Sony’s ACID Music Studio is a good starting point for new and emerging music producers. Beginning with its price and moving onto its built-in tutorials that guide users through every process (should they want/need it) each step of the way, it’s easy to see why ACID Music Studio has become a well-traveled stepping stone for producers of all stripes. It's fairly bare-bones in comparison to other audio production software programs and Digital Audio Workstations featured on this site, but has enough fat to chew even for producers with a few years behind the boards. And, though it's a program that is almost designed to be grown out of, it can be upgraded to Sony's ACID Pro. For a price, of course.
Strengths
- Price!
- Paint-by-Numbers simplicity
- Endless user resources
- Includes 3,000 genre-specific loops
Weaknesses
- Limited functionality
To call ACID Music Studio "simple," can be somewhat deceiving. It is simple, straightforward, intuitive, easy to use and buffered with endless help pop-ups and pages. Nevertheless, it can, in fact, still be used towards complicated, detailed ends. Will the ends result in the same quality of tracks and projects produced using Ableton or Reason? No. No, they will not. Will they at least allow users to produce, record, edit and remix tracks? Yes. Yes, it will. Tired of the rhetorical questions? Yes. Yes, you are. So, what features stand out or at least deserve a few lines?
Chop Shop
ACID Music Studio's Chooper tool, while nowhere near the Ableton Live Looper, is a fairly standard loop generator, apart from being one of the easiest to use in the biz. Producers can lay down a loop as a foundation, or mix it in real-time over a track to gauge effect. For composition efforts starting from scratch, this works well with ACID Music Studio's Beatmapper tool, which maps the song tempo and assists in applying loops and effects to tracks. Unfortunately, no quantize tool is available, so results can be, well, different than imagined. Also, apropos of the Beatmapper: tempo curves and changes aren't mapped, further limiting where the otherwise effective Chopper can be used.
ACID Music Studio lacks a built-in audio manager, making path and mapping duties fairly complicated. Sony does feature this, like most deficiencies in its ACID Pro, but that does ACID Music Studio users little good. Still, ACID Music Studio does support a variety of MIDI and external controllers, as well as VSTi plugins, DirectX plugins, ASIO drivers and can even record MIDI, too.
As for audio file format support, producers with a wide variety of "lossless" and "lossy" files might want to pass "go" and move directly to ACID Pro. WAV, MP3, WMA, ATRAC and CD are all supported, and finished products can be published using all the listed file formats. So, no FLAC, AAC and other audio file formats. But who wants rich, full, uncompressed sound, anyway?
As mentioned in the previous section, ACID Music Studio can record finished tracks and files to CD, WAV, MP3, WMA, ATRAC and CD. Songs being recorded, remixed, fixed or tested can also be piped out to external MIDI devices.
del.icio.us
Digg
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! My Web
Facebook
Google Bookmarks
ma.gnolia
Newsvine
reddit
Windows Live
Ask & Answer