Sony Acid Pro 7 (Win) Review

Jul 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jason Scott Alexander

           
 

Plenty of new features for taking control of your music.

With all this radical stretching, Sony wisely updated the core time-and-pitch engine with the hot new élastique Pro algorithm from zplane. Selectable from an audio file's Clip Properties window, élastique offers higher-quality time-stretching than the stock Acid algorithm with minimal sonic artifacts. You have a choice between Pro and Efficient methods; Pro's quality reminds me of the time-stretching in Ableton Live, but it doesn't offer the source-material options of Elastic Time in Pro Tools.

Adding to the professional MIDI facilities in Acid Pro 6, V. 7 includes Track Freeze. This feature allows you to render MIDI tracks that are routed to soft synths and as WAV files to save processing power.

At the Post

Although I'm not heavily into video work, I found an extreme-sports montage with very challenging and rhythmic cuts with which to try out Acid Pro 7's new timing features for synching to picture. I began mapping music cues along the timeline, using styles from techno to metal and So-Cal punk rock. The Tempo Curves were extremely helpful here, letting me lock in patterns with radically varying grooves onto the frame edits and adjust for tempo changes in the visuals.

During an aggressive indie-rock pattern, a skier on a crazy downhill mogul run hits a massive jump and the shot changes to slow motion, so I punched in a downward tempo change over two measures and let the enhanced Beatmapping slow the drums and guitar to a crawl along a gradual tempo curve. By adjusting the start and end positions of that curve around the visual sequence, and by trying different curve shapes, I experimented with the feel of the ramp and how it transitioned into the next music cue in real time.

FIG. 4: The Mixing Console gives you greater flexibility than in previous versions.

You can't import OMF or AAF sequences from video editors, but Acid supports numerous video formats in the timeline without conversion, including native support for FLAC, AAC, AC-3 Studio and MPEG-2 formats. This provides more options when working with streaming media and hardware devices — including the Apple iPod — and the ability to export mixes in surround format. While the Dolby Digital AC-3 Studio plug-in is included free, advanced users can upgrade to the Pro AC-3 (which gives you access to all of the Dolby metadata) for $199.95.

Mix Mëister

The previous Acid Mix window had only master, group and effects buses, leaving audio and MIDI mix operations to the tracklist parameter controls. The new dedicated audio and MIDI console in Acid Pro 7 (see Fig. 4) makes a world of difference. It provides an integrated view of all tracks and buses, letting you specify routing, assign inserts and control mixdown automation. You can toggle the scalable and customizable console to show all tracks or only certain tracks and types (audio, MIDI, soft synth, groups, etc.), audio buses, input buses, master bus, sends, I/O meters and so on.

The input buses are a new addition. At their simplest, they may be used for live input monitoring of external devices, such as hardware synths/drum machines or a talkback microphone. They could also mix in turntables and CD decks with Acid. When recording, you can select them as an input and apply Acid effects for a wet signal. Naturally, input buses can also act as returns from outboard effects processors.

The new Real-Time Rendering playback mode merges both internal and external signals and renders them to WAV (or W64) format so you can capture impromptu recordings or jams. Any track that is armed for recording will be unarmed, and you cannot arm a track for recording or start recording while in Real-Time Rendering mode. When rendering a project that does not use external audio hardware, real-time and normal rendering produce the same result.

I really like the new track/clip/event switches that now include Normalize, Invert Phase, Mute and Lock functions. There is great convenience in quickly normalizing an event and performing other processes within the Acid Pro workspace. Likewise, audio, MIDI and bus tracks now have customizable meters you can position, scale and set to horizontal or vertical orientation.

Incidentally, the main graphic user interface essentially remains the same as before, so there's no learning curve for current users. If you're totally fresh to the Acid game, definitely check out the exciting new interactive tutorials Sony built into the session environment. These context-sensitive screenshots follow the user with timely prompts to open and close menus, showing what to select and suggesting helpful commands or keystrokes. It's much more effective than the typical HTML sidebar or static PDF because you actually learn by doing.

Though native support for external control surfaces still hasn't gone past the Mackie Control Universal and the Frontier Design TranzPort, you can now use a feature called Channel Tracking to monitor which channels are under external control. ASIO devices and their ports can be customized with labels to match your configuration, rather than relying on the default driver name.