Acid Loops

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Acid Loops are specialized music clips. They were originally created for use with Acid, the loop-based, music-sequencing software, created by Sonic Foundry in 1998. The program made the arranging of sound clips to form a song much simpler than ever before. Renamed Acid Pro, the program is now owned and distributed by Sony, and is currently up to version 6. Sony also sells a line of CDs containing "Acidized" loop samples for use with Acid, as do many third-party companies.

Similar technology was added to Cakewalk's Sonar (called "Groove Clips") and Cubase (called "Audio Warp"). Another very popular program for the use of loops is Ableton Live. There are several other loop based programs, including Mixcraft 3, FL Studio, Garageband, Magix' Music Maker, and EJ's multiple versions of their loop program. Many of the new music genres today utilize loops extensively.

"Acidized" loops contain tempo and key information, so that Acid and other programs that can read the "acidization" can properly time stretch and pitch shift them. Although the phrase "ACID loops" technically only refers to loops which have been "acidized", some people use the term to refer to loops in general, even when used with other software packages.