Review of Acid Music Studio 5 -- Not the Greatest Software

Acid Music Studio 5 is designed as a relatively inexpensive tool to allow users to create loop based music. It bills itself as a recording studio program, but in fact does better for those who want to mess around with pre made loops. If you actually want to record you own music, I would recommend spending a bit more money for a program like Cubase or ProTools, which would be easier to use and would offer a lot more features.

When I opened Acid Music Studio 5 for the first time, I saw a basic timeline, a very few buttons, and an explorer window. Deciding to experiment, I clicked my way through the explorer window, found a song, and dragged it onto the timeline. Up popped a box calling itself the "beatmapper". This looked like a good idea. Rather than using the timeline, it appeared, Acid Studio 5 would let me map out the song based on beats and measures. I told the beatmapper to automatically beatmap the song. After telling the computer where the first downbeat was, it gave me a beatmapped track which, at least originally, seemed good. The computer played me the first bar of the song, its metronome neatly clicking on each beat. I told the Acid Studio 5 that it was right, and told it to proceed. The results were disappointing. Apparently, all the computer had done was to run the metronome throughout the song. After the first five bars, or so, this meant a total trainwreck.

Although the beatmapper worked eventually, each other feature proceeded to provide its own annoyance. It became apparent that Acid Music Studio 5 was designed primarily designed to be used with the included, and rather bad, loops.

Loop based production, for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept, essentially involves building a song based on a few measures of repeating audio. Each individual loop might be used to provide percussion, a baseline, or anything else, for that matter. Such a loop would be repeated a few times for the verse, another a few times for the prechorus, and another a few times for the chorus. A few less cyclical features would be added, and a vocal lone would be sung over the top. Acid Studio 5 seems to be great for building songs this way, but only if you want to use the included (and crappy) loops. Trying to make my own loop took forever, did not go well, and revealed to me that the program had not been designed for that purpose.

Although I did eventually succeed in putting together a simple song with Acid Music Studio 5, I had a hard time of it, and found that I was limited in what I could do. I have to say that I prefer my friends' copy of Cubase, another recording program.