Ever since Acid became a true multi-track DAW it was originally a very welcome addition but with each new release that followed, there was a lot left to be desired.

I was always more of a fan of Vegas Pro over Acid Pro where my hope after audio was pretty much done being at the forefront of Vegas Pro's development Acid would have swiftly packed all the audio feature of Vegas into it and then continue to grow within the DAW development market. Aside from the troubles which are present in Acid, it's just been a major disappointment to me that Acid never really even caught up to Vegas Pro's audio features.

It actually throws me off quite a bit since I do more audio work in Vegas Pro when I go to use Acid Pro. Things like Vegas has way more audio editing capabilities than Acid and even what should be simple things like when I right click on an audio event and select "switches" and only see "Lock and Mute" available in Acid where in Vegas you not only have Lock and mute, but Loop, Invert Phase, and Normalize. Then the additional channel switches when working with Stereo/Mono events which are in Vegas of "Both, Left only, Right only, Combine, and Swap".

It's just such a disappointing that Acid Pro's development can't even keep up with their own Vegas Pro app which hasn't had any audio features added to it since VP6 where VP19 just got released.

I've made my decision where I'm moving to Reaper. Initially, I really didn't like Reaper's user interface but since then I've invested a lot of efforts into getting to know it's customization possibilities. I've spent a good part of the last month creating a Vegas/Acid theme in Reaper where I feel once I get done, it will be the Vegas Pro + Acid Pro I've been wishing for since AP6 and on top of that, it runs very smooth and everything just works.

The ironic thing is that by the time I'm finished customizing Reaper, it will functionally be much closer to Vegas Pro than Acid Pro. Justin Frankel the developer of Reaper was originally a Vegas Pro user, where he seemed to make sure Reaper got all the features of Vegas Pro and a whole lot more. He's recently added Video editing capabilities to Reaper. I'm anticipating it won't be long before I'm ditching Vegas as well on that front.

I'm still trying to get comfortable with Reaper's loop sequencing workflow compared to Acid's. It seems very similar but some things throw me off. I don't do loop sequencing often, so if I don't get comfortable with Reaper's method, I'll just keep Acid Pro around for that purpose and Rewire it to Reaper just to use Acid's loop sequencing. No need for me to update Acid any longer as long as it runs on the current OS I'm using.

Since I simply cannot work in any other DAW as well as Acid Pro, version 7 has been working without a hitch.

You may be interested in following my developments of a Vegas/Acid Pro Reaper theme and customization discussion thread. Would love to hear from others more familiar with Acid to make sure I include all the good stuff. 😉

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2477961#post2477961

Since I simply cannot work in any other DAW as well as Acid Pro, version 7 has been working without a hitch.

You may be interested in following my developments of a Vegas/Acid Pro Reaper theme and customization discussion thread. Would love to hear from others more familiar with Acid to make sure I include all the good stuff. 😉

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2477961#post2477961

 

Thank you, RednRoll for the recommendation. Will look into that. There are 3 things that are still un-matched and I am not sure why no other DAW has them implemented yet. Pick/Paint, Browser on the bottom and double clicking a sound which creates a track automatically. Hoping that Reaper will have similar if not same. I have never used that DAW but lets see. I still have my hopes that Acid will be continued and Magix is taking forever because maybe, just maybe it is being worked on. Thank you, kind sir.

Yes, the pick and paint is definitely on my list and is the the thing I like most when working with loops in Acid. I haven't tried working with loops much in Reaper but what I noticed when I did, was that you can click on an audio event in the track view and when you do that, it becomes your picked paint option, as if you just dipped your paint brush into a can of paint. Then when you place your mouse anywhere in an empty track view area, the mouse automatically turns into a pencil just like Acid and then you paint away. You just need to remember which can you last dipped your paint brush into...LOL!

Therefore, Reaper is actually better in this area IMHO since it's not locked into Acid's one loop per track paradigm but if you prefer that one loop per track then no reason you can't just click on one of the events in the same track and paint away later down the timeline on that same track.

I believe there's a preference settings for the other things you mentioned where I will definitely check into those and ensure they are turned on in my theme by default.

I actually prefer the double click on file in explorer Acid/Vegas preference loads the file into the trimmer in Vegas or chopper in Acid but since Reaper has the trimmer/chopper built right into the explorer view it eliminates the need for that extra step and opens up the door for the behavior you like. So I'll be sure to add that, thanks for the suggestion.

BTW, Reaper has a non expiring demo mode where I believe the only limitation in demo is that it gives you a nag screen reminding you to purchase a license on launch. So you can try out my theme as I progress at no cost. A personal use license is $60 and can be installed on as many PCs as you want, to get rid of that nag screen. You're just not suppose to run more than 2 instances at a time with personal license but it's more of an honor system license system where many pay it to help fund the continuous development. Commercial license is $260 which is intended for Pro recording Studio houses where multiple installs with multiple people will be running the program. No difference in functionality in any of the demo, personal or commercial licenses.

I'll also add, what originally threw me off when trying to do pick and paint in Reaper was I dragged and dropped an Acid loop from the explorer to a track. Then clicked on an empty area in that track. The cursor pencil tool was displayed, so I then went to paint away but it kept drawing empty audio events and it was starting to frustrate me. However, now that I better understand how it works, I guess that makes total sense. Since I clicked my mouse on an empty area in the track view, that now meant my paint brush pencil tool was now empty also. I actually, can see how that can be more useful. In Vegas and Acid there's an insert empty audio event for punch in recording purposes which Reaper has also, but you can also not even have go to the menus and use the pencil tool instead to draw in that empty event. It makes total sense and once you get more comfortable it actually seems like a better way to do things.

Hey Red, once again, thank you for your suggestions. I tried Reaper and just couldn't get used to it. It seems as if they tried copying what Acid does but it still doesn't pull it off for me. I tried the customization but I guess I am really fluid with the whole "double click a sound, and just start painting away on the arrangment without any other clicking/dragging business". I am the rare breed who never got used to the Drag n Drop stuff. Many times I wish I was never introduced to Acid Pro in the first place. I used it for way too long that I just don't like to work in any other environment. In reaper, the grid doesn't change automatically when zoomed in or out. The pencil tool does sort of work but not quite like Acid so I couldn't use it. I just gave up after that.

And it is simply bad luck that acid pro was thrown around within developers who just don't care about it enough. I have S1, Live and Cubase, but they all work under the same principal. Oh well, I guess I will continue using the version that works best for me and maybe someone other than Magix will take over and actually do something with it. But thanks again.

I understand how you feel. I've been using Acid and Vegas since each of their v1.0 initial releases. Vegas even before 1.0 since I was on the initial Vegas beta team. As I stated, keep an eye on my thread....it's currently a work in progress. I'm nowhere even close to being done making changes. That's the great thing about Reaper. If it doesn't do what you want, most everything can be customized. Some of those customizations take more effort than others. As outlined in my discussion, I'm putting in those efforts so others like us won't have to....but you are also welcome to wait and keep complaining on these forums about Acid and see which option ends up being more productive for you. ;)

I actually returned to the forum to read your posts as yours were the only ones interesting to read. I got tired of the ones who didn't actually have a solution but came here to either argue or to aggrevate the "whats left" of the other users. Just like the guy replying to me initially in this post. I mean its a dead product and these people would come here to push away a small clientele Magix has left.

Anyway, I continue to read your posts. Maybe you will crack the code and make Reaper behave just like Acid. If I can find a DAW that does these 3 things in exact same way as Acid, Browser on the bottom, double click a sound and it creates an empty track and you can paint anywhere in the arrangement, I would burn my original Acid Pro CD and say goodbye forever. I would even join you and spread the word that Acid Pro can now be buried.

I will definitely check into those things for you while I plug away at this. Unsure about double clicking in browser to add an empty track but I believe there is an option to double click in browser and have it added to a new track to where your timeline cursor is currently positioned. Hower, there are additional custom options I can look into. Reaper has what they call "actions" which is basically a long list of every feature/function inside of Reaper where you can take each of those actions, combine them, and create a "custom" action. So there is possible way to have it added to the timeline trackview as I described, then delete it off the timeline via creating a 2 step custom action but to the user it would look just like an empty track was added for you to paint away on.

I definitely like to hear how others work in Acid while I'm working on this to make sure there isn't something important I overlooked.

What I really disliked about Reaper was the menus and contextual right click menus. They were this long list of options with very long descriptions. What I later learned is those long list names are the action names and all those long names can be renamed to whatever you're familiar with and all those menus can also be edited and arranged however you like. By default they just seem to throw everything into those menus which makes it feel like you're reading a book everytime you right click on something.

Also everyone of those actions and custom combo actions you create can be assigned to a button of your choice and placed on a toolbar, as well as be assigned to keyboard shortcuts of your choice.

So I totally get why people get turned off by Reaper with their initial impressions when trying it out. However, later as I dug into it further, realized there is a method behind that madness and in a way it's kind of brilliant. 😁

I was kind of laughing to myself when Vegas Pro 19 launched. One of the biggest complaints was some icon button was "too dark and hard to see". And now everyone's waiting for the next developer build to come out with an easier to see button. Was laughing because in Reaper , if that same thing happened then you just go change the button, picking from a long list of available stock buttons which takes 2 seconds or if you're ambitious go create your own or edit the one that is already there in your favorite photo editor.

Guess who created these "Open in Sound Forge" and "Open Copy in Sound Forge" buttons in Reaper?

Muwahahahahahaha! 😆

I was feeling ambitious, took me like 5 minutes in Photoshop to create them. 😉

When I 1st started using Reaper, I was used to Acid and Vegas, Right click, context menu and selecting "Open in Sound Forge".

Did that in Reaper and saw this mess and was like.....WOW! this really stinks! What a freaking mess!

I still need to tame down that menu above, but for the time being I created that custom tool bar and configured Reaper so that when I Shift+Click on the bottom of the audio event, that toolbar pops up where my mouse is located and I just click on those Open in Sound Forge or Open Copy in Sound Forge custom buttons I created. It's actually now easier for me to use than the Vegas and Acid method.

How about another Acid Pro irony while I'm on the subject of Open in Sound Forge?

When you have a smaller section of a longer audio event selected in Acid and then choose to do an "Open in Sound Forge"......that smaller section you had selected in Acid, the selection is suppose to carry over into Sound Forge....so you're working on the exact same section of audio in SF as you were in Acid. Guess where that no longer functions like it is supposed to? Yours truly Acid Pro 10. Guess where it does function properly? In Reaper. It also functions properly in Vegas Pro. And again both Reaper and Vegas have an Open "Copy" in Sound Forge option but which app doesn't? Again Acid Pro doesn't have an Open Copy in Sound Forge option. These kind of small things have just piled up for me that I just have to laugh at what a joke Acid has become and I used to really love this program.

Wow, Red, you are really going deep into this and trying to come up with workarounds for people like me. What I meant by pick paint is actually showed here in this video and it is by Magix. I am sending a screen shot and it is located in Acid Pro's promo page on their main site. See how you can just paint a segment and the pencil will only draw the segment belonging to the dedicated track. Not a mess things up. And loop or one shot will draw from the start and not from somewhere in the middle like it did in Reaper. That was a turn off for me using the pencil tool.

Why Magix is not interacting with the users here is beyond me. Since 2018, I have noticed a long battle between users and moderators. I have noticed how they are quick to jump at a paying customer as their complaints are genuine. If Acid is working for you for your cause, great, doesn't mean it will work for me. If Magix employee interacted here like other companies do, they can save a lot of users and possibly make money by showing respect and interest.

anyway, this is not here or there, I do appreciate what you are doing and hopefully you can come up with a code that mimics Acid Pro in Reaper. I hope Reaper people are noticing this and maybe will hear us out and put Acid Pro options in Reaper. No one wants to sit here and complain.

I'll say, Acid's way is probably somewhere in Reaper.

Let me share with you a back story of what spawned the entire Reaper kick-off development. A long time ago on the Sony forums I was invited by the developers to be part of the Acid, Vegas, Sound Forge and CD Architect beta test teams for multiple developments. There was a new Vegas release on the horizon, it may have been version 5 or 6, I don't remember. Many audio users at that time were chomping at the bit for Sony to add Rewire to Vegas, so they could combine the Midi sequencing and loop sequencing of Acid to Vegas's multi-track audio features. Sony decided they couldn't or wouldn't do it. During beta test times of that particular Vegas release, I had to bite my tongue on the forums of just how neglected the audio feature development had gotten where I already knew early on Vegas wasn't going to get Rewire that everyone had wanted.

When it finally got released, a large portion of the audio users were pissed because it was a wake up realization that Sony was pretty much done supporting the audio side of Vegas. I shared their enthusiasm frustrations in the forum discussions. I didn't violate any forum rules, but due to those discussions Sony decided to kick me off of all those beta teams as well as ban me from their forums. Many users observed this unjust punishment. I was like....ok, you don't want me to be a part of your user forums, I'll create my own Sony app user forum. I did that and about 150 Sony audio users decided to join me on my user forum. One of those user's was Justin Frankel the founding developer of Reaper and he at that exact same time decided to kick off the initial developments of Reaper and was hosting development discussions with all us passionate Sony app users on my forum. Before you knew it, I had 4 of the Sony developers also join that forum and participating discussions. The irony LOL!

Anyways, a big part of those user discussions with Justin at that time was to ensure Reaper would implement the Acid pick and paint exactly how you described and have shown. So I know it worked that way in the past, since we had over 100 users describing to him what they wanted from Acid in that department and he was listening.

What happened over time as Reaper's development grew and so did the userbase, Acid became less and less relevant and more Protools, Cubase, Cakewalk, and Logic Pro users started to adopt Reaper, where their preferences of how they preferred things to function became more and more prevalent in Reaper's development. What Justin seems to have done is make everything configurable through a combination of preference settings and the action item lists I described previously. Many of those action items underneath of the hood of Reaper tucked away under the "Action menu" are a lot of toggle on/off actions, where you can either run that action directly to toggle that preference or assign it to a button as I described.

So what I'm getting at is that what you want is highly likely already in Reaper it just needs to be turned on to function that way in some manner. I haven't checked into or searched for it yet. I know it was discussed at nausea with Justin and the initial userbase on my forum who then migrated to the Reaper forums once Justin got that up and running to ensure the Acid paint feature got into Reaper as you discussed but Justin is a really creative individual and also tried to do things "better" while still providing that same type of workflow but he also later had to accommodate the other larger userbase by adjusting default preference settings and thus likely the reason you see how it works now out of the box without adjusting any preferences or searching through the action menu list.

For myself, I changed careers about 2 years after I launched my forum and was no longer working at recording studios like I had in the past, where I stopped using DAWs all together for an extended period of time to focus on the new career, which means I also lost touch with Reaper's development.....for like the past 10 years LOL! So I'm doing quite a bit of catch up on Reaper at this point.

I'll also add, in my Reaper customization efforts...although the configuring of Acid loop's painting functionality is on my personal tudo list, it currently falls nears the bottom of when I'll get to it. That list has an order which currently looks more like this

1. User interface layout (Acid/Vegas look and feel), 2. Customizing action list toolbars for quick access to Vegas/Acid common features 3. Preference settings adjustments, so out of the box by default works more like Acid and Vegas. 4. Customize all the layouts of the menus and right click contextual menus so the name descriptions and menu layout match Vegas/Acid, instead of that big list yuck. 5. Midi sequencing customizations 6. Acid loop sequencing customizations 7. Create a distribution package which wraps all those items together in one nice easy to install bundle.

Man! I don't think there is ANYONE here that got so close to success of Acid as you did. So you were part of that team? Man, I should have rather paid you! I am still saying this, if you can figure out in Reaper what I am looking for, I am willing to donate to you. We can connect via DM. If you can get me these 3 features working in Reaper, I am even willing to pay for the commercial license. That would solve my 12+ years of torture I went through trying to find that workflow in other DAWs as Sony dropped the ball and now its in no better hands. You will be loved by many if you can figure this out. I am deeply appreciative of you who understands my frustration and are actually willing to put in time writing about this and easing my pain. In all honesty, I spent better part of the evening trying to figure out Reaper once again but I am not very technical. I am just a musician and know Acid Pro like second nature. But thats all I know. Thank you, kind sir.

This is all very interesting, however it leaves me wondering. Does every thread critiquing Acid have to quickly turn in to Rednroll's reaper therapy discussion? Almost every post you make is about reaper. This isn't the Reaper community forum.

> Sony decided to kick me off of all those beta teams as well as ban me from their forums

😅

Red, another thing to note in your quest, when you zoom in acid, the grid changes along with it. No need to change the grid values manually. Thats another plus point for Acid. Reaper and S1 still don't have it. I tried playing around with preferences but can't seem to get it to behave. By the way, I am still on version 7 as that has proved to be the most stable so far. Again, whatever you are doing, it is highly appreciated.

This is all very interesting, however it leaves me wondering. Does every thread critiquing Acid have to quickly turn in to Rednroll's reaper therapy discussion? Almost every post you make is about reaper. This isn't the Reaper community forum.

If you prefer the continuous bitch and moan sessions which are most prevalent on this forum, I can leave them at that.

> Sony decided to kick me off of all those beta teams as well as ban me from their forums

😅

I'm glad out of all the comments I made, you enjoyed that one the most. Funny, how you didn't highlight the part where I mentioned about the 4 Sony developers which joined my user forum afterwards because they were the one's most interested in hearing constructive criticism feedback about the products from their most passionate users, so they could bring their voices to the development table and actually try to improve the products for the better. Something that is definitely lacking in these forums of having any great developer and user interactions.

I'll also give you a hint. The users who actually take the time to make complaints on this forum about Acid are the ones who are most interested and passionate about these products. If Magix took the time to listen to these individuals and actually improve the products, they would also be the ones speaking the loudest in support of the products and thus promoting it on their behalf. That's the part those Sony developers who joined my user forum fully understood.

You also may have missed the part where I outlined Open in Sound Forge does not work properly in Acid. You could probably benefit from more users like myself who actually know how functions were intended to work. Magix inherited this product and something like that makes it pretty obvious they have no one on their staff who are even aware of many of the intended behaviors of Acid's original design or anyone on their beta teams who know the product well enough to be able to point it out to them. Along that same front, Sound Forge is also messed up on that integration. The intent was that you could have both Acid and Sound Forge concurrently running on the same system and bring selected audio back and forth between them without launching a new instance of Sound Forge each time you selected Open Sound Forge in Acid or Vegas. The current behavior under Magix's umbrella is that every time you select Open in Sound Forge from Acid is that it launches a new instance of Sound Forge each time. Do that 10 times and now you have 10 instances of Sound Forge running. Sound Forge some how along the way, lost the intelligence that it was already running on the system and didn't need to launch a new instance, it just needed to open that audio into another window within the Sound Forge which was already running.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the products owned by the same company and the integration between them doesn't even work properly and there doesn't seem to be any users left to be able to point it out to them. So you may want to make yourself more useful and pass these bugs along to your contacts at Magix. You can inform them carrying over the selection works properly in VP18 if they're unsure of that intended design behavior and hopefully they'll be able to figure out a way to not have Sound Forge launch new instances every time you select Open in Sound Forge from Vegas and/or Acid. That's how it worked in the past, so somewhere in that code within Sound Forge it's already present but Magix likely unintentionally broke it along the way.

Oh, and if they fixed some of these things....you likely wouldn't hear me talking so much about Reaper but the fact of the matter is in their current states, many of these products actually went backwards in functionality from when they were owned by Sonic Foundry and Sony.

On the most part, I feel sheppo means well. He's a user like you and me who accepted the unrewarding offer of being a forum moderator. He at least knows Acid well enough to a certain extent. I do feel some of his responses could be better guided by seeking to understand some of these expressed frustrations instead of contradicting them and then once understanding them, passing the finer details of what's really wrong with Acid, along to the program managers he is likely in communications with. That would be more of a win/win for everyone, so I won't hold that negativity against him.

Red, another thing to note in your quest, when you zoom in acid, the grid changes along with it. No need to change the grid values manually. Thats another plus point for Acid. Reaper and S1 still don't have it. I tried playing around with preferences but can't seem to get it to behave. By the way, I am still on version 7 as that has proved to be the most stable so far. Again, whatever you are doing, it is highly appreciated.

There's a lot of great tutorials on Youtube from other users which admittedly, I also need to watch to catch up on Reaper's way of working with loops. Many of them go into the customization options to change the default behaviors and explain Reaper's way and which customizations to consider making if you don't like the default behaviors. If interested you may want to check some of these out as well.

Tutorials For Reaper | Audio Loops in Reaper | Similar to Sony Acid | Drag and Drop | Regions

Kenny Gioia has a great Reaper channel and breaks down most everything on loop production in Reaper with an 11 part series. He often goes into breaking down the available custom option adjustments.

Most of the time after watching some of these tutorials, usually a light bulb goes off in my head where I realize....oh man! That's awesome, I never even realized that.

Essentially, when I get to the loop production customization of my theme, these are the things I'll be watching to best determine how to set Reaper up to function much more like Acid. Reaper saves all these types of custimazation settings in *.ini files which can be easily distributed and edited with a text editor. Unlike Acid which stores them in the registry or some proprietary file format.

@Former user

Hello, Welcome

Please keep your comments respectful when mentioning users or Moderators.

Please refer to Community Rule one.

https://www.magix.info/us/community-rules/

I have removed your post ranting about a Moderator.

As @sheppo has stated this is not a Reaper Community Forum and therefore I am closing this thread.

Stephen

Forum Moderator