Your browser is out-of-date!

Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now

×

1990 Opcode Studio Vision Digital Audio Sequencer

Ideas sometimes come when you least expect them. In the late ’80s, Paul de Benedictis—Opcode’s marketing guy

Ideas sometimes come when you least expect them. In the late ’80s, Paul de Benedictis—Opcode’s marketing guy—and Digidesign software engineer Mark Jeffery were carpooling from San Francisco to the South Bay office park in Menlo Park, Calif., where both companies were located. During one of their 30-minute commutes, these two musicians considered the possibility of combining the power of Opcode’s Vision MIDI sequencer with the digital audio capabilities of Digidesign’s Sound Tools and Audiomedia recording systems.

Excited about the prospect, Opcode founder Dave Oppenheim worked with fellow code writer David Willenbrink (co-founder of Blank software) to make it happen. It worked and the digital audio sequencer was born. Audio data was displayed as tracks of waveforms and could be cut/pasted/manipulated as easily as MIDI tracks in a conventional sequencing program, and the software—later known as Studio Vision—was the talk of the Winter NAMM show on its debut in January 1990.

Close