A couple of housekeeping questions for Acid Pro

Greylow wrote on 8/18/2019, 3:29 PM

Hi Everyone,

Using Acid Pro 9.0.1 / Windows 10 (64bit) and I have a couple of housekeeping questions.

First, when starting a new project, the dialog box opens, I type in a title and artist, go to the Audio tab, make selections and create a new folder. Then I start recording, remembering to label the track first or that creates more confusion down the line. When I'm done with the session, the file still shows as "Untitled" until I save it as the new title, in the folder I've already titled and created. In the meantime I have a couple of autosave docs in the default folder. And if I've neglected to click the "copy all media with project" on the save screen, it creates even more confusion.

So, I guess my first question is, am I doing it wrong, or is there a reason there are so many steps just to get going?

My second question is about managing tracks.

So, say I do 10 different takes of a bass track until I'm satisfied. Even though I've "undone" each bad take before starting again, Acid records and saves each one. In Cubase you can just go to the track pool and clean up any unused tracks, but I can't find a similar function in Acid. Is there one?

Thanks for any guidance,

Grey

Comments

Former user wrote on 8/18/2019, 9:01 PM

Acid leaves a lot of 'garbage' on your computer. It has a 'remove all unused clips' function under 'Tools'. however it doesn't remove ALL the unused clips. As to MIDI, it removes nothing. It just rewrites over what was there. If you record a MIDI passage in the beginning of a song and on the same track add another passage, it rerecords over what you did in the first passage. So you can't write an 'intro' (on the same track) then move to a verse and add that then it will write over all over your previous work and if you write an ending figure and THEN add an intro it will over write your ending figure. Acid needs a good deal more work to be considered a good DAW. Good Luck

Greylow wrote on 8/19/2019, 3:42 PM

Thanks Max! There's so much about the DAW that's simple and intuitive and fun, and then it has this dark side that's nonsensical overly complicated.

Former user wrote on 8/21/2019, 6:25 PM

Thanks Max! There's so much about the DAW that's simple and intuitive and fun, and then it has this dark side that's nonsensical overly complicated.


There's nothing complicated about ACID, because it's one of the simplest DAWs on the market.

It was designed to be extremely niche, and that ended up working against it. DAWs that started off more generalist grew to become pretty good at Loop-Based Music Production. There is not much reason to use ACID over Cakewalk by BandLab ($0) for this type of music, but Cakewalk will also allow you to do well in all those other disciplines that ACID simply doesn't function well... Heavy MIDI and Composition work, Film Post, and working with Audio from Recorded Instruments (or doing a Podcast, etc.), for example.

It's pretty simply, compared to other DAWs. It has like 1/4th the feature set of Cakewalk.

Most other popular DAWs have totally encroached on ACID Pro's niche, but ACID has done little to nothing to move into those other areas. That has largely obsoleted it (most other DAWs support ACIDized Loops, flawlessly, out of the box).

 

mjn wrote on 8/22/2019, 11:17 AM

I do my basic composition in ACID 7 because it's so easy to get started that way. At a certain point I export the audio and pick it up in Cakewalk. Been working that way for years. Sometimes I'll even export a stereo submix from Cakewalk back into ACID 7 just to build a part using horn section loops or whatever, because of the ease of use.