can match the tempo perfectly and sounds much more original. In fact, as a test of the program's abilities, I was to create a music bed for a network spot I was working on in about five minutes flat! Less time than it would taken to find a cut in a music library.
If you like to make music, Acid is the bomb!
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