Sonic Solutions

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~ the last words ~

Robert Doris, Mary Sauer and James A. Moorer left the Lucasfilm audio operation in 1986 and started Sonic Solutions in San Francisco. They had been building SoundDroid, a digital audio workstation for film that never became a product, and they took the signal processing knowledge with them into a company with a much narrower purpose: get the noise off analog recordings.

NoNOISE arrived in mid 1987, running on a Macintosh with custom hardware, and it worked. Hiss, clicks, hum, the whine of a camera motor in a location recording, all of it could be attacked without gutting the music underneath. The timing was exact. The record industry was in the middle of reissuing its entire back catalog on compact disc, discovering that a 1955 master tape sounds like a 1955 master tape, and NoNOISE was the answer. Recordings from the 1930s through the 1970s went through Sonic systems by the thousand.

The company went public in early 1994 on the Nasdaq, then made the jump that defined the rest of its life. DVD Creator shipped in the middle of 1996, the first integrated authoring system for the new disc format, and the workstation that followed in September 1997 cost $99,999. By 2003 roughly eighty percent of the commercial DVD titles released worldwide had been authored on Sonic software.

The music I had in 2003 came off internet cafe connections in Turkey as mp3 files with wrong ID3 tags, ripped by strangers from CDs I never touched. Those CDs, the reissues at least, had passed through a Sonic Solutions restoration suite before pressing. Two steps upstream of a file with a mangled filename sat an expensive machine in a mastering room that had already decided how much of the original tape hiss I would be allowed to hear.

~ the record ~

~ what it became ~

A professional tools company with a good margin decided to become a consumer software company, which is a decision that usually ends the way this one did. Sonic bought the desktop and mobile division of Veritas in November 2002 for $9.2 million, and then on 20 December 2004 it closed on the consumer software division of Roxio for $70 million in cash plus stock. That deal brought over the Roxio brand, Easy Media Creator, Toast on the Mac, and more than two hundred employees. Roxio's remaining half, the one holding the Napster brand it had bought out of bankruptcy, renamed itself Napster, Inc. the same week.

Revenue went from $32.7 million in 2003 to $148.68 million in 2005. It also went from being the only serious option for a mastering facility to being one of several boxes on a shelf next to a blank disc spindle. Where I was, the CD burning software everybody had was Nero, and Roxio was the disc that came in the box with a drive and got put in a drawer. Which brand of burner software you used was mostly an accident of what your hardware shipped with and what circulated locally.

~ what really happened ~

Optical media stopped mattering. Sonic saw it coming and built RoxioNow, a digital delivery platform, out of the CinemaNow business it acquired in 2008, and that platform is the thing Rovi actually wanted. The merger agreement was signed on 22 December 2010, the tender offer closed on 11 February 2011 with 84 percent of shares in, and the merger completed on 17 February 2011 at a valuation around a billion dollars.

Rovi kept the delivery platform and put the rest up for sale within a year. Roxio went to Corel on 7 February 2012 and now belongs to Alludo. The professional audio side had left years earlier, handed in 2002 to a joint venture called Sonic Studio LLC that still develops and sells NoNOISE to people who restore recordings. Rovi itself became Xperi and then TiVo. Nothing called Sonic Solutions has existed since that February.

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