Product Reviews

Your PC is capable of becoming an incredibly powerful and versatile tool for making music , all you need is the right software.

Turning a good idea into a good tune doesn't require a degree in music engineering either. Programs like Sony's Acid series are superb for splicing together synthesized sounds and drumbeats, noises and snippets of sound snatched from here, there and anywhere you like.

When we reviewed the previous version of Acid Music Studio, we found that its sound manipulation tools were better than ever, but its new MIDI-editing facilities were let down by a lack of ASIO drivers (for low-latency monitoring) and a lack of support for VST plug-ins.

Version 6 addresses both these criticisms. Adding ASIO, VST instrument and VST effect support hasn't been hard - after all, all three appear in the £199

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Acid Pro 5. However, when used with a MIDI keyboard and an ASIO-compatible sound card, Acid Music Studio 6 is a vast improvement on its predecessor. The delay between pressing down a key and hearing a sound can be reduced to just a few milliseconds, and MIDI sound sources now include a vast range of VST instruments (including plenty of free ones), rather than just the painfully dull General MIDI synth in version 5.

MIDI synths and audio tracks can now be processed either with Acid's own basic bank of effects or with VST plug-ins, the latter giving great scope to create unusual, interesting sounds.

However, it's not possible to set up effects so that various synths and audio tracks can share the same ones. As a result, you'll quickly run out of processing power if, for example, you want to add some reverb to a handful of sounds, as you'd need to set up a separate reverb plug-in for each one. Because each separate sample appears on its own individual track - a key feature for Acid's ease of use - this makes it easy for the track and related plug-in count to quickly get out of hand.

Even so, the latest version of Acid Music Studio remains fun, inspiring and easy to use, and VST support means the end results sound considerably better than before. As a musical sketchpad for those who are easily put off by the price and complexity of programs such as Cubase or Sonar, it makes an excellent substitute.