Digidesign

Digidesign (operating as Avid since 2011) is an American digital audio technology company and software developer, established in 1984 by Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks and best-known for Pro Tools digital audio workstation. Gotcher and Brooks, high school friends who played in several bands together, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1984, they founded Digidrums to sell sound replacement chips for the E-mu Drumulator by E-mu Systems, Inc., the first programmable drum machine. They rebranded as Digidesign Software and developed Sound Designer, a sample/waveform editor for Macintosh II. In 1989, the company offered Sound Tools, marketed as "the first tapeless recording studio." In 1991, the first version of Pro Tools multitrack "digital audio workstation" came out, offered as an integrated hardware/software system. In the following two decades, Pro Tools became a "de-facto" standard in a professional studio environment, earning Digidesign Grammy (2001) and Oscar (2003) awards. In 1995, Avid Technology, a multimedia company from Burlington, Massachusetts, purchased Digidesign. As part of the Avid company group, Digidesign acquired several notable music technology companies: The Bomb Factory studio and plugin developer from California in 2003, M-Audio in 2004, and "Sibelius" scorewriter and notation editor (2006). Since 2010, as Pro Tools became a pure software DAW, Avid Technology gradually phased out the "Digidesign" brand.