Sony Acid Music Studio 5 review

Acid has received four glowing reviews in Computer Buyer since its launch six years ago.

While other music production software mimics the layout of a real recording studio - and the bewildering array of controls that go with it - Acid has its own way of doing things. The result is a program that lets both beginners and experienced computer musicians get on with making music.

Plug in a microphone, press record and Acid automatically creates a new track for your recording. Drag an audio sample on to the timeline, and the program will time-stretch it to fit the tempo of your track. Other functions such as looping, volume curves and pitch changes are just as easy to use. Even complicated sound mangling is a simple affair, thanks to controls that are quick to navigate and an ingenious multi-purpose cursor tool that adapts automatically to a variety of jobs.

Acid's talent for producing weird, chopped-up sounds is also better than ever in version 5, thanks to an Event Reverse function and a Chopper editing tool for working with short snippets of loops. Its controls aren't without their weaknesses, though: the mixing tools are fairly basic, especially by today's standards. Apart from the addition of a master track for creating fade-outs they have remained untouched since version 3.

Tweaks to the program's controls aside, the exciting new feature of Acid 5 is MIDI editing. Although previous versions could handle MIDI for playing synthesiser sounds with a MIDI keyboard, a complete lack of MIDI editing made this feature pretty much redundant. Sony has tried to remedy this in version 5 by adding a piano roll-style MIDI editor and basic functions such as 'quantize' for locking performances to the tempo grid. The quantise feature now supports tempos other than the standard 4/4, and a new metronome function helps you play your MIDI performances in time.

The new MIDI-editing functions are fairly primitive, but they're good enough. Sadly, the same can't be said for the built-in MIDI synth, which produces the noises for your MIDI performances. The sounds aren't exactly terrible, but they're not going to send tingles down anyone's spine. You can load alternative sound banks, but we don't know of any high-quality banks that use the DLS format employed here. Other formats (namely VSTi and DXi) would have been much better, as there are plenty of good examples of these available for free on the Web.

These limitations might have been acceptable if you could spice up the MIDI sounds with some effects, but you can't use the limited range of enhancements on offer with MIDI tracks. Most frustrating is that, with no support for special ASIO sound card drivers, there's a significant delay between hitting a MIDI key and hearing the resulting synth note, which makes recording MIDI performances tricky.

MIDI editing, even in the basic form it takes here, should have given Acid a new lease of life, finally allowing you to add your own melodies and basslines to the loop-based compositions it handles so well. Unfortunately, the basic synthesiser makes MIDI tracks sound second-rate next to the loop-based tracks. Sony may have felt that it had to keep something back for its flagship Acid Pro software (which costs £300 and supports plug-in instruments and effects), but Cubasis 5, Cubase SE and Cakewalk Home Studio all compete with Acid Music Studio on price and, thanks to plug-in support, can produce much better results. Acid is still a fun, fast musical sketchpad, but if you're serious about making your compositions sound as good as possible, it isn't the best choice for producing finished mixes.