ACID Pro vs WavePad

• 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

• Voice recording is our most used function. It is simple and straight forward. We have trained non-technical voice over talent to use it.
• The cleanup tools have saved us from having to go out and rerecord some bad original recordings.
• Being able to cut out sections of recordings and insert a different audio piece is a great time saver.

Read full review

• 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

• WavePad only works with a single audio track. NCH does offer MixPad for multi-track editing. We also use MixPad occasionally to mix background music with voice.

Read full review

• 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

• We are able to work with local voice-over talent and amateurs and that allows us to keep our cost low to our clients.
• WavePad is so inexpensive that is pays for itself on the first project. The Master's edition is less than $100 and the standard edition is less than $50.

Read full review