Sonic Foundry’s Acid Pro 3.0
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Acid Pro ships with audio-editing software and 600 music loops.

Soothe the Savage Beat
Other useful features include a Beatmapper remixing tool that helps you add beats, combine musical loops with existing audio files, overlay samples and add tempo information to longer audio files. A Chopper editing tool lets you create drum fills, stutters and DJ-style effects to your audio files. Experimenting with the Chopper can yield some very interesting slice-and-dice effects. No matter how you mangle the audio with the Chopper, the altered loops always play in sync with your other tracks.

This latest version supports 32 effects per track, 32 effect chains that feed 26 busses, and sample rates as high as 192 kHz. Also new is MIDI file support, including MIDI record and playback. As with the video track, the MIDI support is limited. For example, there's no provision within the program for editing a MIDI file. Similarly, audio recording is bare-bones. If you need to combine your loops with multiple MIDI or linear audio tracks, you'll want to augment Acid with a more traditional audio-editing program. Fortunately, you won't have to look far–the Acid Pro 3.0 package ships with Sound Forge XP Studio and Vegas Audio LE. The box also includes Sonic Foundry's XFX 1, XFX 2 and XFX 3 collections of DirectX plug-ins (for a total of 18 plug-ins), as well as more than 600 music loops.

Going Loopy

If you've tried other looping programs, you probably realized that these programs are only as good as the loops that are available for them. The loops included with this program, and in more than 40 CD volumes from Sonic Foundry's Loops for Acid Collection, are exceptional. To help me evaluate Acid Pro 3.0, I requested five volumes that I thought would be particularly appealing to video and multimedia producers. Three of them were developed by well-respected musicians: Robin Storey's Rapoon, Robert Rich's Liquid Planet, and Marc Anderson's Dragon Dance. They include some very exotic aural textures, such as ethereal voices, hypnotic drones and ethnic drums. These are definitely not your run-of-the-mill loops. The other two volumes: Orchestral Series 1: Classical and Orchestral Series 3: Cinematic consist of high-quality musical phrases recorded by a full orchestra. They're designed to be used as basic building blocks for creating complex orchestral scores. We were particularly pleased with how well the loops from the various packages sounded when mixed together. If you have a good ear and enjoy experimenting, you'll be won over by any of these volumes. Other loop collections specialize in R&B vocals, techno tracks, world pop, jazz licks, ambient soundscapes, blues guitar and classic country, so you should be able to find the musical styles that are appropriate for your production. All the loops that we listened to are top-quality and, best of all, royalty free.

If you think looping programs are severely limited in the kinds of music they can produce, visit Sonic Foundry's Web site (www.sonicfoundry.com) and download the free trial version of Acid Pro 3.0. Based on the ease and power of this program and the incredible range of the loop CDs, Sonic Foundry has created a set of tools that can serve video and multimedia producers, just as they already serve music and movie producers.

David English is a freelance writer in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Sonic Foundry
Phone: 608-256-3133
Fax: 608-256-7300
Web site: www.sonicfoundry.com

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