Acon Digital Media GmbH Acoustica v3.3 Review

Overall Rating

Easy to use the cleaning wizards. Good graphic music display. Straight forward editing.

No built in MP3 creation. Limited range of effects.

Acon Digital Media GmbH Acoustica v3.3 is digital music editing at your fingertips.

Music has turned digital just like photography, with the software developer Acon Digital Media launching Acoustica v3.3. This music-editor can read and graphically display the sound waves from all common audio file formats like Ogg-Vorbis (OGG), Wave Audio (WAV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), MPEG Layer 3 (MP3), and Sun Audio Format (AU). Acoustica can also take the sound track from MPG, MPEG, WMV and AVI videos to edit them just as it does with a song from an audio CD.

The Cleaning Wizard, simplifying the transfer of LP records or audio tapes to CD comes in handy, as it automates the whole process from recording and track splitting, to audio restoration and CD-recording. Advanced users may appreciate the six band equalizer, automatic noise and scratch-elimination, as well as sound effects like reverb, chorus, and others. The application can also edit the meta-data for MP3, Ogg and Wave files, which can contain for example the song title or artist. The software can burn straight onto CD-ROM with a build in recording module.

The Effect Chain Editor allows to chain internal processing tools and plug-ins. The chains can be saved, including their settings for later use. Each processing step in the chain can be bypassed, and the processing order changed by drag and drop.

This application makes music editing accessible to any PC users with music files and sound cards. Editing the sound waves makes it easy to move parts of a song through drag and drop, fade-in or fade-out can also be added to any song.

It comes with other useful features like dithering and noise shaping; statistics (RMS, DC offsets, loudest peak and more); a new stereo enhancer tool; support for ACID information in wave files; new time formats such as sample index, SMPTE and bars and beats; the addition of a preview button to the file opening dialogue; the option to save regions as a separate file; support for LAME codec if installed, and several new usability features.


Price and Availability
The application can be downloaded as a 30-day trial version from http://www.acondigital.com for free. The full, unlimited version costs GB£20.30 as electronic delivery or GB£25.51 on a CD-ROM.