ACID Planet: A Glimpse Back at a Forgotten Music Hub

Before SoundCloud, before Bandcamp, and long before today’s AI-fueled music generators, there was ACID Planet—a vibrant online community built around Sony’s pioneering loop-based DAW, ACID Pro. From the early 2000s to its quiet shutdown in 2018, ACID Planet served as a digital stage for bedroom producers, remixers, and experimental musicians to upload, share, and collaborate using loop-based compositions created primarily with ACID software.

For many of us, it was an essential part of our creative growth. I used ACID as my primary DAW during Tapegerm’s most prolific period, remixing with a network of artists in the early 2000s. ACID Pro was groundbreaking at the time—it allowed time-stretching and pitch-shifting of audio loops in a way that was intuitive and playful. ACID Planet gave users a way to showcase the results.

Though the platform disappeared in 2018 with little fanfare, I recently discovered something fascinating: a huge swath of the music uploaded to ACID Planet has been preserved on the Internet Archive. It’s not well-organized, but it’s there—tens of thousands of tracks rescued from obscurity.

What You’ll Find

The ACID Planet archive is a strange digital time capsule. Browsing through it, you’ll uncover:

• Original tracks from amateur and semi-pro artists experimenting with loops, remixes, and mashups
• Genre-blurring work that spans ambient, techno, industrial, hip-hop, glitch, and things that defy categorization
• Surprising finds: a significant number of uploads appear to be unauthorized rips of popular commercial songs, uploaded under strange usernames—possibly by users misunderstanding (or ignoring) the platform’s intent

Why did people do that? Who knows. Maybe it was to test how the upload system worked, or to “flex” by showing what they could rip or remix. But the heart of ACID Planet was always the original loop-based creativity from users all over the world.

Did You Upload a Track There?

If you were an ACID Pro user between ~2001 and 2018, there’s a chance you uploaded something to ACID Planet and completely forgot about it. It might still be sitting, quietly preserved, on the Internet Archive.

Here’s how to find out:

1. Visit the ACID Planet Archive Collection.
2. Search by your old username or project name (if you remember it).
3. Browse the tracks and filenames—many are poorly tagged, so try a few different variations.

Here’s a few Tapegerm-related tracks: https://archive.org/details/acidplanet?tab=collection&query=tapegerm

Unfortunately, metadata preservation is hit-or-miss, so discovery takes a little patience. But finding a forgotten track—something you made decades ago—is like opening a time capsule sealed by your younger self.

ACID Planet’s Legacy

ACID Planet may have shut down without much notice, but its spirit lives on:

• Many of the artists who uploaded there now share music on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or are active in communities like Tapegerm and GAJOOB.
• Loop-based composition is now a default feature in most DAWs.
• AI music tools, like Suno or Udio, build on the same concepts: accessible, pattern-based creation—but ACID Pro helped define that workflow early on.

Most importantly, ACID Planet gave thousands of people a place to experiment and share during a formative era of digital music. That legacy, thanks to the Internet Archive, hasn’t been completely lost.

Were You There?

If you ever uploaded to ACID Planet, let us know. What did you create? Did you find your old tracks? We’d love to document some of those rediscoveries at GAJOOB or Tapegerm. Maybe even remix them into something new.

The loop, after all, continues.

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Want help tracking down your uploads or building your own ACID-era digital archive? I’m working on tools to help artists preserve and reframe their legacy collections. Let’s chat.