16, Jan, 2025
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Sony ACID Pro 5.0

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Key enhancements make ACID Pro 5.0 a worthwhile upgrade.
Many music makers, both amateurs and pros, use Sony’s loop-based audio editor for creating backing audio for videos and even songwriting. ACID is popular because it’s both relatively easy to use and powerful, with an intuitive interface that makes it simple to drag audio onscreen.
The best new feature in version
5.0 is a Media Manager that lets you catalogue all your samples and assign metadata, a godsend for those with huge sample collections. Unfortunately, all tags have to be added manually. The application relies on Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Edition (MSDE) to store the data, which ends up being quite resource-hungry — a memory footprint of 165MB was measured during operation. The software features support for an unlimited number of audio and MIDI tracks, direct burning to CD and now native VST and VSTi support. Full automation of tempo-based DirectX effects has been added in this release, which can greatly speed editing. A new feature called Groove Mapping is also included: this quantisation tool enables the editor to morph loops and MIDI and works well, though it takes some fiddling before you learn to get the most out of it. It also ships with 1,000 copyright-free loops.
One of the complaints levelled against ACID is its cluttered interface. Version 5.0 includes Virtual Track folders that can be used to store groups of tracks and save screen real estate. These groups can be expanded or collapsed as required, enabling the user to focus only on what they’re working on at the time. It’s also much more reliable. Though version 4.0 had a nasty habit of regularly crashing the RAM-crammed 3GHz Pentium 4 test machine, version 5.0 remained 100% stable during the testing period.
ACID Pro 5.0 is recommended for anyone who works with loops, whether for songwriting, making backing music for videos, or even as an editor for creating short samples for use in other applications. Though the new Media Manager is a resource hog, and populating the database with useful tags is time-consuming, it makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. The added stability and improvements to speed editing are also welcome.

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