AudioMedia - January 2009 - (Page 20)

Delightfully tangy or explosively corrosive? RICHARD WENTK examines Sony’s little looper with DAW aspirations. B efore Acid, loop assembly was slow and torturous, and required manual time stretch, pitch shift, and tempo matching for every loop. Acid revolutionised the concept by making it as easy to pin loops to a grid irrespective of their source tempo, with optional pitch shifting. Since then, looper tools with similar features have appeared in Garageband for example, and some professional DAWs also include quick beat matching and pitch shift. As the competition has evolved, Acid has moved on. This update underlines that Acid isn’t just a loop arranger – it offers a powerful mix of intuitive loop assembly tools with extra DAW-like features for recording and arrangement. The feature set is unexpectedly deep. Most powerful is the automation – this works at a full-cream DAW level, offering individual control of any basic track or plug-in parameter, controlled live by a control surface or painted in with a mouse. But there are other extras that push Acid beyond the basic level offered by Garageband and Steinberg’s Sequel, and turn it into a productive audio environment. to its settings, which is simpler and more intuitive than the Cubase/Nuendo mixer and gives the ProTools mixer a good run for its money. Acid’s old recording limitations have been broken. There’s support for multiple input busses, and surround mixing is also possible. You can add your own labels to ASIO hardware, and hidden out of sight are closer links to various control surfaces. Even the best console-sized interfaces struggle with mapping track and FX parameters to a set of hardware controls in a way that’s intuitive and obvious. Acid’s flexible approach means you can control how this happens to suit your own hardware. It’s not a fully solved problem – no one in the industry has truly solved it yet – but it’s an improvement on earlier versions and makes Acid easier to work with. The time stretch technology has been given a useful but minor update. Time stretch in Acid has always been less than optimal, making mixes audibly crunchy and low def. The interestingly titled élastique Pro for beatmapped clips SONY ACID PRO 7.0 Professional DAW Avoiding Temptation So what ’s new in this update? Acid is reaching the point where it’s tempting to start nailing on features for the sake of it, but Sony has mostly managed to avoid the temptation here. There isn’t a vast list of changes, but almost all of the new additions nudge Acid further in the direction Garritan’s Aria is an orchestra in a box – albeit a very small orchestra, in a very small box. of mini-DAW credibility. The most obvious change is a new console-style view for the mixer. This now looks and works as it always should have done. Faders and meters are now visible for every track by default. There are also various sub-views that show inputs, soft synths, and assorted busses, and support for MIDI mixing, with much improved metering both in the track list and in the mini-console area. The mixer view is very customisable, and while there’s a certain amount of tweakery for the sake of it – iZotope’s effects bundle includes a selection of basic but useful plug-ins. you can set the meter range, the screen width of each track, or you can make the faders disappear altogether – THE REVIEWER some of the changes, such as the quick mode for adding RICHARD WENTK is the insert FX, make Acid much more responsive to work with. owner of Skydancer Media, a digital production company Acid’s FX chains can be any length, and you can hide or providing sound, image, design show as many plug-ins as you want to. Effects are still perand consultancy services to track rather than per-clip, which can be wasteful of screen various clients in London and the space, but makes automation much easier to understand. West Country. Clicking on each item in an effects stack takes you directly is supposed to improve this. In practice the difference was modest. I loaded Acid Pro for a comparison, and while it was easy enough to hear a smoother sound in Acid , I felt the timestretch quality still lagged behind that offered by more professional DAWs. You can set beat points and slices, and there are four algorithms to choose from: Pro, Efficient, and two versions of Soloist for monophonic material. There is also the 'classic' timestretch method, again with optimised modes, plus straight loop stretching options. Acid Pro can deal with up to -bit, kHz audio, and internal processing is done at -bit floating point. I n The B ox Also in the box is Sony’s selection of , taster loops from its library series, which you can buy as add-ons. There are also , MIDI file clips, most of which are designed to loop, but which aren’t linked in any obvious way to the sound files or softsynths they’re designed to work with. More usefully there’s a sizable collection of plug-ins and extras. A very basic GM softsynth is still available, and sounds as good as you’d expect it to. But iZotope’s Acid Pro Effects are more useful, with a modest but useful mix of traditional flangers, phasers, delays, and dynamics. There’s also a Guitar Combo bundle that includes three amp sims, also useful for adding overcooked crunchy distortion effects. For more conventional sampling there’s a basic version of Garritan Aria, which includes orchestral and General Midi samples, and can be expanded almost indefinitely with downloads from the Garritan range. And finally you can get your drummer on with a collection of drum samples and kits, which includes MIDI grooves and is more fun than it sounds. Perhaps more useful for sound design is extended file format support. WAV and AIF remain standards, but it’s now possible to import and export/output FLAC, AAC, AC- , and MPEG- files directly without conversion. This might not look like a spectacular change, but FLAC is increasingly being used online for lossless file Building An Ex tension 20 AUDIO MEDIA JANUARY 2009

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - January 2009

AudioMedia - January 2009 Contents Recording News Post News Broadcast News Geo Focus: India What's Up UK? Special Report: Pimp My Ride AKG C214 Sony Acid Pro 7.0 Final Cut: Mirror's Edge Opportunities in the Reality World She's Got the Look The X-Factor Sadie LRX2 Source Elements Source-Connect 3.1 Buying a Recorder In Control Product Sampler: Trade Shows Video Guide AMSR News Digico SD8 The Last Picture Show File Server

AudioMedia - January 2009

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