Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Acid Pro 4.0f Reviewed

Chop It Up!
Another feature worth mentioning (and one of a slightly more advanced nature) is the ability to chop and manipulate the loops/sound clips as you create. This helps to keep one person's song from sounding like everyone elses (as most commercial loops are available to anyone). This can either be done through the Chopper tool (Figure 8) or manually drawing in the chopped bits.


Figure 8: The Chopper Tool.

Here's a quick example of a ringtone I recently created:

The original loop.
sample1.wma (Size: 27.7 KB)

Same loop and length, but chopped.
sample1_chopped.wma (Size: 27.7 KB)

And here's the loop in the context of the song
(only 3 seconds of the project - see Figure 9 for a visual).
sample1_context.wma (Size: 104.9 KB)


Figure 9: Screenshot of contextual sample 1.

One can also change the key, modify the tempo, or even add effects (universal or staged) of not only the tracks, but also the entire project.

Render and Publish
So you've got a killer hit single - but how do you make it available to the rest of the world? Acid Pro 4 gives you the flexibility to render your projects in a variety of formats (from .wma to .ogg) and bitrates (Figure 10).


Figure 10: The render window.

Alternatively, you can sign up at ACIDplanet (for free) and then use the Publish (Figure 11) feature to share your new creations with a wide community of other artists. ACIDplanet also provides rankings, ratings, and listens (for individual songs) - similar to the original MP3.com. You can see an example (of my available tracks) here.


Figure 11: The Publish Wizard.

Conclusions
All in all, I personally have found Acid Pro 4 to be invaluable. From the creation of ringtones and game soundtracks, to the production of background music for presentations, I use Acid Pro 4 on an almost daily basis. While it isn't necessarily the only tool I use for music creation, the simplicity in design does keep bringing me back. The asking price is my only issue. Personally, I got in on a spectactular deal (a $99 download promo that I haven't seen the likes of since) on version 3, and the upgrade to 4 is only $150. Good for me - but if I was just gettting started, dropping $399 on software that (at this point) is still primarily loop based is a hard amount to swallow. Of course, if you are a student, the academic version is priced right at $150 (very nice).

Want to get a feel for Acid before laying down the dough? You can find ACIDxpress (Sony's limited, but free version of Acid) here.