Music by the Numbers--Sonic Foundry’s Acid Pro 3.0

Music by the Numbers
Sonic Foundry’s Acid Pro 3.0
by David English

Is your video or multimedia project missing something? Are you looking to spice up your visuals with some catchy music? If you've found clips from music libraries to be too clichéd or one-dimensional, consider Sonic Foundry's Acid Pro 3.0. You can use it to produce great-sounding music essentially by moving musical phrases on a time grid.

While you won't be able to whip up Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you will be able to design any kind of music that depends heavily on repetition. That not only includes the obvious categories, such as techno and hip-hop, but also some forms of jazz, classical, and third-world music. With the right musical phases, Acid can create seamless compositions that appear to be spontaneous and linear.

Acid Pro is a high-quality looping program designed for professionals. It doesn't require that you play a musical instrument, but it does require a good ear for what works and what doesn't work musically. Like any powerful computer-based creative tool, you'll need to spend some time with it in order to learn its many strengths and weaknesses.

A Bit of Cut-and-Paste

Summary:

Creates original royalty-free music by mixing and matching musical loops

Target Users: Music composers and video and multimedia producers Platforms:Windows 98/ME/2000

If you're familiar with other time-grid software programs, such as Adobe Premiere or Macromedia Flash, you should feel right at home with Acid. On a basic level, it's as easy as finding an audio loop and pasting it into one of the audio tracks. You can use only one loop per track, so adding a musical phrase is as simple as grabbing the drawing tool, moving the cursor to the point where you want the loop to begin, pressing the left mouse button, moving the cursor forward and releasing the mouse button where you want the musical phrase to end. Because the program keeps all the loops in the same musical key, maintains a consistent tempo and starts and stops each loop at the exact beginning and end of the measure, you don't have to deal with a lot of variables. It may sound like dumbed-down music composition–and in some sense it is. However, with most of the drudge work removed, you're free to concentrate on the music itself.

Fully Evolved
Over the years, Acid Pro has evolved into a mature program with a wide range of features. This latest version is especially attractive for video and multimedia producers. The new video track, with its associated scoring tools, lets you sync your multiple audio tracks to video. Using the video track as your guide, you can change the tempo of the audio (without changing its pitch) or time-stretch it, in order to line up the audio with the exact frame of your video. While Acid Pro is limited to just one video track, its superior audio features, including DirectX plug-ins, loop-creation tools, and loop-editing tools, make it an excellent environment for merging audio with a work-in-progress video. If you need additional video tracks, you can import your Acid tracks directly into Sonic Foundry's Video Vegas.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]