Product Reviews

When we reviewed Acid Music Studio 5 a year ago we found that its sample 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 - all three appear in the £199 Acid Pro 5. However, when used with a MIDI keyboard and an ASIO-compatible sound card, Acid Music Studio 6 is a vast improvement over its predecessor.

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The delay between pressing 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 dull General MIDI synth in version 5.

You can now process MIDI synths and audio tracks with either Acid's own bank of basic effects or VST plug-ins, the latter providing massive scope for unusual and interesting sounds. However, you can't set various synths and audio tracks to use the same effects. As a result, you'll quickly run out of processing power if, for example, you want to add reverb to a handful of sounds, as you'd need to set up a separate reverb plug-in for each. As each sample appears on its own track (a key feature for Acid's ease of use), it's easy for the track - and hence plug-in - count to get quickly out of hand.

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