Acid Pro 10

[Larry Shelby]

Acid Pro 10 is $99

https://www.magix.com/us/music/acid/acid-pro/

Upgrade is $79

[aidan o driscoll]

I have ACID Pro 8 and up to Acid Studio 11. Its installed bt not really used.

Had a quick look tonight. It does have the audio and midi tracks etc. Pretty much a regular DAW. But Why would one use it, over Cakewalk for example? What would it do better? whats its USP?

Edited January 31, 2021 by aidan o driscoll

[Larry Shelby]

18 minutes ago, aidan o driscoll said:

I have ACID Pro 8 and up to Acid Studio 11. Its installed bt not really used.

Had a quick look tonight. It does have the audio and midi tracks etc. Pretty much a regular DAW. But Why would one use it, over Cakewalk for example? What would it do better? whats its USP?

Nothing really if you already have one of the big boys...except for maybe Acidized Loops etc...or just
for snitz and jiggles I guess...

[abacab]

I thought ACID was cool when it first came out. Long time ago.

But I eventually got bored with searching for audio loops. I much prefer MIDI clips. You can easily make them sound any way you want, instead of going into a workflow loop searching for the perfect sounding audio loop... ?

But the funny thing now is you can use Acidized loops right inside Cakewalk. No need to leave home!

Edited January 31, 2021 by abacab

[Matthew Sorrels]

So for reasons I can't really explain I decided I did want to upgrade my ACID Pro Next to ACID Pro 10.  Yeah not a smart idea, but I still am very fond of ACID.  So I bought the upgrade and go to install it.  And it tells me I'm missing the Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (x64).  Which of course is not correct.  Then it tries to install it and then claims it fails.  There are some forum posts about this problem (I guess it's not super common but does happen).  The only advice to fixing this is to uninstall all the Visual C++ runtimes and then try running the installer.  Which of course doesn't work on my workstation.  Then I try running Pro Next, which tells me I there is an update but that installer has the same problem.  So I can't install 10 or even update Next.

So I did some digging.

Their downloadable installer places the actual setup into %USERPROFILE%\Documents\MAGIX Downloads\Installationsmanager and then runs it.  When it starts it makes a directory in your TEMP drive SonyInstall_1 where it sticks the files and works from there (but you can't launch those files directly).  The installer directory has a file setupcfg.xml that has the tests it uses to determine if the three Visual C++ runtimes it needs are installed.  For the first two it looks at registry keys.  But for 2013 it looks for an entry in the Windows Installer Database.  A specific key.  One that isn't guaranteed to actually be present.  Which is why it doesn't work on my computer.  And faking that is kind of difficult (it's not like a registry entry).  And since I can't launch the install from the SonyInstall_1 directory after modifing that .xml file it looked like I was kind of borked.  I sent them a support note (but I don't expect them to be able to fix this).

So here's how I worked around this.  The download installers in the MAGIX Downloads directory take a few command line options, including one for the temporary directory.  I made a dir on my d drive called d:\tmp\magix and ran the downloaded installer with

Quote

ACID_Pro_10.0.4.29_DLV_INT_201029_10-03_10_0_4_29.exe /t:d:\tmp\magix

This puts the SonyInstall_1 folder into my tmp folder.  Then install opens up and asks to pick a  language.  When that's up, I copy the setupcfg.xml file out of the Sony dir and into the directory above it.  I then exit the installer (which deletes the Sony dir).  I modify the setupcfg.xml file to not include the last check for the 2013 runtime but removeing the last section between the <REQUIREMENT> tags (I left the checks for the first two since those pass).

I then wrote a batch file that would constantly copy my modified setupcfg.xml into the SonyInstall_1 directory and started it running.  The idea being as soon as the ACID installer created the install files my batch file would overwrite their extracted file with my fixed version, before they read the file.

Quote

:start
copy "d:\tmp\magix\setupcfg.xml" "d:\tmp\magix\SonyInstall_1\setupcfg.xml"
goto start

I then started the installer with the /t flag while running the batch file.  And sure enough it worked and let the installer work, since it wouldn't check for the 2013 runtime.  Because I do actually have the 2013 runtime installed everything worked just fine.

Might also want to point out that both ACID Pro Next and Pro 10.0 both report you don't have enough disc space if the directory your ACID temporary file is set to use a directory that has more than 2TB of disc space.  But other than that bit of annoyment, at least I was able to get it installed.  And it does look like they changed the one thing I hate about Pro Next, if you double click to add a loop it places one full copy of it in the lane, with 10 it works the old ACID way of just making an empty lane and waiting for you to paint the loop.

I'm posting this on the off chance it might help someone else.  I don't think anyone should have to do this kind of insanity to get software you paid for to run, but if there was a better answer I sure couldn't work it out.

 

 

[aidan o driscoll]

13 hours ago, abacab said:

I thought ACID was cool when it first came out. Long time ago.

But I eventually got bored with searching for audio loops. I much prefer MIDI clips. You can easily make them sound any way you want, instead of going into a workflow loop searching for the perfect sounding audio loop... ?

But the funny thing now is you can use Acidized loops right inside Cakewalk. No need to leave home!

Acid music studio 11 and pro 10 both support MIDI. Just right click and add MIDI Track as is case with CW.

[aidan o driscoll]

@Matthew Sorrels Is there any way to disable ACID from scanning VSTs at startup?

[Matthew Sorrels]

26 minutes ago, aidan o driscoll said:

@Matthew Sorrels Is there any way to disable ACID from scanning VSTs at startup?

Not that I've found.  It's been a long running issue with them.  They have improved the scanner a bit for Next and 10 (unlike 8 and 9 where it was really bad).  And 10 now seems to have some crazy extra scanning I've not seen before once the UI opens.  Usually the only way to work around that kind of scanning is to create a specific for the app VST folder, with only the plugins you want.  So it can scan a much smaller set.  But I'm not sure I recommend anyone do that (I think there is a commercial product that sets up those kind of directories for you but I can't remember the name).