Sonic Foundry Signs Worldwide Licensing Agreement with HP

Sonic Foundry (Nasdaq: SOFO) announced today that they have signed a worldwide licensing agreement with Hewlett-Packard Company. Under the terms of this agreement, HP is distributing Sonic Foundry's ACID Music loop-based music creation software with its HP CD-Writer Plus 8210i and HP CD-Writer Plus 7510e CD-RW drives.

"The pairing of ACID Music with the HP CD-Writer Plus drives uniquely allows musicians and non-musicians alike to easily create their music and burn their own CDs as well," said Roy Elkins, Sonic Foundry's Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We are very pleased to working with an acknowledged worldwide leader like HP and view their selection of ACID Music as an important endorsement for this technology."

ACID Music is a powerful, yet user-friendly software package for Windows[R] 9x/NT that allows PC users to easily create a broad assortment of professional-sounding music. Users simply select the sound clips (loops) they want to include, 'click-and-drag' to arrange them into tracks, and then play back the assembled song. To ensure professional-quality sound, ACID Music synchronizes the tempo and the key of each loop in a song, regardless of the loop's original speed or pitch.

ACID Music includes a built-in library with hundreds of license-free loops in a vast array of instruments, including percussion, guitar, horns, synth, and more, and in a wide variety of musical styles such as rock, jazz, pop, dance, techno, funk, and hip-hop. Moreover, with the software's comprehensive onboard digital studio, users can mix and match loops to create recordings with an unlimited number of tracks. ACID Music also allows users to easily add their own instruments or vocals to their musical creations or to sing along by simply plugging a microphone into their PC soundcard.

"HP is continually looking to offer more compelling solutions to new and existing customers," said David Clark, Software Product Manager for CD-ReWritable products at HP's Colorado Personal Storage Solutions Division. "By including this software with our drives, we're able to provide our customers with a complete solution for creating both music and CDs. With ACID Music and HP's CD-Writer Plus products, anyone can create songs and record them to CDs that they can play in their home or car or on their portable stereo."

The HP CD-Writer Plus 8210i is one of HP's top-of-the-line multimedia, multipurpose CD-RW (rewritable) internal drives for PCs. With this powerful drive, users can quickly save, organize, and manage business projects with speeds of 4x write, 4x rewrite, and 24x read. Ideal for use by home, school, and business users alike, the HP CD-Writer Plus 7510e is an external CD-RW drive that interfaces easily to a standard PC parallel port for maximum portability, and provides speeds of 2x write, 2x rewrite, and 6x read.

Both of these HP drives allow users to save up to 650 megabytes of data on a single CD and also feature HP Fast Format functionality that lets users begin writing on a CD-RW disc in less than five minutes. In addition to Sonic Foundry's ACID Music loop-based music creation software, each drive also includes Adaptec DirectCD and Easy CD Creator software; HP Simple Trax software, which offers automatic back up, index, and file-search capabilities; HP Disaster Recovery software for quick and easy restoration of hard-drive files and operating system software; and CD Labeler software for the creation of custom CD labels and jewel cases.