The KRISTAL Audio Engine (commonly referred to as KRISTAL or KAE) is a

digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pro ...

for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. It is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use. The successor to this product became what is now known as Studio One.

History

Initial Development

KRISTAL began development in 1999, as the university thesis project of Matthias Juwan. At that time it had a different look and feel, and was known as the ''Crystal Audio Engine'', a name derived from the song ''

The Crystal Ship "The Crystal Ship" is a song by American rock band the Doors, from their 1967 debut album ''The Doors'', and the B-side of the number-one hit single "Light My Fire". It was composed as a love song to Jim Morrison's first serious girlfriend, Mary ...

'' by

The Doors The Doors were an American Rock music, rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore. They were among the most controversial and influential ro ...

. Following a public

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

period, the initial version, renamed to the ''KRISTAL Audio Engine'', was released in 2004, under the developer name of Kreatives.

''K2'' and KristalLabs

On 24 December 2004 the KRISTAL development team announced that they were working on the successor to the KRISTAL Audio Engine, based on a new infrastructure. The development team planned for this successor to include cross-platform support for both

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

macOS 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 computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. The new software, known as ''K2'', entered the Alpha development stage in July 2005. On 18 September 2006, it was announced that all work and rights to the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

of ''K2'' had been taken over by KristalLabs Software Ltd., a private start-up company co-founded by KRISTAL lead developer, Matthias Juwan, and Wolfgang Kundrus, who had previously worked on

Cubase Cubase is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music and MIDI recording, arranging and editing. The first version, which was originally only a MIDI sequencer and ran on the Atari ST computer, was released in 1989. Cut-dow ...

Nuendo Nuendo is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music recording, arranging, editing and post-production. The package is aimed at audio and video post-production market segments (marketed as an 'Advanced Audio Post-Producti ...

and

HALion HALion is a software instrument application, created by German music software company Steinberg for macOS and Windows. It uses a sample-based approach to emulate the acoustic sounds of a full orchestra, such as the strings, brass, woodwind, and pe ...

. Ownership for the original KRISTAL Audio Engine, however, did not transition to KristalLabs.

PreSonus and Studio One

KristalLabs further developed ''K2'' in cooperation with the American music technology company,

PreSonus PreSonus Audio Electronics, Inc. (often known and styled as PreSonus) is an American manufacturer of professional audio equipment and software, used to create, record, Audio mixing, mix, and Audio mastering, master music and other audio. This inc ...

, before becoming part of PreSonus in 2009. Following this acquisition, the final result of the ''K2'' development was re-branded and released as the first version of the PreSonus DAW, Studio One, for macOS and Windows. The former KristalLabs logo (representing a series of

hexagons In geometry, a hexagon (from Greek , , meaning "six", and , , meaning "corner, angle") is a six-sided polygon. The total of the internal angles of any simple (non-self-intersecting) hexagon is 720°. Regular hexagon A '' regular hexagon'' has ...

, like the one from the original KRISTAL Audio Engine logo,

tessellated A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of ...

together) was used as the basis for the logo of Studio One. Since this time, all versions of Studio One have been developed and released by PreSonus.

Functionality

KRISTAL is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use. The primary window of the application is a

digital mixer In professional audio, a digital mixing console (DMC) is a type of mixing console used to combine, route, and change the dynamics, equalization and other properties of multiple audio input signals, using digital signal processing rather than a ...

, but it provides separate, built-in components for additional functionality, such as audio sequencing and live audio input/

recording A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, ...

. It includes built-in effects, such as EQ,

chorus Chorus may refer to: Music * Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse * Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound * Chorus form, song in which all verse ...

delay Delay (from Latin: dilatio) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Delay 1968'', a 1981 album by German experimental rock band Can * ''The Delay'', a 2012 Uruguayan film People * B. H. DeLay (1891–1923), American aviator and acto ...

and

reverb Reverberation (also known as reverb), in acoustics, is a persistence of sound, after a sound is produced. Reverberation is created when a sound or signal is reflected causing numerous reflections to build up and then decay as the sound is abso ...

, but also supports the use of third-party

VST VST may refer to: * Vancouver School of Theology, a theological graduate school in British Columbia, Canada * VST, Stockholm Västerås Airport in Sweden (IATA airport code) * Vehicle safety technology * Virtual Studio Technology, Steinberg's stand ...

plug-ins. It can support up to 16

channels Channel, channels, channeling, etc., may refer to: Geography * Channel (geography), in physical geography, a landform consisting of the outline (banks) of the path of a narrow body of water. Australia * Channel Country, region of outback Austral ...

of audio; however, it does not provide support for

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

. The application uses

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

audio processing and supports both MME &

ASIO ''Asio'' is a genus of typical owls, or true owls, in the family Strigidae. This group has representatives over most of the planet, and the short-eared owl is one of the most widespread of all bird species, breeding in Europe, Asia, North and S ...

drivers. In addition to its native Kristal project files, it is also compatible with

WAVE In physics, mathematics, and related fields, a wave is a propagating dynamic disturbance (change from equilibrium) of one or more quantities. Waves can be periodic, in which case those quantities oscillate repeatedly about an equilibrium (res ...

AIFF Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

and

OGG Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

files.

References

External links

*
KRISTAL User Community
{{Digital audio workstations Digital audio workstation software Music production software Music software Audio editors Windows multimedia software 2004 software