Does Acid Music Studio 11 x64 support x64 VST plug ins from Amplitube for virtual amps and cabs?

It should support x64 plugins however, beware that it is not a stable DAW. If you haven't bought it yet, I would download the trial to see if it works for you. Many users out there have reported numerous issues including problems with VST plugins not holding their state when switched back and forth. Good luck

Any recommended alternatives?

Thanks!

Sorry for late reply. Forgot I had commented here. As Acid pro is a unique DAW, so there is nothing that is remotely like it but alternatives are many. In my case, I am getting it all done in Studio One. However, this does not mean I am not waiting for a stable Acid Pro version but until that happens, I am getting used to Studio One as my main tool.

Sorry for late reply. Forgot I had commented here. As Acid pro is a unique DAW, so there is nothing that is remotely like it but alternatives are many. In my case, I am getting it all done in Studio One. However, this does not mean I am not waiting for a stable Acid Pro version but until that happens, I am getting used to Studio One as my main tool.

With Cakewalk being a thing, and how easy it is to get access to software aimed at the same market as ACID Pro (FL Studio, Maschine 2, MPC 2)... I'm surprised so many people are masochistically trudging through these chronic issues.

MAGIX had tough talk when they acquired these products, but I think the jury has returned a verdict. They really are no different than Sony. Probably worse, but honestly this was 100% foreseeable considering they do have quite a long history with other products.

Pray for ACID Pro 11 to be something unignorable.

 

MAGIX had tough talk when they acquired these products, but I think the jury has returned a verdict. They really are no different than Sony. Probably worse, but honestly this was 100% foreseeable considering they do have quite a long history with other products.

Pray for ACID Pro 11 to be something unignorable.

Actually, Tren, this is something I do agree with you on. Magix is definitely worse when it comes to that. At least with Sony, they successfully advanced the program from 4 all the way into 7 before taking a crap all over it.

With Cakewalk being a thing, and how easy it is to get access to software aimed at the same market as ACID Pro (FL Studio, Maschine 2, MPC 2)... I'm surprised so many people are masochistically trudging through these chronic issues.

Many have done that. However, once you invest time on learning a DAW there tends to be a lot of frustrations when attempting to move to another. It's not that the other DAW is unable to do those things, the problem is that it does it differently and the frustrations start to build up when a bunch of quick and easy tasks now become, "Ok, how do i do that same task in DAW X?" where this often turns into a 15-20 minute break in your workflow and those breaks start to add up and become major frustrations.

For myself personally, I use Vegas Pro where Acid Pro and Vegas have a 90% common user interface so it doesn't take me much thought when working in AP.

I also keep Reaper installed on the same system and slowly but surely am becoming more and more familiar with doing the same things in Reaper. Acid definitely doesn't seem very robust handling different VSTs like Reaper where I often find myself firing up Reaper just to confirm....Is there something wrong with this particular plugin or is it just Acid Pro choking on it for some unknown reason?. 99% of the time the same plugin works fine in Reaper.

Ran into some prime examples this past week. I purchased Toontrack's Superior Drummer. Installed it on my system. fired up Acid, and Acid showed it in it's "Failed" to load plugin's category folder. Fired up Reaper, it worked fine. Here's what I discovered. Superior Drummer as well as EZDrummer install the plugin into my VST3x64 defined folder like every other plugin installer. The thing that I noticed different was that Superior drummer installs the plugin with a .DLL file extension instead of the typical .VST3 file extension. For sh*ts and giggles, I decided to copy that .DLL file into my VST2x64 folder and sure as sh*t, then Acid recognized it properly and it functioned fine in Acid. Reaper obviously didn't care if the file had a .DLL or .VST3 file extension or that it was in my VST3x64 folder, it just identified it as a plugin and it just worked. Acid must have saw it had a .DLL file extension and decided....that's not what I'm expecting, so just throw it in the sh*t pile of non functioning plugins category.

Additionally, I moved Superior Drumme'sr sound file library to another hard drive. When you do that, you go into the Superior drummer plugin settings and tell it where the location of the library is now located. Attempted to do that working inside of Acid, clicked on the "assign new path" button in Superior Drummer and nothing happened. Did the same thing in Reaper and a pop up window appeared where I could then assign the new location.

It's pretty obvious to me that Magix doesn't do much plugin compatibility testing and the 3rd party developers likely don't as well since Acid Pro has become so irrelevant in the DAW community. Hoping Acid will some how become more robust in future versions working with 3rd party VST plugins seems like futile hope to me at this point.

 

It's pretty obvious to me that Magix doesn't do much plugin compatibility testing and the 3rd party developers likely don't as well since Acid Pro has become so irrelevant in the DAW community. Hoping Acid will some how become more robust in future versions working with 3rd party VST plugins seems like futile hope to me at this point.

RednRoll, your whole text was well put, but honestly, I don't think Magix is doing anything at all. Since the last "worthwhile" update by Magix......Steinberg, Presonus, Ableton..all have already put out successful updates/upgrades. Presonus just sent out another update a couple of days ago with more bug fixes. Shows how much they care. I have tested out contacting support from others and all were good except for Steinberg being slow to respond. But in Magix's case, no replies at all. Almost as if they don't even want to talk about Acid Pro anymore. I used to be pretty active here helping others. After noticing so, Magix contacted me and I gave them a list of issues to work on. That was months ago. I never heard back from them. The conversation was almost as if they had very little knowledge of what Acid Pro actually does. It was clear that these developers have never used this DAW. So that explains why they are having such hard time figuring this out. The rest, depends on time and maybe a miracle that Magix might actually come back with a robust update and prove the handful of us wrong. But so much time has passed, I don't think anyone at their office is even looking at this awesome DAW. Sad.

With Cakewalk being a thing, and how easy it is to get access to software aimed at the same market as ACID Pro (FL Studio, Maschine 2, MPC 2)... I'm surprised so many people are masochistically trudging through these chronic issues.

Many have done that. However, once you invest time on learning a DAW there tends to be a lot of frustrations when attempting to move to another. It's not that the other DAW is unable to do those things, the problem is that it does it differently and the frustrations start to build up when a bunch of quick and easy tasks now become, "Ok, how do i do that same task in DAW X?" where this often turns into a 15-20 minute break in your workflow and those breaks start to add up and become major frustrations.

For myself personally, I use Vegas Pro where Acid Pro and Vegas have a 90% common user interface so it doesn't take me much thought when working in AP.

I also keep Reaper installed on the same system and slowly but surely am becoming more and more familiar with doing the same things in Reaper. Acid definitely doesn't seem very robust handling different VSTs like Reaper where I often find myself firing up Reaper just to confirm....Is there something wrong with this particular plugin or is it just Acid Pro choking on it for some unknown reason?. 99% of the time the same plugin works fine in Reaper.

Ran into some prime examples this past week. I purchased Toontrack's Superior Drummer. Installed it on my system. fired up Acid, and Acid showed it in it's "Failed" to load plugin's category folder. Fired up Reaper, it worked fine. Here's what I discovered. Superior Drummer as well as EZDrummer install the plugin into my VST3x64 defined folder like every other plugin installer. The thing that I noticed different was that Superior drummer installs the plugin with a .DLL file extension instead of the typical .VST3 file extension. For sh*ts and giggles, I decided to copy that .DLL file into my VST2x64 folder and sure as sh*t, then Acid recognized it properly and it functioned fine in Acid. Reaper obviously didn't care if the file had a .DLL or .VST3 file extension or that it was in my VST3x64 folder, it just identified it as a plugin and it just worked. Acid must have saw it had a .DLL file extension and decided....that's not what I'm expecting, so just throw it in the sh*t pile of non functioning plugins category.

Additionally, I moved Superior Drumme'sr sound file library to another hard drive. When you do that, you go into the Superior drummer plugin settings and tell it where the location of the library is now located. Attempted to do that working inside of Acid, clicked on the "assign new path" button in Superior Drummer and nothing happened. Did the same thing in Reaper and a pop up window appeared where I could then assign the new location.

It's pretty obvious to me that Magix doesn't do much plugin compatibility testing and the 3rd party developers likely don't as well since Acid Pro has become so irrelevant in the DAW community. Hoping Acid will some how become more robust in future versions working with 3rd party VST plugins seems like futile hope to me at this point.

Some plug-ins install duplicates. Output Movement is one example. It installs a duplicate VST3 file in the VST2 directory. However, most DAWs will read that as VST3 and disable the duplicate or skip scanning it altogether.

You can throw VST2 and VST3 in thte same non-system/default folder and set your DAW to scan them. It will scan fine. Those folders exist only for organizational purposes on your system. They have no bearing, whatsoever, on what the DAW expects to see there. The DAW loads a plug-in as VST 2 or 3 based on the plug-in and the information that it provides when it is queried by the VST scanner. You don't even have to install anything in Common Files\VST3 or Steinberg\VstPlugin. You can put everything together in F:\Lol Some Plug-ins Go Here\ and it the DAW should scan all of them without issue.

The DLLs that fail are support DLLs, often. iZotope has a lot of those that get installed into the VST 2/3 folders, but DAWs imply fail the scan and move on. It's not a big deal.

MAGIX's VST support has been problematic since ever. This is a problem people face not only in ACID, but also in Samplitude and other products. Sound Forge Pro 12 basically never loads the TRackS 5 VST3 plug-ins, for example, and I'm not really going to upgrade for a bug fix :-P

MAGIX Products are practically the only reason why I even bothered to install VST2 plug-ins for products that provide VST3 versions.

As for people being put off by learning curve. This is why you have to have good planning and forsight. I always make sure I maintain proficiency with at least one other DAW. I don't expect myself to be a master on it, but I expect myself to be able to sit at it and get work done with fairly decent efficiency. This way, if the DAW I'm using isn't developing quickly enough, becomes too buggy, falls out of support of an OS update I cannot pass up, etc. I can simply drop it and move over to the other one.

I think this is more than worth it. I'd rather switch and be content, than sit in agony dealing with issues because I was too short-sighted to develop and maintain some platform flexibility.

For myself personally. I took an extended break from doing any music production. Been working in Vegas. Recently decided to get back into music creation, so needed something with Midi, and VSTi support.

I've mostly been using Acid in setting it up for the past couple months. Installing plugins, trying them out, organizing them in the plugin manager according to categories, customizing the UI, external controller setup, etc. Trying to get my system to a point where I just need to fire it up and I'm ready to get to work. Throughout that entire process, I've been stumbling through problems.

In regards to how VST plugins and the folders they go in, Yes that is suppose to be how they work. However, I ran into multiple scenarios in Acid where it didn't work that way. All Toontrack plugins are only a single VSTi3 plugin which installs a single .DLL file in the default VST3x64 folder. None of them work in Acid after initial install. See here where others have had the same problem and I provided them the solution I found.

https://www.magix.info/us/forum/vst-instruments-missing--1274832/

While I've been setting up Acid, I have also now started to do the same with Reaper. If I could have Reaper's functions, stability, with Acid's User Interface and simplicity of customizing it, I would be as happy as a pig in mud. However, I am now digging more into Reaper's theming and customization. I will admit it's not the simplest thing to do and out of the box it's not simple to use, but fully customizing it is within Reaper's capability and that includes underneath the surface as well. So it's not just a skin laying on top type of customization. That's just the more simpler customization which can be done.

Anyways, I'm currently working on a custom theme for Reaper which will eventually make it much simpler to use coming from a background experience of using Acid Pro and Vegas.

I have quite a few more things to do, but here's how it's currently looking. Notice I added a custom track freeze pop-up toolbar, it currently pops up when you double click on the track header. All the menus can be customized in Reaper including adding functions, removing, and renaming them. You can further define context aware mouse click actions to work how you prefer.

I'd rather use Samplitude Pro X4 Suite (still obtainable for $149) than deal with REAPER's mess of a GUI.

The issues with REAPER's UX go deeper than you can theme; while theming often results in fundamental changes of UI organization on the surface. That's the big issue with it, and why many people who refuse to use it ignore comments saying "just theme it." 85% of REAPER tutorials on YouTube use themes that look completely different and have surface level organization that is completely different than the stock GUI, which only makes it harder for viewers to utilize that material - particularly newbies. It also puts the UI out of sync with what is displayed in the documentation.

When I tried it, I had to go through the entire menu system and reorganize it, because the defaults are so bad. Some Windows, like the MIDI and Score Editor didn't even ship with usable toolbars. You were expected to build them yourself...

Lastly, I don't personally find it productive to spend so much time turning a DAW I've paid $225+ for (Commercial License) to look and work like another DAW. It is FAR easier to just use the DAW and let yourself acclimate to its operating philosophy.

So much about the REAPER UI has such a blatant disregard for ergonomics or decent design sense. I can't deal with it. I did try it, but I use a DAW to make music; not to pay for the privilege of doing the developer or designer's job for them...

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ACID Pro is fine as a utility DAW. I look at it the same way I view Native Instruments Maschine 2 and Akai MPC 2. Some of the sound pools are nice. It's good at arranging loops to a grid, etc. But, I wouldn't want to do all of my Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing or anything to do with MIDI Composition in ACID. I also wouldn't want to record audio in ACID, as it's missing a good comping workflow (unless something has changed since I've last tried doing that) and is not useful for audio cleanup duritesIt's also missing some of the better dynamics plug-ins you get in DAWs like Samplitude Pro X, Cubase or even Cakewalk by BandLab. So, that will have to be added in (either with freebies, or with commercial products).

Time has passed ACID by, due to it being dormant for almost a decade. Some of the issues with VST would feel a lot less severe if the DAW wasn't already struggling to justify itself in other areas. It's hard to commit to upgrades when the development team communicates practically nothing to the user base. We have no idea what direction the product development is going in.

On top of that, ACID Pro saw really fierce encroachment on its primary niche much earlier than DAWs like FL Studio and Ableton Live - which were allowed to dominate their niches far longer than ACID Pro. The latter two are really ONLY just starting to see "Generalist" DAWs like Logic, Live and Digital Performer target them (Pattern Workflows, Clip Launchers, etc.).

The "Remixing" and "Loop Arranging" craze is over, but the Hip Hop and EDM craze continues on. This has left ACID Pro with a core toolset that is lacking for the type of music people coming into the market (the people who would be most attracted to its now-lower price point) are interested in.

In ACID's case, SONAR had already fucntionally cloned ACID Pro within itself a decade ago (Loop Construction, Audio Snap, ACID and REX2 Support, Integration of better Time Stretching Algos, Matrix View, etc.). That is probably why Sony stopped development. They couldn't develop fast enough to compete. Keep in mind, this was during a time when ACID Pro was a $350'ish product, so ditching it and going to SONAR. Lots of people started off arranging loops, and then found themselves in a position where they needed to move to something more robust when their demands grew.

It does seem unfortunate that after MAGIX lowers the price for ACID Pro (significantly - at least initially...), SONAR (now Cakewalk) comes back as a free product with really rapid ongoing development.

Specialist DAWs like Maschine and MPC have leapfrogged it in the Sampling game. And most people these days prefer triggering samples with MIDI (via sampler instruments, which ACID Pro lacks) due to the proliferation (and lower cost) of MIDI and Pad Controllers vs. placing audio clips on the grid individually. Grooveboxes are making a huge comeback for beatmakers, as well (Maschine, MPCs and even some newer devices being developed like the Nektar Aura). None of those have good support for ACID Pro - or any MAGIX DAWs, really.

IMO, MAGIX should offer crossgrade license from ACID Pro to Samplitude Pro X. The two compliment each other well, but at current pricing they really put users in a position where it is often cheaper to jump off to a non-MAGIX product than maintain in the MAGIX "universe."

I get your view when it comes to Reaper. I've just reached the point where I'm tired of half-assed DAW software developments. You speak so highly about Samplitude but have you looked at the latest version product highlights? It fits the current theme of every other product Magix has adopted. They add a few tweak enhancements to existing features and then include a bunch of 3rd party bundled garbage and call it a new release. Seriously, new version highlights were "Redesigned EQs" and "More Cowbell"....literally, more cowbell because they bundled in a bunch of VSTi instruments which included a cowbell with it to make it seem like you're actually getting something new. Oh gee...I'll add that into the mix of the great VSTI's I own from Toontracks and all the 3TB of great Kontakt sample libraries which blow them all out of the water. Vegas Pro and Acid Pro is the exact same development model. Enhance existing features, while including more stuff from other 3rd party developers. The majority of the development additions are not even from Magix at this point and it's not like the products are becoming more robust in that process by any stretch of the imagination.

With Reaper, Yes I've called their baby ugly on their forums in regards to it's user interface and it's ugly and convoluted mile long menu list of menu items. Many Reaper users can't stand me on the Reaper forums for calling their baby ugly LOL! However, what I can say on a positive note is it has every feature you could dream of. It is rock solid and runs efficient. Every plugin you throw at it works, and if it doesn't there are hooks in the settings to help it along if it happens to be a troublesome plugin. If there's a bug, it's squashed within 2 weeks along with a bunch of additional features. You're not waiting and wondering for 6 months for the next "update" to come out, the next update will come out within 2 weeks.

Everything can be customized. Yes, it does have a significant learning curve to understand how to perform many of those customization's but so does jumping to a new DAW. At least with Reaper I'm in control of being able to customize it to be more user friendly instead of waiting on some wish and a prayer that will likely never come true from these other corporations who seem to have no clue to what their userbase actually wants to do with the products. You say "many", well there's also many who love Reaper as well. Many more people using Reaper than most of the DAWs you've mentioned. I coined the phrase "Reaper is the Linux" of DAWs. Yes, when you 1st fire it up it can be ugly and intimidating but once you dig into it and understand it's paradigm and make best use of the functionality that's built into it, then you've made your way over that initial barrier and just like Linux, the techy types love it while the OSX and Windows users can't get over the initial out of the gate hurdle of realizing it can be fully customizable for ease of use with rock solid stability and made to look as pretty or ugly as you want.

Google Top 5 DAWs of 2021 and see what consistently comes up in the search results. Cubase, Reaper, Fruity Loops, and Albeton are always on the top of those lists. No one knows Acid and Samplitude even exist any longer.

Enjoy the more cowbell with the latest Samplitude release. LOL!