Whoops! Keep muddling up VSTi and VST (instruments and effects).

VST support was precisely the reason I upgraded to ACID Pro 5!
Except for some odd FX, VST plugins are all I ever use. My UAD-1 DSP plugins have never worked better as native VST, in ACID Pro 5.
The DX versions sucked wind not to mention massive native CPU and the so called VST-DX (Cakewalk & DirectiXer) wrapper versions were not any better. Welcome to the 21st century SONY! :-)
BTW, I have hundred's of VST/VSTi plugins and I rarely find one that does not work natively, in ACID Pro 5. If I do, then I just avoid using it.
As long as my UAD-1 and Voxengo VST plugins work, that is all I care about anyway :-P

I tried out the trial of Acid V5.0 and found it unusable - it kept rescanning my VSTi directory every time I started Acid; that and the Media Manager put me off Acid 5.0. Besides, I already had something that did what I wanted, so it seemed a waste of money to upgrade.

Yes, this was a minor annoyance for me. After user requests, this was fixed in the 5.0a update.

the Media Manager put me off Acid 5.0

You can actually, permanantly turn off the MM, from ACID's Preference's, so that it never starts up or uses any resources.
I actually find the MM quite useful having tagged and catalogued over 35GB's of Sony loop libraries, of mine. Which the Sony Reference Library did automatically, for me, while I went and had lunch :-)

Those two features are really only a small part of the 5.0 update. For hardcore ACID users, many other new features like the Folder Tracks, Plug-In Manager, Full Rewire support, Bus to Bus routing, Realtime Reverse, Tempo-Based FX, Groove Mapping, Key Mapping, and a slew of others are all very compelling reasons to update. Not to mention the free Native Instrument VSTi plugins. Being an avid ACID Pro user since 1998, version 1.0, I feel the 5.0 update is the most useful and comprehensive ACID update ever. At this stage of the product cycle, version 5a is more stable than ACID Pro 4 was even @ version d, IMO.

YMMV, of course,

Billy Buck

glad to hear you are a voxengo user Billy!

Yeah Pipe, that Aleksey is one prolific audio plugin designer. It's hard sometimes to keep up with all the new plugins and updates. I wonder if he ever sleeps. :-) Speaking of VST support, his VST plugins work great in ACID Pro 5. I would imagine they would work just as well, in Vegas 6 now too.

Billy Buck

I feel the 5.0 update is the most useful and comprehensive ACID update ever.

Yeah, I strongly agree with that statement. ACID 5 was an awesome update; I thought it was their best focused released ever. They really targeted and nailed a bunch of ‘marquee’ features.

...And thinking about it, I now see V6 in kinda the same way. They very much focused on what they saw as the key features. The only problem for us was that they were finally honest with themselves (if not us) and realised that audio is not one of them.

I’ve always maintained that trying to get high-end audio and video packages coexisting in the one app was a concept that was doomed to failure. Like I’ve said before, ultimately you are only ever going to end up with a half-arsed compromised, bastardised application.

...I think our only hope is with ACID...