Acid Pro (often stylized ACID) is a professional

digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW ) is an electronic device or application software used for Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pr ...

(DAW) software program currently developed by Magix Software. It was originally called Acid pH1 and published by Sonic Foundry, later by Sony Creative Software as Acid Pro, and since spring 2018 by Magix as both Acid Pro and a simplified version, Acid Music Studio. Acid Pro 11 supports 64-bit architectures, and has

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

ASIO ''Asio'' is a genus of typical owls, or true owls, in the family Strigidae. This group has representatives over most of the planet, and the short-eared owl is one of the most widespread of all bird species, breeding in Europe, Asia, North Ameri ...

, VST, VST3,

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

Audio, and 5.1 surround sound support.

History

Acid was first launched in 1998, as Acid pH1, by Sonic Foundry in

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. It was a loop-based

music sequencer A music sequencer (or audio sequencer or simply sequencer) is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling Musical note, note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open ...

, in which Acid Loop files could be simply drag-and-dropped then automatically adjust to the tempo and key of a song with virtually no sonic degradation. A website for budding musicians using Acid technology was set up, named AcidPlanet.com. The software became very popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s among composers, producers, and DJs interested in quickly creating beats, music textures, or complete compositions and orchestrations, that would work with virtually any tempo or key signature. Sonic Foundry sold its Acid, Vegas, Sound Forge, CD Architect, Siren, VideoFactory, ScreenBlast, and Batch Converter product lines to

Sony Pictures Digital Sony Pictures Digital Productions Inc. (previously known as Columbia TriStar Interactive, Sony Pictures Interactive Network, and Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment) is a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation. Operating under the trade name Sony ...

in July 2003; the merger resulted in the new Sony Creative Software division. Sony's Acid Pro 6 (released in the third quarter of 2006) introduced a full-digital audio workstation that also included

and multitrack audio recording with full support for

computer-audio and VST synthesizer-plugin standards. On May 20, 2016, German company Magix Software GmbH announced they had acquired the majority of the products in the Sony Creative Software portfolio. These include Acid Pro, Vegas Pro, Movie Studio, and Sound Forge Pro. Acid Pro 8, the first version since Magix's acquisition, was announced on January 21, 2018 and released in spring 2018. The update came with new modern features including an enhanced interface, support for 64-bit, additional samples, VST3 support, over 20

audio effects, the ability to mix in 5.1 surround sound, and new features named Media Manager, BeatMapper, and Chopper. Acid Pro 11 runs on 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows 10 or 11. Versions do not exist for

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Acid Loops

''Acid Loop'' (trademark), also ''Acidized'' or ''Acidified loop'' (generic terms), refers to " loops", sound clips which can be repeated and transposed to form a song with minimal manual adjustment. Acidized loops contain

tempo In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for 'time'; plural 'tempos', or from the Italian plural), measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given musical composition, composition, and is often also an indication of the composition ...

and key information, so that Acid can properly time-stretch and pitch-shift the clip to fit into an existing track structure. An Acidized loop is a specially prepared WAV audio file, which can be created using

audio editing software Audio editing software is any software or computer program which allows editing and generating audio data. Audio editing software can be implemented completely or partly as a library, as a computer application, as a web application, or as a loa ...

such as Sound Forge. The technology was created in 1998 for Sonic Foundry's original Acid pH1 software. Sony and Magix later sold series of Acidized loop sample CDs to be used with Acid Pro, as have various third-party companies. Since then, this looping technique has been adopted by the majority of other digital audio workstations on the market, sometimes with competing brand names for the feature, such as Cakewalk Sonar (calling it Groove Clips), and

Cubase Cubase is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music and MIDI recording, arranging and editing. The first version, which was originally only a MIDI sequencer and ran on the Atari ST computer, was released in 1989. Cut-do ...

(calling it Audio Warp). Many DAWs can also directly support Acidized loops intended for use in Acid Pro.

Notable users

* Halley Labs * DJ Arana * YoYo Honey Singh

Other versions

* Acid Music Studio is a simplified, lower-cost version of Acid Pro. The latest version is Acid Music Studio 11.

References

External links