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Magix Buys Sony Creative Software


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I figured this might be of interest here since we have quite a few Magix users. I've used acid for years...ahem...Sony Acid that is .

 

Magix has bought Sony Creative software which includes sound forge. 

 

It was sad to see Acid go the way of the dodo bird. I had hoped Sony would jump start these products, but it wasn't mean't to be.I can still run the old Sony Acid Pro on my win7 setup. 

 

I have apprehensions about this deal. The good news is that hopefully, Acid will get some more development.

 

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`I wonder how they ponied up the money and I wonder why

 

Here's my stories regarding Samplitude and Acid.  I was a rising star of the flashkit community. Moderated over several forums and was on my way to being a SuperMod right about the same time Mark Fennel sold fk to internet.com At that time we were developing the sound and loops repository.  I made quite a bit of money via extremely long days recording loops and sound effects for fk.  It was part of a big promotion to get other loopers involved and to provide royalty free loops for flash designers. I worked mostly in Cakewalk and Sampitude at the time.  As  my rep grew I was handed quite a number of editing/remix/mastering gigs from Acid users.  They wouldn't accept me just taking the stems and working in my own software they wanted it in Acid format.   This was just as Vegas handed over acid to Sony.   Working in Vegas acid was fine.  But when Sony took over they stripped all the professional features and put out a dummy down version of the product hoping to capture the amateur market.  Freaking hell!  I could no longer use my third party plugins.  There were very active discussions regarding this on the acid forums when some exec explained to us the long term acid user that we were not the market.  It wasn't for a long time till they came out with later versions of Acid "Pro" which brought back features that were in the Vegas version.  By that time I was done with Acid and the side work that I'd originally been getting also dried up.  

 

Samplitude was always great for polishing things up for me.   And I've found the Magix old school sequencers like Robota fun to play around with.  I'm oddly not a fan of Vandal but I do think it was good of them to take on Yellow Tools and make it available for all,

 

The DAW market is already huge with fierce competition over an ever diminishing customer base.

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You were quite involved with the products I see. I started using Sony Acid back when it was owned by Soundforge.I upgraded to the Acid Pro 7 version. Right about that time there was a big uproar because acid was sliding into oblivion. Some of the complaints were, bugs not fixed, not 64 bit and wouldn't load into Win7 properly. 

 

Sony seems to have made a weak effort to console its user base in making it compatible with win7 which was probably a necessity to keep the product on the shelf. I still have that version on my older Win 7 computer and it works well for what it does. One of the easiest looping DAWs out there IMO. A person could make some really convincing songs in it because many of the drum and bass loops were very well done. I wanted to keep it around because I occasionally use loops...very occasionally lately. 

 

I'm happy that someone bought it and might be using/upgrading the code. FWIW Acid pro 7 was a lot more than just looping software as you might know. It had everything one would need to record audio and master, even had some of Sony's sought after efx included.

 

I'm guessing Magix got a good deal on the purchase since Sony had basically let it atrophy and didn't seem to care about their daw division.

 

Yeah, the daw market is a small pie for sure. Cakewalk has some kind of "announcement" the first of the month. 

 

Samplitude is a really nice progam. Majix has some good things going for them.

Magix seems to be two things...a good upper echelon of products and a passable lower end  which is fine for many basic users. They already had loops made for majix, so I'm also wondering why they bought it. Might give them an edge if they can advertise that they have cutting edge DJ improvements thanks to Acid...time will tell, but these seem to be strange bedfellows.

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Not sure if it's ok to link to other threads on the subject. If not please delete.

 

This thread has a link in it to the info and additional comments on the subject.

 

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Magix-Buys-Sony-Creative-Software-m3422177.aspx

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Here's a thing to note about Magix and Yellow Tools.  YT was big in EU for a time.  The problems were numerous for YT and support for YT was a joke.  One of the resellers who stopped carrying YT was doing all the heavy lifting fixing problems with the environment.  He was so busy trying to fix YT's issues even with people who didn't purchase that he got a great reputation and increased his sales for other products dramatically (all this comes from http://kvraudio.com)   Magix bout YT fixed the authentication process and gave the basic version away for free.  Now the expanded library is bundled in various Samp releases.  While I'm not a fan of YT or vandal (vandal always seems highly compressed and "edgy" to my ears.  It still makes for a massive collection of sounds.

 

 

Now on to my rant about daws in general.

If you buy a daw with a plugin library, that library should be portable into any other daw / hosting environment that you own.  As an example.  I bought BIAB upgraded package with a special set of IK Media's guitar rig.  The included BIAB rigs will work in any host/daw.   That's the way it should work.  and yet... Many daws that include plugins of their own making won't allow you to use them in different hosts....Like .....Mixcraft..  The standard version of Mixcraft and the pro version include third party apps which one pays for included in the price that cannot be used in different host applications.  A prime example is VB3 by gsi.  I love vb3 so much so I bought it.  Yet the version included in Mixcraft will not work in other host applications.  I get a warning prompt when trying to access it.

 

 

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I remember when I looked at YT and salivated. It seemed the company to take Kontakt out of business, but it wasn't to be. YT ended up going the way of the gigasampler. Now I'm so glad I stayed away from it, because as you say, support wasn't very good. Like so many other good ideas that had potential but wasn't developed into what it could be. I didn't know YT was bought by Majix.

 

I've run into the same frustration concerning purchased DAW plug-ins. They usually aren't cross compatible. On one hand I can understand the company's protective nature. Cakewalk just developed a few higher quality mastering plug-ins, a dynamic EQ and a really good multiband compressor. You know if the plug ins weren't proprietary, they would be on the web at some p2p site for free. Same goes for Studio One. I can't use those plug-ins in Sonar. Cakewalk has had a fairly lax download scheme. You can use their software on more than one computer. They had a lot of hacks just like Cubase and several others. Older versions showed up for free on the web so they went to a different system. The DAW market is so small anyhow, these guys need all the help they can get. 

 

A .vst is such a small  program. I'm sure a person who knows how can strip away the part of the code that ties the plug in to a certain DAW. People are probably doing it. I never needed to do that because I had all I needed and the rest were purchased 3rd party and could run in anything.

 

Most of the larger software companies have gone to a software control panel to purchase and upgrade . Every program has a user  user indetifier and can only be bought through them. These control panels probably can also look at the code to see if it has been compromised, much like Microsoft does when you want to get free upgrades.

 

The one bright spot in this is loops and samples. Most programs are now cross compatible with acid and REX loops. Magix I'm not so sure, I think they are pretty self contained.

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Re VST format.  Sttenberg owns the proprietary rights to it and really there is not much difference between 2.5 and 3.0  The major difference is licensing.  If you are a developer it's practically royalty free with the right tools to create your own vsti or vst plugins in VST1,2,2.5  But not VST3  which you have to pay a substantial amount of money for.  This is why you see so many freeware vst plugins over the net.  Some are great and some are not so great.  Even the best of the free usually has some small things missing that could have really made something worth paying for.

 

Some vst developers do it for a hobby and some do it as an inroad to larger companies like ..IKM, NI and the like.  Most free developers give up on hope and lose desire to do any better or do anymore as time goes by.  Which is the same for the freeware/linux community.  I know as for a time I would work on a few freeware apps in the distant past trying to cultivate my software design skills.  It was really frustrating adding tons of code which would be compiled by someone else who...just couldn't / wouldn't get around to it.

Finally I threw in the towel as it wasn't helping me advance my career and I got so sick and tired of the half-arsed way lead developers would put crap out and not be as devoted to the project as when they started.

 

I experienced the same thing with Wusik Station as a user. Gigs of sound libraries that are crappy poorly sampled and poorly if at all optimized.  That users can create on their own and are added to the library.  The only thing I got out of Wusik was EVE which is a smaller rompler /sample based player.  And even then I piled through endless libraries only to find a few usable sounds.

 

On the other side of the spectrum there is some signs of hope for developers of high quality freeware who want to join forces with major players

 

This was originally released by Martinic as a freeware plugin. I have the freeware plugin  Aurturia did a great deal of polishing the sound up and adding nice features.

 

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I once went after free vst plug ins like white on rice. Some of them are pretty good. That Arturia vox looks like a nice setup. I hope these developers with the knack for software design can either work for a larger player or go into business. 

 

Some of these guys are just gifted naturals.....take the owner of Melda for instance. I don't know how he developes new products one after the other and continues to update them regularly. He has to be one busy guy. In his case the plug ins are good and he has some very unique plugs, especially if you wanted to mix electronic music. 

 

I had a few free plug ins lock my old computer up and this scared me away from some of the unknown hobbyist makers. I don't have many free plug ins on my most recent computer. Mostly tried and true well known makers.

 

I don't think there's a huge market for a small developer. Small operations are looking for free or really low cost. I've seem some of those plug in makers post a paypal link and ask for donations. Not sure how that's working.

 

Many daw software companies are crowding the plug market out by offering darned good plugs in their flagship programs so the user doesn't really need to look for anything. An EQ with good filters, a compressor, a decent multi band compressor and a limiter will be all many will ever want or need for the mix. A good selection of reverbs helps too. One of my favorites is Valhala room .One of the best IMO. Anything from them is good. I also love a convolution with a bunch of impulses.

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