Play the sounds with the computer keys or warp them with deejay-style effects at the move of a mouse as the beats stay tight on the one. Load breakbeats, horn stabs, vocal lines or sonic bric-a-brac of indiscriminate speeds into the 16 slots spread around two virtual turntables. Though it's speedy and intuitive, Acid still has a contemplative, type-B personality in comparison to rival Mixman, which sports an instant-gratification interface. Sonic Foundry also gets points for its brand-name marketing tie-in: It's offering fans the chance to remix loops from Beck's "Mixed Bizness," and the winning entry will wind up as a B-side to the single release of the song. Behind the scenes, the program is reading an "Acidized" version of a common ".wav" sample file, which has markers on each beat and a "root note." Give the program a desired key and speed, measured in beats per minute, and it stretches the samples into submission. Drums, vocals, bells painted onto separate tracks all fall in line-no matter that they came from different recordings at different speeds and keys. Click "play" and the infallible thump of, say, a Stanley Clarke riff rumbles along, the downbeat smacking every time the cursor scrolls across a new measure. Load a bass-guitar sample and paint it along a track. From top to bottom, each row holds a "sample," the basic unit of all loop-based music, so called because a digital recording is made of snapshots, or samples, of a sound wave, typically taken about 20,000 to 40,000 times per second. It looks like this: From left to right, each line marks a beat or measure.
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One standout, Sonic Foundry's Acid, has made waves in both the professional and home markets with what is essentially a spreadsheet for sound.
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The mainstreaming of breakbeat-based musical genres-as in this year's Grammy nomination of bigbeat vizier Fatboy Slim-has at least a half-dozen major music software companies scrambling to invent "beat loop" tools for eager living-room deejays and remixers. ("CD-burner" drives, once an expensive addition to a computer, are increasingly becoming standard equipment on new machines, and add-on CD burners now cost as little as $200). With a $50 program, any young Jimmy Jam can whip together a dance track with cut-copy-and-paste ease, then save it as a basic sound file to be recorded onto a CD. Hours were spent lining up the start and end points of looped grooves with pricey hardware and matching notes and tempos of intricate sonic collages.īut lately, computer software has humbled the high priests of digital beats, automating their wizardry-as has already happened with printed invitations, greeting cards and retouched photos. In the 1980s, hip-hop artists such as Kurtis Blow and Biz Markie began stitching together digitally recorded snippets called "breakbeats" for the floors of their dance tracks.