7.0 wishlist for songwriting -ACID Product Family - MAGIX Community Forums Archive

Subject:7.0 wishlist for songwriting Posted by: bradbecker Date:4/16/2007 10:19:36 PM Any other songwriters out there using Acid for quick composition and demos instead of the more common techno-ish stuff I think Acid was originally targetted at? I like Acid because it allows me to work quickly at writing, recording, and arranging demos of songs. Sort of. Here are some issues: 1. no click count-in for recording. Bummer. 2. too hard to "comp" parts. Most common example of this is doing five vocal takes and then editing them into one final track. It should be really easy to view multiple takes simultaneously and select where all the cuts should be between the different takes. Sonar now has this sort of functionality. It's the number one reason I've been toying with switching. I comp vocals, backing vocals, bass tracks, guitar tracks, etc. on every single song and there's not a quick and easy way to do it. The notion is that multiple takes are mutually exclusive when residing in a single track and selecting one section of one take to be on means all other takes are automatically off for that exact section without having to manually crop each one at the exact location on separate tracks. 3. Clip Start/Snap points: Support grace notes, lead ins, tails, etc. - outside of really repetitive music, the restriction of clips not having headers and tails is way too draconian. Loops (and even one-shots) should have the easy ability to mark the snap point or start of loop within. Often in a musical part there's a quick lead in that shouldn't loop but is important to have play the first iteration of that loop. Common case: the chorus of the song may start on the first beat of a measure but I can guarantee that there are parts of notes or even entire phrases that belong to the chorus but happen before the first beat. Designating a snap point fixes this. The snap point for a loop is the start of the actual looping part. Once this is in place, moving/adding/removing clips and sections around should respect these heads/tails by default (with the ability to manually clip them if needed.) I can explain further if needed but this is everywhere in music--listen to just about any album and you'll see this behavior. 4. Zoom: someone else mentioned this one but zooming should zoom in toward the right (the music I'll hear if I hit play) instead of zooming up the middle. right now the workflow is zoom at cursor, scroll right. Rinse, repeat a thousand times in a session. This is a constant annoyance. 5. Track archiving - some tracks/takes become completely unused for a particular mix and it would be nice to "park" them and be certain that they are not taking up memory or processing w/o having to delete them. Mute should be used for just muting. Lesser: 6. Better effects - like the izotope stuff in Sound Forge 7. track freezing 8. song templates (that let you preset your plugins, softsynths, etc.) 9. Track Folder mixing - I like the idea of being able to use track folders as subgroups for mixing purposes. It would be nice to have a volume control and effects sends for these but I understand the complexity of doing that and realize that you can manually go to each track and set the properties accordingly or use busses but that's pretty manual, especially if you have a bunch of tracks you'd like to send to a particular bus or effect. There you go. -b Message last edited on4/16/2007 10:20:16 PM bybradbecker.
Subject:RE: 7.0 wishlist for songwriting Reply by: jumbuk Date:4/17/2007 5:55:05 PM Nice list! I agree - these are all things that real users will appreciate, rather than new bells and whistles. To which I would add: automatic plugin window configuration as described by someone in another post - a real annoyance for me.

Any other songwriters out there using Acid for quick composition and demos instead of the more common techno-ish stuff I think Acid was originally targetted at? I like Acid because it allows me to work quickly at writing, recording, and arranging demos of songs.

Sort of.

Here are some issues:

1. no click count-in for recording. Bummer.

2. too hard to "comp" parts. Most common example of this is doing five vocal takes and then editing them into one final track. It should be really easy to view multiple takes simultaneously and select where all the cuts should be between the different takes. Sonar now has this sort of functionality. It's the number one reason I've been toying with switching. I comp vocals, backing vocals, bass tracks, guitar tracks, etc. on *every single song* and there's not a quick and easy way to do it. The notion is that multiple takes are mutually exclusive when residing in a single track and selecting one section of one take to be on means all other takes are automatically off for that exact section without having to manually crop each one at the exact location on separate tracks.

3. Clip Start/Snap points: Support grace notes, lead ins, tails, etc. - outside of really repetitive music, the restriction of clips not having headers and tails is way too draconian. Loops (and even one-shots) should have the easy ability to mark the snap point or start of loop within. Often in a musical part there's a quick lead in that shouldn't loop but is important to have play the first iteration of that loop. Common case: the chorus of the song may start on the first beat of a measure but I can guarantee that there are parts of notes or even entire phrases that belong to the chorus but happen before the first beat. Designating a snap point fixes this. The snap point for a loop is the start of the actual looping part. Once this is in place, moving/adding/removing clips and sections around should respect these heads/tails by default (with the ability to manually clip them if needed.) I can explain further if needed but this is everywhere in music--listen to just about any album and you'll see this behavior.

4. Zoom: someone else mentioned this one but zooming should zoom in toward the right (the music I'll hear if I hit play) instead of zooming up the middle. right now the workflow is zoom at cursor, scroll right. Rinse, repeat a thousand times in a session. This is a constant annoyance.

5. Track archiving - some tracks/takes become completely unused for a particular mix and it would be nice to "park" them and be certain that they are not taking up memory or processing w/o having to delete them. Mute should be used for just muting.

Lesser:

6. Better effects - like the izotope stuff in Sound Forge

7. track freezing

8. song templates (that let you preset your plugins, softsynths, etc.)

9. Track Folder mixing - I like the idea of being able to use track folders as subgroups for mixing purposes. It would be nice to have a volume control and effects sends for these but I understand the complexity of doing that and realize that you can manually go to each track and set the properties accordingly or use busses but that's pretty manual, especially if you have a bunch of tracks you'd like to send to a particular bus or effect.

There you go.

-b