Sony Acid Music Studio: Review
April 24, 2008 | Software And Plug-ins
Sony, bless ‘em, sent me some stuff aaaaages ago to review, and been very patient in waiting. Bait your breath no more, oh company of many pies, for here is your first review.
It’s the Acid Music Studio software – designed for the bedroom guitarist types amongst you really. But you get a lot more than that for your money. This software is a powerful tool for recording and editing audio multi tracks, meaning that you can get commercial results for pocket money. All you need in addition is a half decent computer… and me to mix it for you. Arf.
So – start her up. The explorer window at the bottom of the screen means you can search (AND preview) the media on your computer, and easily drag and drop items into the channel strips, which is a really good feature – saves messing around with two windows. You can change this explorer window later to become a wave editor tool – cut/paste or draw, all are easy functions.
- Sony include a beatmapper, which you can toggle to come on at this time, which is really cool for quantizing your drum tracks
The interface put me off, for a while, until I realised that you can drag each of the four windows around a bit in order to make the controls more versatile. For instance, if you need to change your gain by a fraction of a db, just stretch out the fader window to make it more versatile (otherwise you’ll find yourself jumping 2db at a time).
It’s little things like this which give the Acid Music Studio its individuality. Or so I thought, until I started messing around with the VST plugins, provided.
- Sony make it really easy to incorporate other plugins. I use Waves, and the program actually found them for me automatically.
Sonically, Acid Music Studio allows for true response if you’re using EQ graphs, which is a massive asset for a tool priced at amateurs. Similarly, the build in compressors and gates are the same as the aforementioned Waves tools I regularly use.
These VST’s, along with the seperate editing window (the same window where your explorer window was) are my favourite tools on this package. Other things are standard, and nothing out of the ordinary. The fact that I managed to mix material to release quality using nothing else is truly amazing.
- The bad bits (and there aren’t many)
I almost feel guilty for mentioning any negatives. I’m still astounded by the price:quality ratio with this package, but there are a couple of things I need to mention in case anyone thinks it’s plausible to do anything and everything using something which costs around £40.00
No mix bus support!!!!
This means that if you want reverb on all of your drum channels, you’re going to have to set up a seperate reverb (or a saved preset) on every single channel.
By the time you get to your guitars, things start to get a bit jittery. I’d not been too greedy with gates or anything, but I’d set up a compressor on a few channels, and eq on everything.
Add to that an amp simulator, and we’re in stuttersville.
I know I cannot complain, but Sony – I’m mixing 25 tracks here!!! I’ve still got good results, but it’s meant soloing specific tracks, balancing them with guitars, and then balancing them with something else,THEN rendering them down to an mp3 file to listen. THEN going back, making the corrections.
A mix bus would have meant I could let several channels share at least the reverb, saving a lot of processing power.
Having said all that, on my previous go (when a part of me fell in love with the Acid Music Studio) I was mixing something like 16 tracks, and I only managed to make it jitter right towards the very end. And I DID get about the best mix I’ve ever done out of it.
Unfortunately, I’m unable to publish the audio results at this moment in time due to copyright and licensing issues, as the tracks are not released as yet.
Please take my word. This is only one step away from being as good as software which costs hundreds more!!
You *can* add a bus, as long as you’re using Music Studio version 7, by right-clicking anywhere on the Mixer area and selecting “Insert Bus.” It should be right above “Insert Soft Synth.” Then you just click on the first icon of each soft synth you’re using and assign it to the new bus (Bus A, if using only one). This wasn’t possible in version 6, and I actually wonder if it’s a feature included by accident in version 7, since 7 is based on Pro, as I understand it.