SoundEdit was the first popular GUI-based audio editor for digitized audio. It was one of the first significant audio applications for personal computers in general. SoundEdit was known for its ease of use. It made audio manipulation accessible to those who were not musicians or audio professionals.

History

SoundEdit was one of three audio applications created during a sabbatical by

Steve Capps Steve Capps is an American computer programmer, who was one of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh computer. Capps started working at the Xerox Corporation while still a computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. ...

during 1986. The Macintosh had no built-in sound input, so the MacRecorder audio digitizer was invented for this purpose in 1985 by Michael Lamoureux, a mathematics student at the University of California, Berkeley. The MacRecorder hardware and software was publicly released through the

Berkeley Macintosh Users Group The Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, or more commonly "BMUG", was the largest Macintosh User Group. It was founded in September 1984 by a group of UC Berkeley students including Reese Jones and Raines Cohen as a focal-point for the nascent Apple ...

as a kit in late 1985. SoundEdit first shipped in January 1988, as part of a hardware product called MacRecorder Sound System, by a company called

Farallon Computing Farallon, later renamed Netopia, was a computer networking company headquartered in Berkeley, and subsequently Emeryville, California, that produced a wide variety of products including bridges, repeaters and switches, and in their later Netopia i ...

(which eventually became Netopia). The default sampling rate in SoundEdit was 22,256 Hz. One of the major drivers for SoundEdit was Apple's

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

. With MacRecorder Sound System, stack makers could finally create alternatives to HyperCard's two built-in sounds. The other multimedia programs of the time, (

Director Director may refer to: Literature * ''Director'' (magazine), a British magazine * ''The Director'' (novel), a 1971 novel by Henry Denker * ''The Director'' (play), a 2000 play by Nancy Hasty Music * Director (band), an Irish rock band * ''D ...

and

Authorware Adobe Authorware (previously Macromedia Authorware, originally Authorware) was an elearning authoring tool with its own interpreted, flowchart-based, graphical programming language. Authorware was used for creating interactive elearning programs ...

) also adopted it right away. In 1991, SoundEdit was bought by Macromind-Paracomp, which became

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems ...

(now

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

SoundEdit 16

rebranded the program as 'SoundEdit 16' and expanded its capabilities to support CD-quality stereo audio (16-bit) and added

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

soundtrack editing and an

audio plug-in An audio plug-in, in computer software, is a plug-in that can add or enhance audio-related functionality in a computer program. Such functionality may include digital signal processing or sound synthesis. Audio plug-ins usually provide their o ...

architecture. The new version also supported handling of sound files bigger than available RAM. A free plug-in was included to convert sound files into '.SWA' format, an early form of mp3 file. These SWA files could be streamed to web viewers using by the free web audio player (downloadable from

) or by creating a custom interactive Shockwave experience embedded into a web page. Shockwave content is created by using the

multimedia authoring program. The SoundEdit 16 software was discontinued by Macromedia in December 2004. The final version only runs on PowerPC Macs running

Classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

. It does not run under

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Soundedit Macintosh-only software Audio editors