ACW has been out for eight years. IMHO, it hasn't seen much improvement.
Like all good software demos, they pick a song that works good with its current capability.

I did a deep dive on it this year, again just like I do every year, to see if it's improved.
It essentially does two functions so we probably should talk at that level.

1) Tempo Mapping:
- In the demo they just drop in a song and get a simple dialog and it drops it in per the physical size of the file.
This is actually the best approach. You can also do it via the import process and it starts you up with a more complex window asking for locations in beats etc. That just tends to confuse people.
- In the end you identify beat one and that starts the clock.

- The first problem I ran into was it assumes that you have downbeats on every bar. This may not be the case as the first song I was testing had chords that played for two bars. This throws the tempo mapping off from then on it gets a lttle awkward to try to fix it.
- It does try to calculate a constant beat based on your first 2 to 3 manually marked downbeats. It appears to do this with pure math looking for an average. Often this results in all the automatic down beats being slightly off and the majority of them have to be manually set. (As a side note Z Plane the software it's using to detect tempo has the ability to analyze every transient pattern and do a more accurate tempo map automatically) PGM should adopt that new technology.
- It also assumes that you're using the workflow of the demo: Tempo, Chords, Style. If you're already have a song laid out with a style and chords trying to bring in other tracks (like vocals) and get them to sync is nearly impossible and not recommended for the light hearted.

2) Chord Recognition:
- Chord recognition is 100% dependent on how accurate your downbeats are.
- For basic cowboy chords it does a decent job. When the product originally came out eight years ago there was two flavors of it and one of them had more control over the kind of chords it should be looking for and some basic rhythms of the chords. There is an area called settings I think But as buggy as it resets every time you open it up and doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
This is another area of improvement.

It is usable with a lot of trial and error and a lot of patience, but in my opinion the whole workflow and accuracy needs to be improved since it's been around for eight years and the Z plane libraries have gotten better.

Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).