Sony Pictures’ ACID 5.0 has been on my machine for a few months but I signed a devil’s NDA that prevented me from talking about it. I gather it’s out so I’m allowed to write it up on up.

It’s a big write up so sit back, start a coffee, kill a tree and read on…

After writing all this down and re-reading it (not to be confused with ‘proofing’ it) I realize I sound a lot harsher than I mean to (wtf else is new). In fact I highly recommend 5.0 for just about anybody working with loops and samples — especially when used in conjunction with another app for recording MIDI and audio. ACID is best when used as a loop manipulation tool. For all the other tools that ripped features from them over the last five years, there’s still only one ACID Pro and it has made a very strong comeback.

First, a quick list of new features that don’t need a whole lot of explaining or extra cheering, (say yay! after reading each one): VST, VSTi, bus to bus routing (double yay!), custom keyboard assignment, burn CD at once and event reverse spring to mind as stuff I actually use. OK, on to the other stuff…

Since ACID 2.0 I’ve had a couple of major complaint areas with ACID:

• Cluttered UI

  ACID 2 was incredibly powerful (life changing really) and very, very simple. It was the anti-Cakewalk. There was one screen and one popup (for recording). By the time Sonic Foundry added MIDI support and layering on feature after feature it felt more like Cakewalk.

• Instability

  Along with feature overload came the bugs. A rock solid program that did one thing extremely well went to becoming a touchy behemoth by the 4.0 release. Exactly the reason I replaced Cakewalk after 10 years with ACID 2.0. The problem was so bad in 4.0 however and Cakewalk (by now SONAR) had added ACIDized wav support, I upgraded to SONAR just to remind myself how painful things can get. And boy it was. Which is, by the way, when I settled on Fruity Loops — a uniquely nightmarish user interface itself but dependable, great sounding and (a revelation) totally automated. Which brings me to….

• Lack of Real-Time Automation

  Once I got pulled into using programs like FL Studio (Fruity Loops) and Ableton’s Live I came face to face with the realization that ACID was an ‘authoring’ tool, like Word or Excel and that FL and Live (and *cough* SONAR) were ‘performance capturing tools.’

Here comes ACID 5. Did they address my issues?

Let’s start with the last one: real time automation. What I want is to assign a MIDI controller knob or key or even QWERTY keystroke to a virtual knob on the screen and have the program record my actions into the project. In ACID you could only ‘draw’ what you want as dots and lines on the screen and then listen later to what you did. Well I didn’t get my feature. But you know what? That’s OK. Because ACID is what ACID does. It’s an authoring tool and a damn fine one. It’s really cool and still does things that nobody else does, it still has amazing visual feedback with the most natural, intuitive interface for sliding wav snippets around on a screen.

A fine consolation: they fixed and otherwise improved their ReWire support. ACID can slave to Live — and it works! Really, really well I might add. They also cleaned up their ReWire master code. Driving FL Studio has never been more solid and stable with only minor glitches that are easy to work around. All of a sudden this is production quality stuff.

So ACID doesn’t behave like Live or FL? I’m out of excuses with 5.0. When I miss a feature from Live or FL in ACID (or the other way around now!) I just call up the other program from within whatever tool I started in. It’s not perfect but it seems like all the companies involved are really working hard at getting the glitches out. There are two very important things to keep in mind:

1. Remember you have to SAVE your work in BOTH apps before quitting — can you say: Auto-save in ReWire Mode?)
2. ReWire slaves tend to be in memory (a lot of memory) even when they are not in use.

For example, take a look at what’s in memory just after starting ACID with no project having been loaded (!):

I couldn’t tell you whose ‘fault’ this is. Does it matter?

With regards to UI clutter, there are more features in 5.0 (more on that below) so that means more windows, more cryptic icons on the toolbars, more options to pour through, etc. etc. But buried in there is a screen saving godsend: virtual track folders. Now, when I have a project with 45 tracks (happens more often than I like) I can tuck all 14 percussion tracks under one ‘virtual’ track. Collapsing and expanding these folders is a whole lot more productive than scrolling all over the place.

The UI is still getting more cumbersome but there’s obviously no turning back so there’s no more use whining about it. The fact that I used FL Studio for several years proves that I’ll put up with just about any random UI design if the features and stability are there.

And about stability in 5.0: I’ve been using the beta for a few months and I have to say: aside from normal crazy-ass beta bugs the overall beta was more stable than the released 4.0 (!!!) Memory consumption seems under control again and when use these programs like they were originally meant (FL for MIDI stuff, ACID for wavs) they are all running in optimum mode and with super flexible bussing now all three ACID, Live and FL Studio you can route any sound to any place with a few clicks. And no crashes. Doesn’t sound like a lot but I’ve been running the final release for a few days now without a single one. Welcome back.

The big new feature is the Media Manager. This is a new window in ACID that catalogues all your samples and lets you ‘tag’ them to make them easier to find than rummaging through your hard disk (looking for ‘one shot kicks’? How about ‘electric rock guitar loops’?) Or at least that’s the idea.

I’ve had just about every one of the 12 stages of emotions when it comes to this feature. At first I thought it was great idea and couldn’t wait to use it. I love smart, semantic based searching so it really made sense. Then I started playing with beta needed quite a bit of hand-holding from the developers to get me though the first round of basic steps. This was probably due to a combination of my thickness and a less-than-intuitive interface plus buttons that fell off my laptop’s tight screen. Though, mainly my thickness. Pretty much 100% my thickness. It turns out you tag a loop by dragging the tag name over the loop.

But then how was I supposed to know you take a tag off a loop but dragging it off into space? (Que’es que se: Beta Documention? No lo se.)

Now there’s a couple things you should note about installing ACID 5.0. In order to pull off this ‘Media Manager’ thingy Sony decided to use Microsoft’s SQL Server Desktop Edition as the back end. This is a crippled (in features, not so much resource consumption) version of the mega-database engine Microsoft uses to beat back Oracle. It’s Microsoft’s hope (well, a couple guys at Microsoft, not all 17,000 people there) that MSDE becomes a standard part of your Windows client and eventually gets installed by default with XP-whatever. Ahem. As far as I can tell we’re a long way off from that reality. In point of fact, ACID 5.0 is the very first application that required it. So all of a sudden, my entire DAW is a database mini-server. All the fucking time. Look at what memory looks like after ACID is no longer running:

Remember that this is only the footprint of the program modules which in turn allocate even more memory for it’s data (as in: the media database).

Again, I don’t know who’s fault this is, I know how to kill it if I have to it but the average loop slinging DJ Joe doesn’t and somehow, that aint right.

There’s another problem and this (I’m sure) falls squarely on the doorstep of Sony Picture marketing. The first couple times I go to load a media library I get this nag screen about Sony Loop Library or something like that. This thing gets mentioned on the download page, again during install, all the damn time with this thing. It’s 40mg and it’s called ’sonylooplibrary.exe’ so I figured, OK, I’m always open to product swag if it means it came with the upgrade.

One small problem with the Sony Loop Library. There aren’t any fucking loops in the Sony Loop Library. Just grayed out entries where the loops would be if you bought them. Please tell me I’m wrong. Please tell me I missed the part where I check some box and all those loops are actually on my disk. If not: Hey Sony: cut that shit out. I’m a person and musician and father and person and sure, a dick, but not, not a Pavlovian commodity consumer. Ew.

OK, back to reality. I have spent years coming up with a disk management system for my DAWs. I have a very good (for me) structure for how I work now for the last several years.

My directory structure is this:

So when the Media Manager asks me to point to where my samples were I pointed right at the ‘Loops’ directy. More than five minutes later it’s read in all the loops and one shots under that directory and I’m ready to start tagging away. Now there’s another problem. Turns out I have a whole lot of loops and one-shots.

I don’t know about this. All of a sudden the “problem” of finding loops doesn’t really hold a candle to the work of tagging over 12,000 files. Well it was a nice idea while it lasted.

I guess if you are completely starting from scratch, or only have a few dozen loops, or you actually work with mostly official ACID loop sets then I can see how the MM is a cool tool. But personally, I don’t think it’s going to fly for my use.

The Groove Tool is a kind of a mini-Beatmapper that works on loops. There is a big difference between this version and say Live’s elastic sample edit view (that sounds like a Kesey novel doesn’t it?). ACID’s GT doesn’t work on the loop itself, you work in a template that is applied to the loop. ACID displays a window that shows you a library, er sorry, pool of grooves they’ve concocted for you. It’s a neat idea, it’s implemented square on, I get it and it’s almost useful. My guess is that I’ll be using the one called ‘Quantize to Straight’ on my bass recordings about 10,000 times for every time I call up all the others combined. Still, it’s cool, they did a great job for what it does and you’ll love it. Whether you use it or not on a regular basis we’ll see. Click on Vincent to hear a hi-hat sampled looped 4 times: the first time is the original loop and then a bunch of random Groove templates dropped on it one bar at a time. The last one is pretty psychedelic and definitely feels like I’m empowered with another way to mangle a sample.

Well, kids, That’s about it for me and ACID 5. In my own raggy way I recommend it for Virtual Turntablists everywhere. Go out there and make a Sony marketer proud!

[UPDATE] Read the Follow up