SoundEdit 16

» see macromedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

SoundEdit 16 was a 16-bit waveform audio editor for Macintosh, sold by Macromedia from July 1994 until December 2004. it supported sound files larger than available RAM and a plug-in architecture that other Macromedia audio products keyed into. it was the default tool for editing audio destined for Director and Shockwave.

the lineage goes back further than the Macromedia branding. Steve Capps wrote the original SoundEdit on a 1985-1986 sabbatical in Paris. Farallon Computing picked up the distribution rights in 1987 and shipped it with the MacRecorder Sound System in January 1988. MacroMind-Paracomp acquired it in 1991 and released SoundEdit Pro 1.0 in 1992 with 16-bit support. the MacroMind-Paracomp Authorware merger produced Macromedia, and the rebranded SoundEdit 16 followed in July 1994.

the first time i heard of SoundEdit 16 was years late, in a forum thread about exporting WAV loops for an old Director project. by then i was on Windows and the audio editing my circle did was in Cool Edit Pro on shared university machines. SoundEdit 16 was a Mac-only tool with a Mac-only user base and i had no path to it. the product had already been discontinued for a year by the time the thread surfaced.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it influenced ~

SoundEdit 16 was one of the first consumer Mac audio editors to handle CD-quality stereo at 16-bit depth and to expose a plug-in API. the plug-in architecture set the template for how later editors, including Sound Forge on Windows and Adobe Audition's plug-in pipeline, would let third parties extend the toolset. the QuickTime soundtrack integration meant Director authors could move audio into multimedia titles without leaving the Macromedia toolchain.

the editor was also a key part of the Shockwave audio workflow in the mid-1990s. anyone publishing a Shockwave game or interactive demo with custom audio almost certainly touched SoundEdit 16 at some point in the pipeline. when Shockwave's web presence shrank in the 2000s, the audio toolchain shrank with it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Macromedia discontinued sales on 1 December 2004 and ended technical support on 1 June 2005. the last release was version 2.0.7. Adobe completed the Macromedia acquisition on 3 December 2005, almost exactly a year after SoundEdit 16 had already been retired. Adobe's audio strategy on Mac and Windows ran through Audition, which descended from Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro, not from the SoundEdit codebase.

SoundEdit 16 was a victim of the same Mac-classic gravity that pulled down a long list of Macromedia and Farallon tools. it was built for a Mac that no longer existed by 2005. nobody at Macromedia funded the rewrite, and nobody at Adobe had a reason to revive a discontinued competitor to a product they already owned. the editor that almost every Director author had once used closed quietly while the company that owned it was being absorbed.

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