Product Reviews

There's a huge range of software for making loop-based electronic music, but Acid has set the standard for many years and, in some respects, it's still the best. With a quick and beginner-friendly interface, a level of precision normally found only in professional software and automatic tempo-matching of samples, it accommodates people of all technical and musical abilities.

Acid Music Studio's loop manipulation tools are now better than ever. Audio can now be reversed, adding to Acid's sample-mangling prowess. The reverse function also works for longer audio files streamed from a hard disk, but strangely, not at the same time as they're pitch-shifted. Another welcome addition is the Chopper tool. This doesn't do anything that wasn't already possible in Acid, but makes the process of chopping up and re-ordering loops even quicker than before.

Acid comes with a library of ready-made loops that sound impressive,

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but their experimental nature is at the expense of staple drum and other instrument samples. Many are already processed and we would prefer simpler loops for us to manipulate ourselves. A second CD-ROM contains demo samples from the excellent Loops for Acid series, which serves as a more useful sample library.

With MIDI enjoying a renaissance with the rise of software synths, version 5 finally adds proper MIDI-editing tools, allowing you to compose from scratch rather than through sample manipulation. The MIDI-editing facilities are fairly simple, with just a piano roll, list editor and basic quantize facilities, but they get the job done. However, Acid's one-take-per-track approach doesn't work as well for MIDI performances as it does for audio.

There are more serious limitations with Acid's MIDI implementation. The integrated soft synth is certainly not up to professional production standards. There's no VSTi or DXi support for using third-party software synths, and you can't apply Acid's built-in effects to MIDI sounds. Bizarrely, ASIO sound card drivers aren't supported, which means there's a significant delay between pressing a MIDI key and hearing the result.

Acid Music Studio still excels at loop manipulation but its new MIDI features are a disappointment, and its effects section is ready for an overhaul, too. Adding ASIO and VST support would solve both these problems, but until then Acid Music Studio remains a specialist tool for loop-based music and sketching out ideas only.