Likelihood to Recommend ACID Pro is great for electronic music, hip hop, and any loop-based music production such as for videogame soundtracks. It is great for audio-forward production, rather than MIDI-forward. If I were running a lot of hardware synthesizers, or even softsynths using MIDI, I would prefer another DAW since they often have better features, for instance in the shuffle department where
Ableton Live has hundreds of shuffles to choose from for MIDI instruments. However, I still prefer time-stretching sound quality in ACID Pro, as well as the lack of audio artifacts in looping. To this day,
Ableton Live has still not entirely figured out how to prevent clicks and pops at the beginning and end of loops, especially lower frequencies like basslines, without shaving an arbitrary amount of time off each side (.5 ms by default), resulting in lessened attack and audio artifacts during cuts. I feel that ACID Pro has a better audio engine for looping, although for many purposes this is not noticeable. Still, I prefer ACID Pro for wave-based (rather than MIDI-based) music that makes extensive use of loops.
Read full review Anchor is a great podcast app for folks just starting out with podcasting or who want some of the technical things to be streamlined and simplified. With the built-in audience of Spotify subscribers, it's also easy to get started with a listening audience. There are easy ways to connect to other Podcast platforms and easy ways to integrate ads if that's something you want to do as a podcaster.
Read full review Pros Audio sequencing: It's great for those who like to work primarily with waveforms, rather than MIDI. Loop-based sequencing: It's perfect for loop-based music. Envelopes: It's quite easy to do things like volume fades, crossfades, and other envelope-based audio manipulation of the waveform. Time-stretch: ACID Pro has nice time-stretch filters. Multitrack nondestructive sequencing: I like the UI for multitrack, and how easy it is to get back to a previous state through undo history, even copying something from a future state and then undoing a number of steps before pasting in the later content. Read full review Easiest way to create podcasts, or in reality any audio files. Have some level of reporting on how many people are accessing the files. The Android app is excellent, feature rich and quick. Different levels of compression to have smaller files. Good audio level support. Read full review Cons MIDI: I don't think it is great for MIDI sequencing. There are much better piano rolls and software step sequencers out there. Built-in effects: ACID Pro has not kept up with competitors like Ableton Live, who licensed Cytomic's Glue Compression for version 9 of their software, an incredible-sounding plugin that would otherwise cost a pretty penny but is now included for free in Live. That being said, I haven't used it but I see they are making strides in this area, with new versions of ACID Pro including third-party licensed effects like Zynpatic STEM MAKER 2 out of the box for free. Live performance: ACID Pro still doesn't hold a candle to Ableton Live in this department. Improvising with loops: Despite recently added features like the ACID Morph Pads, the Chopper, and the revised Beatmapper, which allow MIDI triggering of parts of samples as well as creating new sounds using raw audio as an input, I feel that ACID Pro has a ways to go before they harness the improvisatory power you get with something like Stutter Edit, or the performance features of Ableton Live. Read full review Monetization features are currently present in only a limited number of countries, I look forward to the various monetization features like pre-roll and mid-roll ads to be made available soon in my country India. Add more platforms to its distribution services such as Amazon Music and similar ones so that we would not be required to submit the RSS Feed to platforms manually. Read full review Support Rating ACID Pro was the first loop-based DAW I ever used, and I fell in love with it. I was an avid ACID Pro believer for many years, before making the switch to
Ableton Live as my primary DAW. Even still, I prefer the sound quality of ACID Pro in many cases.
Ableton Live just "sounds" like Ableton, and there are audio artifacts that annoy me. I have been able to work around many of them, but I still have a special place in my arsenal for ACID Pro and use it whenever the chance arises, typically for loop-based wave-heavy music that doesn't need to be performed live and doesn't have a strong reliance on MIDI sequencing.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Due to my history as an audio engineer and having worked at many studios over the years, I've been exposed to a wide range of DAWs from
Pro Tools , Cakewalk, and Nuendo to Reaper, Max/MSP/Jitter, and Processing. (These latter two are not really DAWs, per se, but rather systems that can be used for programming audio production — Reaper has features like this as well.) I point this out simply to say that I have experience with a wide range of DAWs and am fairly agnostic about them. I certainly have preferences. If I'm working with an indie rock band or a singer-songwriter, I like
Pro Tools , since it is an industry-standard. For hip hop or electronic music, I prefer
Ableton Live or ACID Pro, since they make working with loops so much easier, and I believe the sound fidelity is better. I choose ACID Pro specifically for loop-based music which almost entirely comes from waveforms rather than MIDI instruments (real or virtual). I find ACID Pro's MIDI functionality lacking, but the ease of sequencing and working with loops more than makes up for it.
Read full review Anchor is less expensive and, in my opinion, much easier to use than
SoundCloud for podcasting. Anchor makes syndication easy, and their recording and editing interfaces are clean and intuitive.
SoundCloud seemed somewhat cumbersome to use, and I didn't care for its UI. Honestly, they seem better suited for other use cases.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive: Easy to use. Up and running in minutes. Virtually no learning curve, just drag, and drop. Negative: Limited in its improvisatory and live performance. This has not made a negative impact on the business per se, but can be a creative block when you are trying to come up with a music bed or interstitial and want to experiment with mixing and matching different loops. There's no easy way to do this on the fly in ACID Pro, as there is with Ableton Live. Positive: ACID Pro now includes more effects than ever, ameliorating the need to purchase plugins. Read full review Taught us how yo properly organize and schedule our show. Anchor's integration with Spotify allows use of Spotify's wide library. Doesn't play well with outside ad agencies, Makes it difficult to be open to all kinds of ad agencies, thus reducing possible revenue. Read full review ScreenShots