Subject:Questions about Acid Pro

Posted by: Eugenia

Date:9/13/2010 3:28:51 AM

I'm new to music, and I'm pondering between Ableton Live and Acid Pro. Here are a few questions for Acid Pro:

1. Can I do mixing and mastering with it in a way that the finished work won't sound "flat" and unprofessional?
2. Can I create music like this? [url]http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewIMix?id=388119866&s=143441&v0=575 (iTunes link). I want to write most of the parts using my midi keyboard, and then quantize them and edit them with Acid Pro. Notice the reverb effects on these songs, and the low-sounding beat (the music doesn't sound like boom-boom-boom cheap electronic dance music).

This is the kind of music I want to do, and I wonder if Acid Pro will be able to give me that sound, with that kind of quality, with its *existing* plugins/samples, or do I need to buy more. Thx.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/13/2010 6:49:05 AM

No - Acid Pro won't do what you are wanting it to do. And neither will Ableton Live, ProTools or any other DAW. You said that you were "new to music" so you will need to hone your, writing, keyboard, production and engineering skills before any DAW will start giving you professional results. If you're like the rest of us, this will take years. But in the meantime you can have a great deal of fun and satisfaction with these music production tools. So go for it! Download the demos of the DAWs that you are interested in and start experimenting.

Regarding Acid's plugins - in my view they are pretty lame, especially the reverb. The good news is that there are a lot of good, professional sounding plugins available (many for free) so that is the least of your worries at this point.

Cheers

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:9/13/2010 12:06:28 PM

Ewww...iTunes! /hisses like a vampire <jk> :D

In all seriousness, in addition to what drbam said, what you put into DAWs like ACID Pro will all depend on how much knowledge you have concerning audio and its related subjects *and* how much *you* put into it. It's really all on you in the end.

Your knowledge of plug-ins (e.g., compressors, limiters and any creative effects) as well as any well-known studio techniques (like recording the same guitar part and layering it for a "thicker" effect) and knowledge of your gear will definitely help out here but, again, it's all up to you.

Most think DAWs like ACID, Live, et al. will make them automatic rock (hip hop? ewww.) stars. This couldn't be any further from the truth. Study, study, study.

Iacobus

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: Eugenia

Date:9/13/2010 1:28:58 PM

I'm not new into the idea. I do video (I'm shooting official music videos), so I know what it takes to get into something complex and new, that requires both technical knowledge, a lot of time, and artistry.

But it's important for me to also get the right software from the get go. See, when I started doing video, I started with Sony Vegas. Because it was cheaper, and because its UI made more sense to me. Three years later, I'm hitting technical limits with it: in terms of its available color grading plugins, in terms of automatic subject tracking (it has none), in terms of free-form effects, and in terms of its green screen support (its algorithm is very bad compared to After Effects'). If I had the money to go with Adobe CS3 at the time, I'd have none of these limits today. Sure, the usability sucks with Premiere and After Effects compared to Vegas, but the tools themselves wouldn't restrict me. But now it's too late for me to move to these. My whole way of thinking surrounds Vegas. I can't just drop it.

So I need to get it right this time with my audio work, from the get go. I need the RIGHT software, because it will *eventually* be a factor.

I have a very specific idea in my head about what kind of music I want to write (like in the link I provided), so I need to know if Acid will have all the tools required to simulate that sound. Good "lo-fi" reverb plugin support is important. Can Acid do it out of the box? Or do I need to buy plugins? If yes, how much would that cost?

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/13/2010 3:47:32 PM

Since you like and are familiar with Vegas, Acid Pro is my recommendation - the UIs are very similar. Live is an entirely different thing and would present a significant learning curve.

As I said in my previous reply, there are lots of great plugins available for free. Many of these are very close and in some cases, even better than very expensive versions. You can do some searches here but you will get a lot more information from the gearslutz forums and the Reaper forum. In my view, you won't need to spend a penny on plugins for a long time. The only Sony plugins I have used on a regular basis have been the track eq, Wave Hammer, and their dither when I am in a hurry and don't want to load a full mastering suite. I also use the Izotope mastering plugins that are included with Sound Forge but those shouldn't be considered Sony plugins because they aren't. Good luck and have fun!

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: Eugenia

Date:9/13/2010 5:26:49 PM

Thanks. I will probably wait for Acid Pro 8 though. In the meantime, I will learn to play.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: Spectralis

Date:9/14/2010 6:42:02 AM

Have you tried Reaper? I've waited so long for an ACID update that I've changed to Reaper.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: ZombieSlugs

Date:9/14/2010 7:58:22 AM

Reaper is very powerful but there's quite a learning curve - read the manual and hang out on the forums.

I use Acid Pro + Reaper for most of my work, at this point. Reapers MIDI editing drives me nuts so I do most of my MIDI work in Acid, still.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/14/2010 9:46:49 AM

I replaced Vegas with Reaper and have never looked back. I am slowly but surely replacing Acid with Reaper as well, primarily because of the instability I experience with Acid. I've worked for years to try and overcome this but for some reason, it simply doesn't work very well for me on complex projects. I have the same problem with several difference computer systems, all of which were custom made for my studio. I know this is not the case for many users and I wish this weren't the case for me because for loop production, I think Acid is still the better app. But Reaper has never, not once, crashed or froze up on me.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: raskiefilm

Date:9/14/2010 11:35:41 AM

That's unfortunate. I would agree that Acid is the better application. And for me, it is solid when it comes to not crashing. Can you define 'complex' projects?

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: sodbuster-ca

Date:9/14/2010 1:47:51 PM

"...I wonder if Acid Pro will be able to give me that sound, with that kind of quality, with its *existing* plugins/samples, or do I need to buy more. Thx.

Eugenia"

You will buy more no matter what DAW you choose. Virtually all music professionals (except maybe guitar players) wind up buying tons of plug-in processors, Virtual Instruments (VI) and or Samples. Some call it "Gear Lust". Call it what you will, it is the nature of the music business in the digital age.

While it is possible to make "hit" records with any of the popular DAW/Plug-in packages on the market, no one seems to do it that way. They all find one reason or another to buy third-party plug-ins, VI's & samples. (Every year I participate in some of the many Group Buys or "No Brainers" promoted by music manufacturers and retailers.)

Instead of worrying about that, there are other equipment issues I'd be concerned about if I were starting out as a music professional.

1) GUI aesthetics & user friendliness/familiarity
2) Workflow
3) Project transportability

Numbers "1" & "2" above are self-explanatory. Number "3" sometimes becomes the reason a studio would select one DAW over another. The idea is some project/home studios are accoustically aceptable for recording basic tracks but fall short when it comes to mixing. That's where the "professional polish" really comes in to play...Mixing. Some high dollar projects will have several "tracking" engineers, a couple of "mixing" engineers and a "mastering" engineer. They're all specialized parts of the recording process and require different talents and skills.

So...you record your tracks (or your customer's tracks) in your project studio and you (or they) take them to a better studio (environment) to mix. If the mixing studio primarily uses DAW-x and you use DAW-y then compromises and/or adjustments will have to be made. That's why some studios start out using DAW-x from the beginning to elimate that issue.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: sodbuster-ca

Date:9/14/2010 2:22:54 PM

In the above post I said that the "professional polish" is added at the mixing stage in the recording process. That's kinda' true but its also misleading because of the following axioms: "...you can't polish a turd..." or "...garbage-in-garbage-out...".

A good mixing engineer can sometimes salvage poorly recorded tracks using plug-ins and external processors. That's why I said that.

Look, you can have the best studio equipment, the best tracking, mixing & mastering engineers in the world but if the music sucks then no one is gonna' listen to it anyway.

So the moral of the story is, every stage of the process is important. Equally? I don't know...it depends.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/14/2010 6:30:11 PM

"Can you define 'complex' projects?"

Freezes and crashes mostly happen when I'm doing complex mixing and editing - working fast, moving items around, especially on the fly. Others have reported similar issues but I think my experience is out of the ordinary. And since I have not been able to find a remedy, and found little support here (compared to the Reaper forums) I finally decided that Acid and me weren't going to be good friends so for the most part I have migrated everything to Reaper. I still use Acid sometimes for the most basic loop construction, but as soon as I'm really starting to put the project together and get into edits and basic mixing, I move it to Reaper.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: raskiefilm

Date:9/15/2010 9:54:58 AM

@drbam:

Working fast and moving around items - are you able to replicate this mixing and editing in Reaper without crashes? If so, is Acid installed on one machine while Reaper is installed on another?

It is my understanding that once you're beyond the nuts and bolts of Acid and get into high-end mixing, Acid is unable to function properly. Whereas Reaper handles all mixing and editing processes with little or no freezes and crashes.

One last question, have you ever tried to do a clean install of your OS and a clean install of Acid?

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/15/2010 12:15:15 PM

I can push Reaper to almost insane demands - never a crash. All of my DAW software are installed on 3 separate computers but I only use one at a time. Also note that I am not using midi on either Acid or Reaper - just audio and I use minimal plugins. Acid has almost always been glitchy when pushed hard on any system I've installed it on. These have been custom dedicated audio systems built by professionals - nothing budget oriented or corners cut and of course the OSs have always been optimized for audio - I still use XP Pro SP3. I make my living doing this and I have a great deal of experience in the recording industry (almost 50 years). Since going from tape to DAWs, I have primarily used Echo Layla sound cards and for the past 3 years RME Multiface II - totally solid interfaces with excellent drivers. I can easily make Acid Pro 6 freeze by editing on the fly and moving quickly but cannot predict exactly when it will happen. It can also freeze sometimes randomly when not pushed hard but more likely when demands are being made.

Re: your last question: I have had many clean installs of my OSs and Acid. You should note that my experiences are my experiences and I'm not speaking for anybody else. I am certain from following this forum for many years, that some users can push Acid Pro very hard with complex projects and remain problem free. Unfortunately that has not been my experience and as I mentioned previously, since I have not been able to find a fix for whatever the problems are, I have chosen to move on to a different DAW. I wish this weren't the case because there are some features of Acid that I really like. You may have great success with it and it could be problem free. Download the demo and really put it through some hard ass work and find out for your self.

All the Best!

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: Eugenia

Date:9/15/2010 2:39:50 PM

Because of this thread, I downloaded and installed both Reaper and Acid Pro 7.0e. Acid Pro crashed before even putting anything in the timeline! Since it came with no loops for some reason, I installed its Reference Library as I was *instructed* from a popup menu, that was providing a link to this site to download it. After 55 MBs of downloading and installation, selecting that Reference Library it would result either in "not available loop" message when I would select one, or the media manager would crash, and taking the whole Acid Pro down with it. And when sometimes I would playback a midi event, it would go aaaaaaaaaa forever, and it won't stop until I re-play it and abruptly stop it manually. Buggy.

Today, I installed Reaper. I've been working with it for 2 hours now, no crash. It's stable as a rock. It's MORE difficult to use it, some things are just not very obvious (e.g. getting audio output for a midi track was not straightforward, and where the heck do you switch midi instruments? -- I found it an hour later only, at an obscure little drop-down menu -- not intuitive). However, it's not THAT unintuitive. A lot of its UI works like Vegas/Acid, so it's not completely alien.

However, since I would be programming midi exclusively (I don't think I would actually be recording it), the REAPER MIDI UI is more powerful. It's got more stuff on it, like jumping from one instrument to another, within the same "midi event". Also, I can see more of the piano octaves, while Acid Pro is limiting me to 1/3, no matter how much I stretch it. With Reaper, your monitor's resolution is instead the limit.

But of course, the most important thing of all in this evaluation, is ending up being the price. Even if REAPER was as crashy, or not as powerful as Acid, you can't beat its price. At $40 for individuals, it's a steal for all the things the app can do.

So, thanks to everyone who replied, I really appreciate it, because it did help me decide what to buy, even if it didn't end up being Acid Pro.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: raskiefilm

Date:9/16/2010 9:12:56 AM

@drbam:

I concede that you have the experience to operate a DAW and do your best to maximize its full potential. I was only hoping to help since you stated that there hasn't been much help in this forum. That said, my proclivities lead me to wonder if you have made necessary tweaks for Acid 6. Also, have you tested these issues with Acid 7 and with all its patches/updates?

You state that you run the best drivers and hardware, which is good. My second thought leads me to question if you have any I/O issues. And when considering on-the-fly editing, I also wonder if your RAM and HDDs are optimized or are capable of on-the-fly editing. That said, I can only assume that they are because you replicate this process with Reaper.

Again, I'm just asking and giving my thoughts. It sounds like you have extensively tested and tried to iron out these Acid issues on your machines. I was at the point of leaving Acid due to MIDI limitations (which I believe it still has) but I dove back into the updated Acid 7 manual to be pleasantly surprised with what Acid was able to process with MIDI.

Best of luck on your continued DAW workflow.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: raskiefilm

Date:9/16/2010 9:17:06 AM

RE: Media manager

To anyone who is using media manager and suffering from freezes and crashes, disable media manger and see if that helps.

Media manager is a resource hog and I do not believe (I have not tested - it is only my assumption) it runs the best algorithms for indexing and searching. It may also be related to .NET Framework - if you want to run Media Manager, be sure to have .NET updated.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:9/16/2010 2:14:56 PM

Thanks for your efforts to help raskiefilm. I do appreciate it. In terms of "necessary tweaks for Acid 6" I cannot imagine what else I can do that hasn't been addressed already. Please know that I have been using Acid (and Vegas) since version 1 so I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable with these DAWs.

Yes you assumed right, my HDDs and RAM are as capable and in some cases more capable than the average professional DAW user that I know. My current system is lean, clean fast and powerful.

About a year ago I tried Acid 7 and liked it but I started having some freezing/crashing problems that I believe were related to a defective usb hub on my mobo (a previous system). By the time I got that sorted out, the demo time had run out and since I was still having problems with Acid 6 with my newer system, I decided not to throw any more money at it hoping that A7 would work. During the defective mobo period when Acid 6 and 7 were really messing up to the point of being unsuable, Reaper never crashed, although I experienced a very glitchy mouse which helped me troubleshoot the usb problem. If SCS were to allow me to test A7 again on this new system, I might give it a shot but I'm not going to purchase it without knowing its going to radically better than A6 in terms of stability. If they (SCS) would like me to test again, I'd be grateful for them to contact me (they do monitor this forum) and we can work something out.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: GrupoJyT

Date:10/1/2010 8:31:09 AM

I'm sorry for my english (It's not my native language):

I have the same problem, I've used ACID Pro from version 4 to version 7e and the last 2 versions (6 & 7e) have many crash/freezes when you make changes on the fly: changin volume tracks, plugging effects, exchanging the track order, muting or soloing, ...

This happens every time when the project is grater than 20 tracks with 24 bits / 96 kbps wave files or when I use complex effects for separate tracks (with the built-in Sony effects, the iZotope included VST's or using iZotope Alloy).

Or it happens too when I'm writing music using more than 15 MIDI tracks mapped to Sony DSP or VST instruments like Native Instruments Komplete 5 suite (Kontakt, Battery, Guitar Rigth, FM8, ...) Acid freezes when I try to make changes on the fly (writing / changing a note, changing the volume envelope, setting some parametter on the VST instrument...)

The Sony Support Team can't help me. The better recomendation has been: "please reinstall all your software..." and I have the dilema: Is time to leave Acid and go to another DAW?

I'm a profesional Software Engineer with 25 years of experience so I know all about technical specifications and software / hardware support.

My Workstation is a Quad Core Processor PC with 8GB RAM DDR II, SATA II Disks, Presonus Fire Studio interfase, Windows 7 32 bits... Each week I run defragmentation and disk performance maintenance (Diskeeper 2009), Registry and system performance cleaners (powersuite). It never runs over 50% of CPU usage or 80% of Disk quota when I'm playing / editing my projects.

But after all, If I'm working in a complex project, Im sure that Acid Pro 7e will crash in at least 2 hours ... And that is a frustration.

I have my own deadline: if ACID 8 have the same behavior ... I will to change to another DAW.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: AnthonyTower

Date:10/2/2010 11:24:01 AM

You will most likely not have these problems with ACID Pro 8, since Pro 8 has been rewritten from the ground up to be 64 bit clean.
Cheers

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: drbam

Date:10/2/2010 1:59:15 PM

"You will most likely not have these problems with ACID Pro 8, since Pro 8 has been rewritten from the ground up to be 64 bit clean."

And your source for this information is . . .? Sony has a long-standing "Bush administration like" secrecy policy when it comes to this type of advance information - which means there is never any advance information until just before release date.

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: AnthonyTower

Date:10/2/2010 3:09:01 PM

“And your source for this information is....?

1. Santa Claus
2. The Tooth Fairy and
3. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (if the son-of-a-bitch is still alive) from our good friends at Al-Qaeda

I probably should have kept shut....
Seriously though, without revealing any sources, ask yourself just this:
would a major software player, like Sony, dare release in 2011 a new version of their DAW that in NOT fully 64 bit native, now that all but net-books are preloaded with a 64 bit OS with 3GB+ of RAM and thus remain 32 bit crippled ?
I’m well aware that ACID Pro’s main rival, Ableton Live, is still a 32 bit app, but just wait ‘till MusikMesse 2011.

Cheers

Subject:RE: Questions about Acid Pro

Reply by: GrupoJyT

Date:10/9/2010 10:56:55 AM

I hope that You'll be right!

Because the problems are not related with the Operative System Core (32 or 64 bits) but with the application behavior.