You may be right with your assumptions or at least some 32bit code stayed inside Acid which causes some random crashes for different people that are hard to track for magix. Who knows.

Right now the stability should be the priority for Magix. They should also test it more with bigger projects (50+ tracks with fx or kontakt libraries) because Acid tend to choke too fast compared to other software.

They also introduced this annoying bug when you expand loop from the left side. Waveform data starts to float, it's impossible to work this way.

I agree that they probably don't fully understand the strenghts of Acid being a kind of groovebox, importance of flawless turbo fast in/out editing, sections, doing things on the fly.

Adding grouping was a good move but we still cannot fade in/out selected events at the same time (as far as I know Vegas can do it, the same with warping audio events). Sidechaining is buggy during rendering and so on.

Well it is what is is. Just could be a lot more... 

You may be right with your assumptions or at least some 32bit code stayed inside Acid which causes some random crashes for different people that are hard to track for magix. Who knows.

Right now the stability should be the priority for Magix. They should also test it more with bigger projects (50+ tracks with fx or kontakt libraries) because Acid tend to choke too fast compared to other software.

They also introduced this annoying bug when you expand loop from the left side. Waveform data starts to float, it's impossible to work this way.

I agree that they probably don't fully understand the strenghts of Acid being a kind of groovebox, importance of flawless turbo fast in/out editing, sections, doing things on the fly.

Adding grouping was a good move but we still cannot fade in/out selected events at the same time (as far as I know Vegas can do it, the same with warping audio events). Sidechaining is buggy during rendering and so on.

Well it is what is is. Just could be a lot more... 

I concur. If I was the developer, I would have only changed the entire program from 32bit to 64bit first and put the feelers out there regarding it's stability. No color scheme changing, no unnecessary additions that did no good but only made the program unstable. Once one step was successfully completed, then move on to the next. When version 8 came out, a lot of the hype died off immediately. The annoying dark GUI, buggy Magix plugins and crashes and so on. Just made a mess of the whole thing. The reality is, I reverted back to version 7, and things are back to normal. No crashes (of course the GUI starts to jitter when zoomed in but that can be dealt with). You are right about Acid being a goovebox with flawless fast editing. To me, the best part is the explorer, double click a sound and start painting regardless where you are in the arrangement. Keep adding tracks on the fly. To me, the whole "drag and drop" is a drag as available in almost every DAW out there except for Acid. But sad that Magix isn't seeing it's power.

About them not be able to track down crashes, thats not hard to do. I offered myself that I can re-create every issue while they are online, maybe via teamweaver, zoom, what have you. But it doesn't seem as if Magix really cares about this program anymore.

I think it's abundantly clear they have little interest in the program or the clients/users...shame really. They might as well remove the "support" link.

AP is a 32 bit core software. 

I think I've reached the point it's best to cut ties with AP and accept the realization it's been the neglected red headed step child of development for far too long.

Things like this have become too frequent to keep beating myself up over.

Made the decision today, I'm moving to Reaper. I've been on the fence for awhile but just stuck with Acid due to familiarity. However, learned today about all the customization that can be done in Reaper to ease my transition pains.

Want Reaper to look/feel more like Protools, change its clothes and install one of the many user created Protool themes.

Want Reaper to look/feel more like Acid...yep, there's an Acid theme for that. All themes can further be customized with Reaper's built-in theme editor as well. So don't like the light color theme...adjust the color of the light theme to a darker one in the theme editor. Don't like the colors of the waveforms or grid lines? That can all be changed with the theme editor to any colors you prefer.

How about some Logic Pro clothes on Reaper?

What was irritating me the most about Reaper was that a lot of the most common features I use, such as Track Freeze, it took me like 3 mouse clicks along with sorting through a menu list of items to use in Reaper. Learned today about Reaper's Action item menu where essentially any action that can be performed in Reaper can be assigned to a button, which can also be assigned to a KB short-cut Then button assignments can further be setup and organized on custom toolbars which can be docked wherever you like. So while Reaper didn't come by default with a 1 button click Track freeze button on its track header like Acid, I'm able to create a 1 button press button to provide the same ability in Reaper in addition to having 6 different render/freeze options to choose from depending on my needs. So rendering audio or midi virtual synths to a new track is now also a 1 button click in Reaper....try counting the number of steps you need to do that in Acid.

You literally googled "REAPER ACID theme" and linked a screen shot from over a decade ago? Lol.

You do realize that those overview screenshots make this look more viable or better than it actually is. Beneath that first screen, a TON of REAPER cannot be themed. That is the issue people have with it.

Theming REAPER is literally putting lipstick on a pig, and a lot of people cannot be productive if they hate looking at the software on their screen...

Beyond that, I think the time of ACID Pro even hoping to compete with Studio DAWs like REAPER and Cakewalk are over... Never mind the likes of FL Studio and Live.

I also think it's going to be completely supplanted by beat making DAWs like AKAI MPC 2 Software and Native Instruments Maschine 2 - both of which have much better (and faster) workflows than ACID and far superior content.

This DAW cannot survive off of an ever shrinking user base. Either the users need to be willing to pay more so that more R&D can be invested into ACID Pro, or it's going to fade away. There are DAWs that cost less and can make the same music just as easily as ACID Pro. Clinging onto the cheapest price as long as possible is only a fast track to obsoletion - and that's speaking from the vantage point of ACID not yet being beyond that point.

Personally, I think it's too late. I think MAGIX probably gambled on getting a lot more people to jump on board. Now, they're banking on the Sound Pool Store baked into the app to further monetize what users they have left.

No offense, but I would never buy a MAGIX Sound Pool (Royalty-Free, ofc.) when I can get such superior Native Instruments or AKAI Expansions for the same price... or less, in some cases.

Those soundpools are bad, and the browser to accessing them in their DAWs is worse than bad.

Music production industry is very competitive. Being able to put out the best products as quickly as possible is kind of important for us artists :-P

I can throw gigabytes of one-shot (so loaded in to memory) audio clips to Acid without any issues at all (although it is slow at the initial load for large files), and can see the private bytes go way above 4GB. Process explorer shows the acidpro.exe is a 64bit executable.

However, child processes are generated for each VST (audio_plugin_server.exe), and these this executable is 32bit.

Acid is definitely loading and supporting 64bit VSTs, so I wonder what having the audio_plugin_server as a 32bit exe actually means. it looks like it could be a proxy process, so maybe it means nothing. But, potentially large sample library VSTIs is the cause of your out of memory error. If that's the case you could have lots of instances of large VSTs just fine, but not a single instance which is VERY large. e.g. some sample libraries allow to load lots at of instruments in to a single instance.

Reproduced this again, clicked to show details. Seems to be tied to my Midi Input device which is an Akai MPK Mini MKII. This happens on initial launch of Acid Pro, no plugins, project or anything else loaded.

that looks like it might be a generic error that may not related to memory at all. A few other DAWs appear to have people complaining about it in forums, FL studio has a KB article about it. As does Cakewalk.

try looking through those solutions to see if they apply here

You literally googled "REAPER ACID theme" and linked a screen shot from over a decade ago? Lol.

You do realize that those overview screenshots make this look more viable or better than it actually is. Beneath that first screen, a TON of REAPER cannot be themed. That is the issue people have with it.

Theming REAPER is literally putting lipstick on a pig, and a lot of people cannot be productive if they hate looking at the software on their screen...

Beyond that, I think the time of ACID Pro even hoping to compete with Studio DAWs like REAPER and Cakewalk are over... Never mind the likes of FL Studio and Live.

I also think it's going to be completely supplanted by beat making DAWs like AKAI MPC 2 Software and Native Instruments Maschine 2 - both of which have much better (and faster) workflows than ACID and far superior content.

This DAW cannot survive off of an ever shrinking user base. Either the users need to be willing to pay more so that more R&D can be invested into ACID Pro, or it's going to fade away. There are DAWs that cost less and can make the same music just as easily as ACID Pro. Clinging onto the cheapest price as long as possible is only a fast track to obsoletion - and that's speaking from the vantage point of ACID not yet being beyond that point.

Personally, I think it's too late. I think MAGIX probably gambled on getting a lot more people to jump on board. Now, they're banking on the Sound Pool Store baked into the app to further monetize what users they have left.

No offense, but I would never buy a MAGIX Sound Pool (Royalty-Free, ofc.) when I can get such superior Native Instruments or AKAI Expansions for the same price... or less, in some cases.

Those soundpools are bad, and the browser to accessing them in their DAWs is worse than bad.

Music production industry is very competitive. Being able to put out the best products as quickly as possible is kind of important for us artists :-P

You make many valid points about Reaper, now that I've spent more time evaluating and trying to set it up to be more like Acid in ease of use. Reaper does have the ability to further customize under the top layer theme, there's an entire thread discussion on the Reaper forums outlining how to do that.

However, to your point it's not a simple customization. You may find yourself having to learn a scripting language to do so.

My summary take away after trying out multiple items in Reaper and learning how to customize it to my preferences is that while I could likely get Reaper to look, feel, and function very similar to Acid Pro, doing that will require much more effort and time learning how to do those customization's than I'm willing to invest.

My overall take away of Reaper is that it is like the Linux of the DAW world. It's very light, runs very smooth, and efficient, able to do most anything you can imagine and is very highly user customizable. Programmer/tech types love Linux machines over Windows due to those benefits and will defend it without consideration that there are other types of users that just aren't that interested in investing that much time and effort to get it to look/feel more like a Windows machine with all the benefits of a Linux machine, but to them...those types are just lower class citizens than themselves.

in life it's always good to be re-evaluating our choices. Things change.

I've used ableton a fair bit but the generic keyboard and mouse options just made it feel slow and cumbersome to me having come from acid, but there's things ableton can do that acid flat-out cannot. e.g. using an external midi controller to record audio-track automation envelopes. So, for me ableton was in my toolbox to call upon when needed, I 'fixed' the usability issues with autohook scripts, which were always super clunky and broke other parts of the interface. Ultimately I stayed clear of it as a result unless i absolutely couldn't use acid.

But that was 5 years ago, I tried a newer version and some of those annoying issues, and others have now been fixed and now it's more readily used in my toolbox.

now let's just hope these annoyances in acid get solved too! :)