Magix Acquires Sony Creative Software - My Acid Pro Story

Anything about MUSIC but doesn't fit into the forums above.
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

All this news about Magix acquiring Sony Creative Software got me thinkin about my beginnings. What's your Acid Pro story? Here's mine.

Image

This little mom and pop music store I worked at called zZounds which was based in Old Town Chicago sent me to Nashville in 1998 for the Summer NAMM convention and that is where the story really unfolds. I stopped by a demonstration at the Sonic Foundry booth and listened to their sales rep demonstrate the latest version of Sonic Foundry's ACID Pro. We had already sold ACID version 1.0 at zZounds and I of course was amazed at what this program could do simply because there was absolutely nothing else like it and it certainly was a total dream come true. After the demonstration they announced that they were hiring and if interested they were to speak with a representative back stage. I was the first and only person to respond which almost made it seem as though it was meant to be.

I could hardly wait to return home because the meeting went well and my hopes were high. I followed through with every step immediately upon my arrival in Chicago and to no avail received a phone call from Mike Scheibinger at zZounds of all places, how nerve wracking because I was at work but hey! Mike was interested and eager to meet and interview me at the Madison Wisconsin home base.
My experience in Madison was almost dream like. Mike let me stay at his house the night before the interview, not even knowing who I was. It was Mike, his wife Deb, daughter T, and a dog all living in a humble home in Cottage Grove Wisconsin. Everyone was so friendly and generous. I awoke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the wet nose of a dog sniffing my face. Mike drove us to Sonic Foundry and we hung out all day interviewing.

My bus ride back to Chicago was not easy to tolerate as I was completely excited about the possibility of working for such a cool company. One hour into my ride home and my mobile rings. I answer it and it's Sonic Foundry's Human Resources telling me I got the job.

I worked at Sonic Foundry for about two years editing and ACIDizing loops, making demo songs, preparing remix contests for ACIDplanet.com, and scoring advertisements. Some of my most adored accomplishments were helping to develop ACIDplanet.com, scoring and producing the Acid MTV commercial, writing the script and music for the Chicago B96 Acid radio commercial, editing the content and preparing samples for the Beck and Beastie Boys remix contests for ACIDplanet.com, and and demoing products at Peter Gabriel's WOMAD tour in Seattle. Working at Sonic Foundry was such a great experience and I learned so much but it was too good to be true. The company went public and became a huge success until the market crash winter of 2000. This is when 200 hundred employees including myself lost our jobs on Christmas weekend do to company downsizing.

Luckily Mike kept me busy with freelance work. I produced all of the loops for ACID Dj 3.0 which was developed specifically to sell at Best Buy and Computer Discount Warehouse nation wide. I am to this day extremely grateful for this.

Image

I also produced content for the Acid Dj Expander pack. The whole project paid I think around $20,000 for about 45 days worth of work which was my first big paycheck working as a producer. I did it all from my little ass one bedroom apartment on Center Street in Madison WI with nothing but a couple hardware synths and a IBM Thinkpad Pro Pentium laptop. I did however have some decent JBL monitors from when I first bought them in 1990.

Image

Since then I have produced 17 loop packs for Sony Creative Software. Some we never released as physical media.

Image

Post

It's cool to hear about the history, not to mention your nice set of accomplishments :tu:

I never bought Acid, but I did buy Sound Forge 4.0 back in ~96 when I was living in Chicago. Can't remember what store it was but I know it was downtown. (Stupidly?) used student loan money to buy Sound Forge, Finale, an Audiomedia III card and a KM184 in that one purchase. Good times though...

Post

lachrimae wrote:It's cool to hear about the history, not to mention your nice set of accomplishments :tu:

I never bought Acid, but I did buy Sound Forge 4.0 back in ~96 when I was living in Chicago. Can't remember what store it was but I know it was downtown. (Stupidly?) used student loan money to buy Sound Forge, Finale, an Audiomedia III card and a KM184 in that one purchase. Good times though...
Thanks! Times were tough once I took out a college loan to go to Columbia in the summer mainly to use the extra money to live off and pay my bills.
Last edited by djpuzzle on Thu May 26, 2016 7:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Post

Fantastic, djpuzzle - thanks for sharing!

My favorite part:
I did it all from my little ass one bedroom apartment on Center Street in Madison WI with nothing but a couple hardware synths and a IBM Thinkpad Pro Pentium laptop. I did however have some decent JBL monitors from when I first bought them in 1990.

Post

cool story.
I used Acid through v3, had a lot of fun with it.

Post

Image

Here is my old skool virtual machine, these are from the early noughties.
My Dad bought me Pent III and Live! soundcard with MIDI

Here is my most potent microdot:-
https://soundcloud.com/nix808/i-always-live-together

Acieed mashup of Sade

Post

I got into Acid pretty early on. Aside from the automatic loop stretching and tempo fitting, the fact that all loops were loaded into ram meant that it didn't suffer from the same audio track count limitations of disk streaming DAWs. I work in a video product group, and I had my manager buy me a license and a bunch of loop packs for quick and dirty video scoring jobs. One of the ones I remember getting was from Robert Rich, who I was not familiar with at that time. Shortly after, Robert played a show in San Francisco, which I attended. Meanwhile, I was getting really into making my own Acid loops, and I ended up having a few conversations with Mike S. about developing some libraries for Sonic Foundry myself. One of my loop sets ended up as a free download of the week on Acid Planet. It wasn't long into that process that I ran into Robert Rich... I hadn't realized that we lived in the same town! We met for coffee and I quizzed him about how his loop libraries were selling. My big concern was that the library collection was expanding rapidly, and that meant that the sales of each individual pack was plummeting rapidly. We didn't talk numbers, but he pretty much verified that it was indeed the case. I stopped work on my libraries, and I've still never done anything with those sounds. Pretty soon after, I started working with Sonar, and Acid gradually faded into the background. What is really ironic is that, part of my job involving live webcasting, I've been using Sonic Foundry streaming hardware and software on a constant basis for the past ten years!
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

Post

I've been using Acid but years ago I turned to another DAW.
In the Sonic Foundry days, this software was unique ;
after Sony managed things, still there were some improvements,
but not enough.

Sad but true, for today, this software can't beat the competition (or come close).
I would be surprised if this latest "Magix acquisition" would mean any development in the future.

Look at another story:
Fruityloops is quite old, but it was improved,
and today it's 1000 times better, than its early versions.
Unfortunately you can't tell the same bout Acid Pro.

Post

My story began with "Hip Hop E-Jay"....I soon discovered Acid Pro. Next came Orion and I stopped using Acid,but continued to post tracks at "Acid Planet". FL Studio and Tracktion soon followed and eventually Studio One. I always hated the "review for review" of "the Planet" so finally this year I switch to Sound Cloud. My legacy page is still up.http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?songs=52808&T=6125 310 songs 2001-2016.Thank you Acid for introducing me to music production, composing with MIDI and the friends I made from all around the world.

Post

Ha! Lots of great stuff here. Thanks everyone for chiming in. It's cool to see the old versions of SF on your desktop
nix808
and
deastman
I know Robert quite well. Thing is SF stopped paying royalties and started doing buy outs so only I think 3 of the 17 I produced for them are still making royalties today. Some of them are from 2002 so I really only get like $30 every quarter from those but the buy outs were nice for the others. Cool that some of you still use the programs and also the SF streaming service. I remember when they first started that side of the company before Sony bought them out. They took over an additional building next door and set up a whole department for their streaming services. A couple of my friends got jobs there working in that dept.

Post

ACID DJ was my first music program back in Jan '99. Not sure what version it was, only had 8 tracks and my 2nd hand Compaq laptop only had a 500mb harddrive. Didn't get so much done with it. :hihi:

Post

lotus2035 wrote:ACID DJ was my first music program back in Jan '99. Not sure what version it was, only had 8 tracks and my 2nd hand Compaq laptop only had a 500mb harddrive. Didn't get so much done with it. :hihi:
lol yeah funny what we had back then. In '99 it would have been version 2.

Post

The funny thing about working with Sonic Foundry's Mediasite webcast streaming system is that the software UI still looks like an old version of Acid or Vegas.
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

Post

So -

the logical question to ask you guys is this:

pretending that Magix is actually going to do something with the stuff that they bought from Sony (which I see as a completely non-threatening 'transference of ownership' of the ip - development looks to have been dead to any of it for a while, now, including Vegas - since Sony seems to be developing Catalyst, instead)

- What would you like to see happen to particularly Acid/SF/CDA, or are they all dinosaurs at this point, only (sadly) worthy of extinction?

Post

goldenanalog wrote:So -

the logical question to ask you guys is this:

pretending that Magix is actually going to do something with the stuff that they bought from Sony (which I see as a completely non-threatening 'transference of ownership' of the ip - development looks to have been dead to any of it for a while, now, including Vegas - since Sony seems to be developing Catalyst, instead)

- What would you like to see happen to particularly Acid/SF/CDA, or are they all dinosaurs at this point, only (sadly) worthy of extinction?
Those are great questions. For me personally I have a side business that still produces and sells loops so we still use ACID Pro to properly ACIDize our files and I still use Sound Forge 9 on my Windows 10 box. The reason I use SF 9 and not a newer one is because with the newer versions they removed features that I got used to using. Why they removed useful features still baffles me. I would love to see Acid Pro evolve to the next level to catch up to it's competition but it's been untouched for so long it might just not make sense. There are probably still a lot of old Acid Pro users out there though it would keep them happy but how would it generate enough revenue to pay for development costs. There are others out there like Mixcraft for example (an ex sonic foundry programmer created Mixcraft) that have a similar feel but to be honest I was using Acid Pro for so long I just got used to it so for me I would be really happy to see an update for Acid Pro some day.

Post Reply

Return to “Everything Else (Music related)”