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Types of Tracks
There are three types of Tracks that you deal with in ACID: Loops, One-Shots and DiskBased. These types are explained below:
Loops
Loops are small chunks of audio that are designed to create a contiguous beat or pattern
when played repeatedly. Loops are usually one to four measures long and are stored
completely in RAM for playback.
Loops are the type of Events that you will use most frequently. Because a Loop Track allows
Events to be continuously “drawn” across it, the arrangement of Loops is very easy.
One-Shots
One-Shots are RAM-based chunks of audio that are not designed to loop. Things such as
cymbal crashes and sound bites could be considered One-Shots. Longer files can be treated
as One-Shots if your computer has sufficient memory.
The main difference between a One-Shot and a Loop are that they will not change tempo
with the rest of the Loops. One-Shots are also different in the way they can be edited in the
Track View. One-Shots will not “draw” across the Track, instead they will be inserted in
their entirety as a single block of audio.
Disk-Based
Disk-Based files are usually longer chunks of audio that get played off of hard disk rather
than being stored in RAM. Disk-Based files make sense for vocals or any other long audio
file that does not loop.
A Disk-Based file can be time stretched with the tempo of the project or not, depending on
the properties set in the file. More information on this is contained later in this tutorial.
Not a Multitrack
Any given Loop, One-Shot or Disk-Based file takes up one Track. ACID is not a
“multitrack” in the sense that you can put any audio regions you want on a single Track.
ACID is designed so that a Track is a time line for a single Event. This makes it easy to place
and edit Events with respect to other Events on other Tracks without worrying about
whether or not you are editing the right piece of audio.
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