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by jgh 2986 days ago
Acid never struck me as something particularly widely used. I was big into electronic music production at the time and I started with Acid + Sound Forge but eventually moved on to Reason and later Ableton + Reason. People who were doing a lot of multitrack editing seemed pretty loyal to Cubase (or Pro Tools if they were using Macs) and then Ableton came along and became extremely popular.

Sound Forge is of course in a class of its own.
2 comments
paulie_a 2986 days ago
And let's be honest. That software was so incredibly pirated I assume more people bought WinZip.

Acid was pretty fun to play with. I will outright admit I did not purchase my copy.

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petronic 2986 days ago
One bit of SoFo lore that I was told on my first day: inspecting the metadata on one of the .wavs on win95 would reveal that it was edited using a cracked copy of Sound Forge.

/EVERYONE/ pirated Sound Forge.

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voltagex_ 2985 days ago
Not 95, XP:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041204064837/http://www.pcwelt....

http://web.archive.org/web/20041210045441/http://www.pcwelt....

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cirgue 2986 days ago
My 10th grade high school music class was taught entirely using Acid. Looking back I am 90% certain our teacher pirated it.
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nitrogen 2985 days ago
They had educational discounts, and possibly school support programs. My high school had legit copies and a library of the official loop CDs.
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andromedaworld 2986 days ago
Fair to say fl studio is the PHP equivalent in the DAW world? So much music has been made using it but it is highly frowned upon in the industry and considered to be the noob's tool.
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jgh 2986 days ago
It was at one time (basically the PHP of DAWs) but I've heard it's gotten much much better over the years. Granted I haven't exactly been keeping up with that world so maybe that image has stuck with it.
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shadoxx 2985 days ago
FL Studio 12 user here. It has definitely matured, but the workflow is pretty different from something like Ableton or Bitwig. I use it because it's what I learned to produce with. The Edison plugin that's bundled is worth the cost of licensing alone.

All in all, once you get to a certain level of knowledge around mixing and mastering, the debate over which DAW to use is much like the vim vs emacs debate. As long as you're proficient in the software, the end result will come out looking more or less the same.

I will say Ableton and Bitwig come with a nicer set of default plugins and samples.

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rhizome 2985 days ago
By far the most difficulty I have in making electronic sound stuff anymore is finding a UX I can work with, much less compose quickly. Like in this context, SoundForge was absolutely ruined by Sony, which probably pushed me to CoolEdit Pro, and now Audacity, none of which are as good as SF5(?) was.

It feels similar to how GIMP and Audacity are being ruined with developer-imposed format friction right now.

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