Prosoniq

Prosoniq Products Software is a German software developer of audio and music tools, mostly known for their sonicWORX, OrangeVocoder, TimeFactory and Hartmann Neuron synthesizer products. It also licenses proprietary technologies in the audio/music DSP sector to software manufacturers including Emagic,Steinberg,Digidesign, TwelveTone Systems, Merging, DAVID, AutoDesk/Discreet and others. Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Prosoniq pioneered the use of artificial neural networks for commercial audio processing.

Company history

Prosoniq was founded in 1990 by Stephan Sprenger (later married as Stephan Bernsee). It began as a privately held company involved in artificial neural network software development for medical applications. Stephan Bernsee, being a music enthusiast and an avid keyboard player became interested in the application of artificial neural network processing to sound manipulation. He created an automatic audio morphing software for the ATARI 1040ST which was later ported to the Silicon Graphics computers and ultimately to the Apple Macintosh, for which it was sold under the name "sonicWORX" in the years 1994 - 2004. Distributed by Steinberg and bundled with Sony and Creative Labs hardware, sonicWORX reportedly reached a distribution of over 500,000 copies quickly becoming the most successful product of the company. However, with the PC becoming more popular in the 1990s and sonicWORX being an Apple Macintosh-only software specifically optimized for Mac OS 9 it was finally discontinued in 2004.