That means that ACID takes a unique approach even in its most recent Sony release when it comes to features like keyframes and automation, one that it has inherited from the video world. I always admired the unique shared lineage of the Sound Forge line in audio and video media. I’m embarrassed to say most of us didn’t even hear the news.īut the news is a milestone. Sony announced on the 20th of May that they would sell essentially all of their audio and most of their video tools – including flagship editor VEGAS (also a Sound Forge creation) – to MAGIX. And that makes Sound Forge one of the few choices if you want an editor that focuses on editing audio files, from mastering to batch processing – things that DAWs aren’t necessarily focused on doing. Originally Windows-only, Sony brought the software to the Mac just as OS X lost a lot of its own competition in that category.

Sound Forge, for its part, remains a favorite dedicated waveform editor. The evolution of this sort of music software seems a story worth telling.) (Side note: I’d love to look at this history in more detail – and recall someone telling me that Apple even hired away the original creator or one of the original creators of ACID. ACID cleared the way both for Ableton Live and GarageBand. But the 1998 release of ACID (originally awkwardly dubbed ACID pH1) really heralded the arrival of music production workflows built on audio loops. In fact, it was so influential, that it’d be easy for newcomers to music production to overlook.

Big in their dayĪCID wasn’t the first loop-based production tool (Propellerhead and ReCycle deserve a lot of credit there), but it was the tool that made time-stretched, loop-based production into what it is today. There are reasons to reflect on ACID and Sound Forge individually. Now, languishing alongside their stablemate, video editor Vegas, they’re seeing ownership pass from Sony (via its creative software division) to German software house and holding company MAGIX.

Once upon a time, ACID and Sound Forge were each industry-leading software tools, originally developed by Sonic Foundry. It’s the end of an era – but maybe not such a golden era.

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