Product Reviews

Acid Music has been our favourite low-cost audio sequencer for years, so we were disappointed to find that the latest version's new MIDI facilities lacked support for VST instruments and ASIO sound cards (What's New, December 2004). Acid Pro, the flagship product, has provided these since version 4. So what else does this latest version have to offer?

Loading Acid Pro 5 for the first time introduces two new modules. The Media Manager panel is an improved version of the Explorer panel for finding and importing loops. It scans folders for audio files and enables you to search by instrument, tempo, length, key, genre and more. Only the latest Acid sample libraries include genre and instrument data, and WAV files that lack Acid-format metadata are simply listed by filename and size. It's a shame that Acid doesn't try to calculate the tempi of these loops. After all, it manages it when importing files.

The other new addition is Groove Mapping. We envisaged this as Sony's

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answer to Ableton Live's fantastic Warp Marker feature, which lets you bend and stretch samples into interesting shapes. Groove Mapping can do this, but it specialises in generating groove templates from any sample. These can then be customised and mapped to any other sample. This allows you to lock two samples in time with each other, or even strip out the groove so they play in time with the tempo. You can't see waveforms being stretched, but the speed with which you can apply new rhythms to samples is unparalleled, and you can apply grooves to MIDI parts.

Acid's one-sample-per-track philosophy makes the software easy to use until you run out of room onscreen, but nested folders keep big projects in order. We're also delighted to see support for VST effects. Acid now accommodates VST instruments with multiple outputs, but you still can't automate mix parameters or add aux effects to VST and DirectX instruments (as you can with audio tracks). Still, bus-to-bus routing makes Acid's mixing capabilities better than they were.

Acid Pro's MIDI recording facilities still feel clumsy, and its mixing tools aren't as flexible as those of Cubase, Sonar or Ableton Live. However, Groove Mapping puts Acid back at the top of the pile for multi-track sample manipulation.

Dance music producers face a tough decision between this and Ableton Live. Acid is more powerful and comes with the excellent Sound Forge Audio Studio stereo editor and a great trio of software synths from Native Instruments. However, Live is more elegant and narrowly gets our vote.