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Acid is not, and is not intended to be, a standard multitrack audio environment. Unlike Pro Tools or Cool Edit Pro or even digital audio sequencers, Acid is completely focused on building music from loops. You can't do much in Acid that you couldn't also do in one of these other environments, but if you find yourself making music out of looping audio, you won't find an easier, faster, or more fun program in which to do it. And Acid does offer enough peripheral features to make it flexible. It isn't perfect, but it is very impressive, and it could as easily find a place with a complete novice as with a hardcore professional. Essentially, this is a product you probably didn't know you needed, but that once you've tried, you won't give up. USING ACID. Acid isn't so much about composing or even editing as it is about assembly. It accepts sound files of three basic types (in several formats) - loops, one-shots, and disk-based and gives you a set of specialized tools with which to piece them together. Loops and one-shots tend to be short sounds loaded in RAM (Acid provides a RAM monitor so you'll know when you've filled available memory). The main difference between them is that one-shots don't loop - they tend to be crash cymbals, drum hits, vocal snippets, and so on. Disk-based files are often larger files that Acid can get off disk as the project plays. So you might build a rhythm track out of a bunch of drum and bass loops, then load in (or record) a long vocal track to play along with it. That file would be a disk-based stream by default. If for some reason you wanted to load it into RAM, and had enough available, you could override the default settings to do just that.
The program presents a screen split into three adjustable viewing panes: the Track View, the Track List, and a multifunction section that can be set to show an Explorer, an Edit Window, a Mixer, or Effects plug-in pages. The primary pane is the Track View - this is where you put together loops, draw automation curves ("envelopes" in Acid parlance), drop markers, and so on. Though this...