Sonic Foundry Debuts its Mastering House[TM] Bundle

Sonic Foundry (AMEX: SFO), a leading developer and marketer of digital audio software for the Windows[R] platform, today debuted its Mastering House bundle, an affordable collection of its top-end audio editing and mastering software products for Windows PCs.

An ideal solution for the growing number of musicians interested in mastering their own music, the Mastering House bundle includes Sound Forge[R] 4.5, the industry-leading audio editor, DirectX Audio Plug-In Packs XFX[TM] 1 and XFX[TM] 2, and CD Architect[TM], the professional package for burning audio CDs. This new soft bundle carries an estimated street price of just $749.00, more than 30% below the cost of the components purchased separately.

According to Roy Elkins, Sonic Foundry's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, "This bundle is aimed squarely at the high end of the rapidly growing digital audio production market. It gives these customers the no-compromise tools they need at a price that has never been more affordable."

Sound Forge 4.5 is Sonic Foundry's award-winning audio editing environment, featuring a wide range of processes, tools, and effects for manipulating audio. It includes a built-in batch converter for automated processing of multiple files and a powerful spectrum analyzer function for optimizing mixed program material. The versatile Sound Forge is also fully compatible with industry standard DirectX Audio Plug-Ins, including the XFX 1 and XFX 2 collections that are part of the Mastering House bundle.

Sonic Foundry's XFX 1 and XFX 2 are high-performance, real-time DirectX Audio Plug-In Packs, each containing a collection of powerful audio processing tools. XFX 1 includes Reverb, Time Compress/Expand, Multi-Tap Delay, Chorus, Pitch Shift, and Simple Delay/Echo. XFX 2 includes Noise Gate, Graphic Dynamics, Multi-Band Dynamics, Paragraphic EQ, and Graphic EQ. Both packages speed editing time by allowing real-time adjustment and previews. Together, they provide PC users with the essential tools used by professional mastering engineers.

CD Architect has become known as the software of choice for designing and burning pre-master CDs. Supporting both SCSI and IDE/ATAPI CD-R(W) drives, it produces Red Book spec masters with full control over PQ code editing. The feature-packed CD Architect includes a sophisticated mix and crossfade capability, independent channel master faders, and the "disk at once" write mode capability for producing replication-ready pre-master CDs. Other valuable features include multiple levels of undo/redo, test burn mode, up to 99 tracks, up to 99 sub-indices per track, realistic CD player emulation, and full support for Universal Product Codes (UPC), Media Catalog Numbers (MCN), Industry Standard Recording Codes (ISRC), and artist, engineer, date, and comment fields.

System requirements for the Mastering House bundle include a Pentium or Alpha AXP microprocessor, Microsoft Windows 9x or Windows NT 4.0 or later, Windows-compatible sound card, VGA display, CD-ROM drive, 16 MB RAM, and 25 MB of hard-disk space for program installation. In addition, a supported CD Recorder and 300 MB hard-disk space for temporary file storage is needed for burning CDs.