Acid Pro 8 - first impressions

t-fa wrote on 8/17/2018, 8:30 AM

As an Acid user of several of its previous iterations, I was excited to see the release of Acid Pro 8. I'm less excited now I've used it.

Firstly the colour scheme takes some getting used to, and there are parts I never will. Like 8% of males and 0.5% of females I am colour blind. AP8 isn't colourblind-friendly. These days, developers should automatically look make their products inclusive; this isn't the 1990s.

Second, there don't seem to be many tangible improvements to the previous version. I'd expect it to be more stable, but one crash today doesn't fill me with hope. The lack of sidechaining, a fundamental feature of DAWs, is particularly disappointing.

I'm disappointed to see so few improvements after parting with £100. I'll use it plenty, but it just doesn't feel like a £100 upgrade.

Comments

Matt-Francis wrote on 8/17/2018, 10:39 AM

As an Acid user of several of its previous iterations, I was excited to see the release of Acid Pro 8. I'm less excited now I've used it.

Firstly the colour scheme takes some getting used to, and there are parts I never will. Like 8% of males and 0.5% of females I am colour blind. AP8 isn't colourblind-friendly. These days, developers should automatically look make their products inclusive; this isn't the 1990s.

Second, there don't seem to be many tangible improvements to the previous version. I'd expect it to be more stable, but one crash today doesn't fill me with hope. The lack of sidechaining, a fundamental feature of DAWs, is particularly disappointing.

I'm disappointed to see so few improvements after parting with £100. I'll use it plenty, but it just doesn't feel like a £100 upgrade.

Welcome to the Disappointed Club. Seems the developers and customer relations have gone AWOL.

sheppo wrote on 8/17/2018, 6:20 PM

Hi @t-fa

On the colour-blind issue. This is a good point, and one I'll raise with the development teams. They have listened to concerns about colour customisation in the past, but as yet we have not seen what the outcome of that dialog is. I'd expect the options and UX consistencies we have in Vegas to be brought in to Acid - but this is just my personal expectation.

It is, however, possible to edit the colours for things such as tracks, envelopes, markers, etc, as well as their saturation, so this may alleviate your issues with the glaring or clashing colours. You can find these settings in Options -> Preferences -> Display

As for bugs / crashes. Yeah, they're annoying. Personal experiences vary. Personally my own experiences are that the latest x64 bit version is significantly more stable than Acid Pro 7 ever was. If all goes well there should be an update out soon which fixes some more of bigger bugs and crashes.

mellotronworker wrote on 8/19/2018, 2:19 AM

Hi @t-fa

Personally my own experiences are that the latest x64 bit version is significantly more stable than Acid Pro 7 ever was.

Personally, my own experiences are that Acid 8.x 32/64 is still in a pre-release mode and that we are all being used as unpaid beta testers. Actually, strike that. I paid an upgrade fee to do this. Some of the issues are so major that I am having to return to Sony x32 to get anything done. Here are a few of the better ones.

* No out-of-the-box support for 32 bit VSTs with the x64 version - that's an egregious oversight.

* The sheer number of crashes I am having with x64 is staggering. I just had one about five mins ago when I was *renaming a track*. I mean...how simple can that possibly be?

* Yes, the colour scheme. It stinks. It looks garish and wearing on the eyes. You HAVE to at least give us a choice as to what we have to look at.

* By far the worst is the number of paid VST instruments I have here which have not only 'forgotten' their registration details, but which appear to be unusable because Acid 8.x (both versions) never start them up in anything but an unregistered mode. (Philharmonia and Omnisphere are two examples) These are expensive and are both now rendered utterly useless for anything I want to do.

Thanks to this 'upgrade' I have made almost no progress in any projects I had planned and am now suffering from constant worries about what will work and what won't and when Acid will simply vanish off the screen without warning. That all translates to *no music* and an aversion to even try to start anything because of poor past experiences.

sheppo wrote on 8/20/2018, 1:40 AM

Acid Pro 8, either 32bit or 64bit is not on Spectrasonic's list of supported DAWs, if I owned this product the first thing I would be doing is reaching out to them to see if there are known issues or workarounds to resolve compatibility - as their knowledge base has quite a few other DAWs listed with support caveats / workarounds.

supported DAWs - https://www.spectrasonics.net/support/charts/host_chart_windows.html

authorisation issues - https://www.spectrasonics.net/support/knowledgebase_view_topic.php?id=600&categoryID=84

Without wanting to go round in circles. cross-architecture VST support is a common problem facing every DAW. If you can name a DAW that doesn't require you to install jBridge it is almost certainly because their developers have hit this issue in the past and integrated jBridge (or their own solution that does the exact same thing) at the DAW level. jBridge integration is coming to AP8 in a later patch. In the meantime your options are 1) install 64bit VSTs, 2) install jBridge yourself 3) use 32bit Acid Pro 8