[bambax]

Sonic Foundry had incredible products (Vegas, Acid) but they don't appear to have enjoyed the success they deserved? They have been acquired many times, once by Sony and then by Magic, and the most recent versions of the software are years old.

Yet these products are among the most stable and user-friendly that I have come across. It would be most interesting to read more about their journey!

[b1daly]

The Sonic Foundry software was uniformly excellent. It’s perhaps a cautionary tale as to how much market structure is as much, if not more, of a factor in ultimate business success.

My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.

They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.

Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.

Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.

Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.

I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.

I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.

It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.

[petronic]

> I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform.

Silos. Sony was (is?) a collection of companies that often didn't cooperate well. After the acquisition, SCS was under the heading of Sony Corporation of America. (SCA) They did little to interfere with the company and they had some fun perks, but they didn't seem to be able to do much to support or grow the products either. Want to add support for <$$$$ broadcast hardware>? SCA couldn't arrange a loan, or get you next year’s model before it launched.

Sometime around the economic collapse of '08, SCS was transferred under the heading of Sony Electronics and it felt like there was more support and more of an effort to promote the products of SCS by Sony (and we could finally borrow hardware!), but the market had moved on and SCS never regained its former glory.

[jgh]

Acid never struck me as something particularly widely used. I was big into electronic music production at the time and I started with Acid + Sound Forge but eventually moved on to Reason and later Ableton + Reason. People who were doing a lot of multitrack editing seemed pretty loyal to Cubase (or Pro Tools if they were using Macs) and then Ableton came along and became extremely popular.

Sound Forge is of course in a class of its own.

[paulie_a]

And let's be honest. That software was so incredibly pirated I assume more people bought WinZip.

Acid was pretty fun to play with. I will outright admit I did not purchase my copy.

[petronic]

One bit of SoFo lore that I was told on my first day: inspecting the metadata on one of the .wavs on win95 would reveal that it was edited using a cracked copy of Sound Forge.

/EVERYONE/ pirated Sound Forge.

[voltagex_]

Not 95, XP:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041204064837/http://www.pcwelt....

http://web.archive.org/web/20041210045441/http://www.pcwelt....

[cirgue]

My 10th grade high school music class was taught entirely using Acid. Looking back I am 90% certain our teacher pirated it.

[nitrogen]

They had educational discounts, and possibly school support programs. My high school had legit copies and a library of the official loop CDs.

[andromedaworld]

Fair to say fl studio is the PHP equivalent in the DAW world? So much music has been made using it but it is highly frowned upon in the industry and considered to be the noob's tool.

[jgh]

It was at one time (basically the PHP of DAWs) but I've heard it's gotten much much better over the years. Granted I haven't exactly been keeping up with that world so maybe that image has stuck with it.

[shadoxx]

FL Studio 12 user here. It has definitely matured, but the workflow is pretty different from something like Ableton or Bitwig. I use it because it's what I learned to produce with. The Edison plugin that's bundled is worth the cost of licensing alone.

All in all, once you get to a certain level of knowledge around mixing and mastering, the debate over which DAW to use is much like the vim vs emacs debate. As long as you're proficient in the software, the end result will come out looking more or less the same.

I will say Ableton and Bitwig come with a nicer set of default plugins and samples.

[rhizome]

By far the most difficulty I have in making electronic sound stuff anymore is finding a UX I can work with, much less compose quickly. Like in this context, SoundForge was absolutely ruined by Sony, which probably pushed me to CoolEdit Pro, and now Audacity, none of which are as good as SF5(?) was.

It feels similar to how GIMP and Audacity are being ruined with developer-imposed format friction right now.

[ryanb]

+1 their products and UX were top notch.