Sony Acid Pro 5

It seems like years since the last update of Acid Pro. Probably because it has, in fact, been years: I reviewed Acid Pro 4 in the October 2002 Video Systems.

Sonic Foundry released the first version of Acid in 1998, and Sony purchased the company a few years ago. Both companies have been good about doing incremental updates and fine tuning and tweaking features. But it's been a while since a new version of the program has been released. Has it been worth the wait?

Well, if you are expecting ground-breaking developments, that's not quite what Acid Pro 5 offers. In fact, a good part of Acid's charm has been that the basic interface has worked so beautifully, and it's so feature-rich that it has been hard to top the existing versions. However, if you are looking for some cool new features that will make you think about using the program in new ways, then Acid Pro 5 dishes up some interesting surprises. But first, a little history.

It's easy to take Acid for granted now, but when it was released it helped usher in a musical revolution. No other music program made it so effortless to create music. It was a very powerful program that users could grow into. The interface made creating music very easy, so that anyone who spent even a short amount of time with the software could use the included loop collection and produce a sweet soundtrack or song. In some respects, Acid was just like Apple's iPod: it did it first, it did it well, and it did it effortlessly.

But as with the iPod, where there is smoke there is inevitably fiery competition. Just as a glut of portable music players are now available, so are loop software programs. Since Acid came out, just about every popular music creation tool has included Acid-like tools to work with loops (not always as well, though). Many music programs now also support Acid-format WAV files, which have hooks in them for making looping seamless.

In the two years since Acid 4 came out (a very long time in the software industry), the music software landscape has changed dramatically. Music software has branched off beyond musicians. We review music programs in...