Article

Registration Woes

When ACID 4.0 is run for the first time, the package attempts to connect to the registration server. If your machine is not connected to the Internet, you'll receive an annoying error message stating that the application cannot continue. Since no contact info is displayed, the software essentially becomes unusable. Unfortunately, copy protection schemes like this are becoming commonplace; if you register with your serial number info, everything is fine, if Sony detects that 300 people are trying to use the same serial number, the software will not be activated. The rub is that the software box does not list an Internet connection as a system requirement. To be as complete as possible, I decided to call Sony to make sure that I had not missed an option for non-Internet costomers.

After referring to the manual for a phone number, I found a section on registration assistance. Like most companies these days, users are first directed towards the website for support before phone numbers are listed. For people calling from within the US, Canada and Virgin Islands, Sony can be reached at 1-800-577-6642 during normal business hours between 9 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. in the morning and 12:30 p.m. - 5 p.m. in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. These numbers are listed under Central Time. Excellent - I was calling at 11:20 a.m. Central Time. Unfortunately, the staff was unavailable and the message directed me "to call back at the right time". Hmmm... it seemed like the right time to me. Perhaps they took an early lunch. Regardless, this was getting me nowhere, so I threw in the towel, deciding to continue using my Internet connection to register the software - but be warned: if you don't have an Internet connection, you might not be able to register or possibly even use this suite.

Real "Demo" Music

A screen that resembles Sonic Foundry's SoundForge welcomes you when Acid 4.0 is first fired up. Now I KNOW that Sonic Foundry developed ACID 4.0. This bolstered my hopes - perhaps this new version will be good after all.

When Acid 4.0 launches, they made a wonderful choice in what is shown; using a mixing keyboard from the 1980s, they show a simple demo. The question is, will this be the only music that comes out of ACID 4.0? Here is the "demo song" that I made by choosing "Render As..." from the file menu. This demo song is in MP3 format and has been encoded 65 killabytes per second (Kbps) with a 22,050 HertZ (Hz) sampling rate. The term MP3 refers to the the Motion Picture Expert Group's lossy compression scheme for compressing video and audio data into smaller pieces. MP3 refers to the MPEG-1 layer 3 audio compression technology that has become a very popular for the compression of digitial audio for the Internet. Killobits per second (Kbps) refers to how many thousands of bits per second the data is made up of (more bits equals higher quality) while HertZ (Hz), where one Hz is equal to one cycle per round, is the frequency of electrical vibrations (cycles) per second (again, a higher number denotes a higher quality encoding.) While this demo song does have good quality, it's size is 847 KB, which is a little on the large size. Here is the same demo song encoded to 20 Kbps with a 11,025 Hz sampling rate, in mono format.

More Registration

While "rendering" the demo to MP3 format for this article, I noticed a little anoyance. Namely, the MP3 settings screen had a ticker stating that the number of evaluation encodes remaining was 17. What? I thought this was a full version! It seems you not only have to register to use Acid 4.0, but you have to register the MP3 portion of the software as well. When clicking the "Register" button to enable unlimited MP3 encoding, a dialog is displayed with Sonic Foundry's branding on it. It seems that Sony hasn't put "Screenblast" on everything... yet.

The nasty thing about this registration is that it requires your first and last name and a valid email address. I hate this - most likely they will use this information to send me some "marketing material". The good news is, you can put any information you want in there. I used "First" and "Last" and then a bogus email address at sonicfoundry.com. On the second page, which asks for an address, company name and such, I left everything blank. A little note here: when using a bogus address, use the company's domain name in your address so they will know that the address is false and some innocent person won't start getting spam becuase you used their domain name instead.

Getting Into It

Playing with the Demo is actually a little intimidating. It is clear that there are multiple tracks of music and that they all have a matched tempo. I decided to tackle this thing by starting with a new document. There is a wonderful little "Show Me How" button in the toolbar that makes this simple.

Pushing the "Show Me How" button brings up a list of tutorials, which are all very good. This will most certainly get you going quickly. The tutorials use the currently opened file as the example file and they work best if you have a file with some tracks in it. Open the demo file named "Magic.acid-zip". The tutorial steps you through all of the parts of the screen by encircling them with a pulsing yellow-orange box accompanied by a descriptor. This is very effective for making you aware of what things are called. ("An Overview of Screenblast ACID" tutorial: screenshot 1, 2)

The Beatmapper

In it's basic form, the Beatmapper allows you to take any audio file and add tempo information. Once your file has tempo information, you can have ACID match the tempo of your file to the tempos of other files. This is akin to having music that can dynamically mesh with other music - a very powerful feature for this type of software. While I don't consider myself a music expert, I was able to easily work with the GeekSpeak theme music with some very dramatic results.

The result is a 12-second clip that shows the amazing versatility and power of Beatmapper. Here is my sample clip as a 556 KB file encoded at 128 KBps with a 44,100 Hz sample rate and here is a smaller 88 KB version encoded at 20 Kbps with a 11,025 Hz sample rate. Keen-eared souls will notice that the tempo of the newly mixed theme music does not match up perfectly with the other beats. This is because I used the default settings of Beatmapper. If you are good with your ear and have some time, you should be able to make it perfect.

How Easy

With the Beatmapper and a little time, anyone can whip out a few tracks. Keep in mind that I'm not a musician, but it really is that simple, and even without skills, the features and power of ACID 4.0 will ensure that your music doe not sound simple.

Of course, I had to orchestrate a larger piece. For the curious, here is my 20-min stab at music (and here it is at lower bandwidth).

I highly recommend this product. It's a blast to play with, and with the added benefit of SoundForge, you really can't go wrong.