Musikmesse 2009Prosoniq News: Windows products to be discontinued; Mac plug-in updates announced; sonicWORX Pro announced

Prosoniq has announced that its Windows products will be discontinued from June, 2009, and that its Mac plug-in line, which will now be its plug-in focus, will receive updates later this year. Prosoniq has also announced its new flagship product - sonicWORX Pro, which will be shown for the first time at Musikmesse 2009 next week.

Plug-In Updates Announced for End of 2009 (Mac)

New versions of Prosoniq's Mac OS X RTAS and VST products as well as new AudioUnit versions are expected to be available in Q4 of 2009. Magenta and Rayverb will be discontinued starting June 1st, 2009. They will eventually become part of a different product in the course of this and the following year. Prosoniq will not be able to deliver the much needed Intel updates earlier, but there have been quite a lot of changes in the VST and RTAS SDK so they decided to redesign them from the ground up rather than to amend existing (mostly Carbon and legacy Mac OS 9) code. More information on product roadmap and feature set will become available after the summer.

Windows Products to be Discontinued

Prosoniq announces that it will discontinue development of its Windows products starting June 1st, 2009. Existing Windows products will continued to be sold until that date, and updates will be available until the end of 2009. Users who wish to crossgrade from the latest version of their Windows product to the Mac counterpart can do so for free by contacting Prosoniq via its contact form.

Bernhard Bouché, CEO at Prosoniq, says that the Windows platform, though having a larger market share, has become increasingly unattractive due to the widespread availability of pirated Prosoniq products. "We were, and still are, using a serial number based authorization. We believe that moving from this relatively easy and painless method to a more complicated and error prone way of protecting our products is counter productive. Our past experience with dongled products shows that implementing a dongle based copy protection is prohibitively expensive for add-on products like our plug-ins, and makes selling over the internet problematic", says Bouché.

Since Windows product sales in 2008 have been virtually nonexistent Prosoniq has eventually decided to put the focus once again back exclusively on developing Mac products. "Even though we are aware of the danger of being dependent on a single company we are primarily a Mac based company", Bouché says. "Being a small company developing highly specialized products we don't aim for the mass market", he adds. "Our experience shows that 90% of our customers are on a Mac anyway. We believe that by tending to products on one platform only we will be able to make better products and provide better support. Since crossgrading is free we hope to encourage our Windows users to consider using them on a Mac when they are ready".

Windows product development had been one requirement for Prosoniq's relationship with their former distributor, Steinberg. Prosoniq and Steinberg parted in 2001 but are still successfully working together as technology licensing partners. All Prosoniq technologies will continue to be available for licensing on both Windows and Mac.

sonicWORX Pro Announced

Prosoniq will unveil its new sonicWORX Pro application at Musikmesse 2009. sonicWORX Pro uses the latest advances in Digital Signal Processing to access your audio material in a totally new way allowing you to view and edit audio at an unprecedented resolution. Working in tandem with intelligent pattern detection used for signal separation and realtime mouse-over preview our innovative time-frequency transform technology helps to quickly identify, select and isolate interesting features in a mix, such as individual notes, instruments and voice. An incredibly versatile tool that allows both micro-editing as well as easy suppressing, extracting or processing instruments within a mix for remixing, mastering or restoration.