With Acid Xpress you work with "loops", which are short sound clips from real recordings the loop or repeat to make grooves. You can make your own from music CDs if you have a sound editor, or you can get collections from Acid. We have some collections in the multimedia lab. If you're working at home, you can download CoolEdit for free.

Once you have a loop in your Acid composition, the software knows how many beats the music has, what tempo it's playing at and what musical key. It lets you adjust these elements so you can mix the beats from one song and the guitar from another.

Here's what Acid looks like when you first open it.

If you want to preview the loop, click it once in the Explorer window and wait. If you like it and want to work with it, double click it. It will appear in a track, as in the example below. Pick the Pencil tool and start drawing, adding that loop to your composition.

To save your project, go to the file menu and select "render as" to save as a .wav file.