The San Diego Troubadour

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The Zen of Recording

Cool Tools That Rule, Part 2: The ACID Test

            All right...last month, we had some fun discussing inner-tubes and submerged spectacles and pretty much skirting around the issue of actually educating and/or informing ourselves about, well...recording.

            Suffice it to say that I've spent some extra time delving deep into the feature set offered by SONY Creative Software's (sonycreativesoftware.com) ACID Pro 7 ($399.95 retail, $299.95 street), which combines full multitrack recording and mixing, MIDI sequencing, and of course, its highly regarded "pick and paint" looping abilities. I've always been a fan of this software's ease of use and quickness in putting together demos and remixes. With this latest version, ACID moves itself into the role of a full-blown DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Instead of bumping shoulders with the likes of Apple's GarageBand, it's banging elbows with big boys, the likes of Cubase, Logic, and ProTools.

            Among the application's many new functions and features are a dedicated mixing console with input busses, enabling complex routing of tracks and effects and facilitating the use of external effects processors for those yearning to work outside of the "box".

            ACID has also heavily bolstered its MIDI features like real time processing and even more precise control over events. Additionally, users can now "freeze" MIDI tracks that are routed to multiple soft synths and render them as .wav files to lighten the load on their CPUs.

            Cadence gets its makeover too, with the ability to not only combine multiple tempos and time signatures within a project, but utilizing tempo curves allows you to perform a gradual transition from one tempo to another. Also notable is the ability to import multi-tempo remix files via the Beatmapper tool. A count-in feature has been added (finally!) so there's no need for inserting an extra measure or two at the start of your song.

            With all of this functionality, the workspace can quickly become cluttered, so things like nested Folder Tracks are also a welcome element. These can hold all your drum tracks or vocal takes for example, making them collapsible into one track instead of say, 40. The user interface is also highly customizable, so you can set up all of your "go-to" elements and create an extra efficient workflow, without any of the fat from unused features getting in your way.

            Covered in Part 1's review of Sound Forge was Zplane's élastique audio time stretching and pitch shifting, allowing dramatic time stretches and pitch-shifts of Beatmapped tracks while retaining maximum sound quality. Again, I cannot emphasize enough just how much this has improved the sound of one's audio in ACID.

            Another great feature (which I hope more products adopt) are interactive online tutorials that can be accessed from within the application. With concise titles like "How to Record Audio," "How to Use an Audio Envelope," and "How to Use Input Busses," it's quite conceivable that you may never need to crack open the included manual or even use the "Help" file!

            Eager to put these things to the proverbial test, I installed the program (via SONY Creative's ubiquitous challenge/response method) and opened up a recent file I had created using version 5 of ACID. The wide array of windows seemed ALL come up at once (which wasn't the case, but it was more than I'm used to seeing anyway), making things seem more than a bit daunting. With monitor real estate already at a premium, I was able to quickly tidy things up and could concentrate on how to best utilize things like the Mixing Console. Again, there are a lot of things that come up here, but there are some cool ways to toggle them on or off. I especially liked that you could view all of the tracks here with or without the faders, leaving only the track's meter visible.

            I pulled up a piece of video and began to score it. Toying with the excellent ACID FX plugin (also known as the ACID Pro Effects Rack powered by iZotope,) was cool, because it's kind of a one-stop shop of the features you use most often, like EQ, Delay, Reverb and Distortion. I really appreciated being able to hang out in one window and check out all of the possible FX combinations without all of the flitting from window to window. Now if they can just make a customizable "Rack" that would allow access to all of my third-party plugins in one window... that would be on my personal wish list.

            Otherwise, all was just as advertised or better. Veteran users of ACID will feel right at home, with the added features being very welcome and the program's rock-steady performance remaining just as ironclad.

            If all of that isn't enough (and really, don't you think it should be?), ACID Pro 7 software includes over 3,000 loops and 1,000 MIDI files for music creation, as well as the Garritan ARIA for ACID Pro player, the Native Instruments Guitar Combos, and Submersible Music KitCore. The ARIA player alone is worth the price of admission with excellent orchestral sounds place right at one's virtual fingertips.

            With ACID Pro 7, SONY has taken an already solid performer and made it more capable, more professional, and just more better. No, it's not as simple to use as GarageBand, but that's because it has so very much more to offer. Download a free trial version and see if you don't agree.

Sven-Erik Seaholm is an award-winning independent record producer (kaspro.com), performer, and recording artist (svensongs.com). Catch his live performances at Zel's Del Mar September 4, with Allied Gardens on September 11, and at the La Jolla Open Air Market September 26.