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Subject:Wow! Finally...
Posted by: Angels
Date:3/3/2009 9:52:17 PM

It's been a long time coming, and just in time too. I've been on the SoFo/Sony road since the first instances of Vegas and Acid and many people like myself just couldn't understand why Acid didn't just inherit the NLE audio editing of Vegas. And now it has :)

No "I told you so's" for the dev team, really. That's not the intention of this post. The fast easy editing style of both Vegas and Acid, along with their seamless integration with Sound Forge, has always made these potentially a sound developer's dream tool, but MIDI and Softsynths were MIA in Vegas, while all the simple NLE editing was missing in Acid. And working with both Vegas and Acid concurrently (I did try it for a while) was just more trouble than it was worth. Since there was no real advantage for me working with these tools than any of the more evolved packages I knew very well, I began to stray away from the fold. I've kept updating in the hope that things would change, but I've used Vegas and Acid less and less over the last few years.

When Acid 7 came out, my first instinct was to dismiss it. With the 35% deal, I decided to try the 30-day demo. And to my surprise, it's now possible to do NLE-style editing in Acid! Also, all the clip switches are there (if not all in the same place) and it's possible to generate a copy of a clip to edit in Sound Forge by copying a clip to the chopper first (I would have prefered the more traditional and direct "Edit COPY in Sound Forge).

The real magic of course, is being able to open clips in Forge, edit and save them, go back to Acid and if the result isn't right, go back to Forge and unedit by using "undo after save". Now THAT is evolutionary, and as of today, this hands down beats any other DAW + Editor combo I've worked with.

Combined with the simple ability to cut new events and drag them to automatically create new tracks (the aforementioned NLE-style editing), I can honestly say that I'm excited to be going back to using Acid extensively. I just spent a couple of hours working on it and while Control-S is my friend due to a couple of odd crashes (shame on early unstable releases!), it mostly seems to work quite smoothly.

If I have one request, it's stability and completeness. SF9 in particular has some odd new auditioning bugs in some of the traditional effects that weren't there in previous versions. As for Acid, I'll see how it behaves in the next week or so. One odd thing is that event fades and level changes don't alter the waveform; is that a setting?

Many thanks to Sony for making this a reality. It's appreciated. :)

Subject:RE: Wow! Finally...
Reply by: SHTUNOT
Date:3/3/2009 10:28:08 PM

***One odd thing is that event fades and level changes don't alter the waveform; is that a setting?***

No dude that is the way it is now. Maybe in version 8 they'll add this. More of a nice to have than a need to have if you ask me.

They definitely should as I loved how I edited with the visual helping as well.

Please post any and all crashes here [step by step repro] so that we can knock off as much as possible so that 7.0b will rock.

Ed.

Subject:RE: Wow! Finally...
Reply by: Angels
Date:3/4/2009 1:09:50 PM

I can live without the waveform redraw, too.

As for the crash repros: I seem to get crashes if I don't keep saving (Ctl-s) all the time doing really stupid things like importing by drag and drop, or just playing with an envelope while in playback. You can't repro something that happens once and not again under the same circumstances.

Maybe the process of saving resets stuff and prevents these stupid crashes from happening? I don't know. I'm in the business of using software not of fixing it, so I'm not going to stop CTL-saving :)

But if I do encounter a reproducible bug, I will no question report it to support.

Subject:RE: Wow! Finally...
Reply by: SHTUNOT
Date:3/4/2009 2:03:10 PM

I get a weird one too.

-dragging a vst pluggin from the plugin manager to a channel in the mix console.[hard to repro]

Though luckily I ctrl+s to as well and so far no show stoppers yet.

Ed.


Subject:RE: Wow! Finally...
Reply by: drbam
Date:3/4/2009 3:51:52 PM

"As for the crash repros: I seem to get crashes if I don't keep saving (Ctl-s) all the time doing really stupid things like importing by drag and drop, or just playing with an envelope while in playback."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should be able to do the above without crashing/freezing. Maybe its not a "bug" by strict definition (maybe it is) but regardless, it certainly speaks to the issue of stability. This is the kind of thing that I've encountered with AP6.0d and I'm disappointed to read here that it is continuing with 7.0a. I was just thinking about upgrading but after this report, I'll wait till 7.0b and see if things get better.

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