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"We are a small group of music industry refugees tired of business infighting, corporate greed and pursuit of the next big thing," proclaimed the Anarchist. "We are not venture capitalized, we do not intend to 'go public.' In fact, we do this because it means something to us. We make things only when we want those things. We use things only when we need those things."
Hollywood couldn't have cast a better troika of cutting-edge entrepreneurs than the ones who founded OSC, despite the company's anti-corporate ethic.
As corporate sharpie, there was the dashing, articulate, and charismatic Josh Rosen."He's got a magic mouth," says one friend. "I wouldn't be surprised if he's mayor of San Francisco someday."
In the serious, efficient, affable Swede Mats Myrberg, OSC had every corporate headhunter's vision of a chief operating officer: Myrberg's speech is efficient and concise, and unlike others formerly associated with OSC, he betrays a crisp understanding of the business realities that eventually tore his company asunder. Myrberg was also the electrical engineering genius behind the early versions of OSC's Deck music editing software.
In the wry-humored, scraggly haired John Dalton, OSC had its scatterbrained visionary. Dalton's brilliant ideas helped launch the company. But his long, unexplained absences from work and the lumbering, monolithic blocks of computer code he wrote gave engineers fits.
The grunge-inspired, rebellious spirit with which the three infused their company was no accident. Before they moved to San Francisco in the late 1980s, Rosen and Dalton worked as rock musicians in Portland's fertile, cross-pollinating music scene, where a single musician might play in half a dozen bands at once.
But the Bay Area beckoned.
"It was kind of like there was this incestuous band thing going on up there," Dalton recalls. "We always wanted to move down to San Francisco, because it seemed to be a hipper city and a better music scene."
In 1987, Rosen moved his techno band R-Complex to the Bay Area, and got a job at a firm called Blank Software. Dalton followed him to San Francisco within a year.
In addition to a better music scene, Dalton and Rosen sought a way to produce compact-disc-quality recordings without having to subject themselves to the tyranny of $200-per-hour recording studios. Within a remarkably short period of time, they invented the hippest, coolest, and cheapest way to make studio-quality CDs, and made themselves the hippest, coolest, newest thing in Multimedia Gulch.
By the end of the 1980s, computer engineers had teased the components of sound into bits and bytes, zeros and ones. There was a system for generating tones through the computer, and there was a way of recording music in a digital format that could be stored on a computer's hard disk.
But digital sound was expensive. Professional-quality digital recording still took place only in high-cost sound studios.
To "multitrack" -- that is, to record each instrument separately, so sounds can be subtly mixed and edited together -- required equipment costing as much as $150,000. Making matters worse for aspiring home-music publishers, engineers had developed two, largely incompatible digital languages for computer-based sounds.
The widely used Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a computer tone-producing protocol that consists of a limited library of computer instructions for notes, pitches, note lengths, and volumes, designed specifically to run on limited computer power. The field of digital audio recording is a different game entirely. It attempts to reproduce sounds by creating digital representations of actual sound waves -- an extremely complex mathematical task. These cyberwaves require huge storage capacities.
Trying to force a computer to simultaneously perform the quick, simple calculations involved in MIDI-based music, and the complex, heavy-lifting computation required to play a digital audio recording was a maddening endeavor. The two formats inevitably fell out of sync.
Dalton got around the synchronization problem by producing his own duct-tape and baling-wire version of a digital recording studio, using two computers, a MIDI sequencer, and the Sound Tools digital recording software made by the Palo Alto firm Digidesign. Later, the OSC boys developed a proprietary interface language that forced the two formats to play in step.
Another drawback to early computer-based recording was the medium's in-ability to record and play sound simultaneously -- an essential component of modern, "multitrack" music production.
A typical commercial recording may consist of dozens of tracks, each containing an individually recorded instrument, voice, or other sound. These individual tracks are blended together into a complete stereo recording.
Digidesign had fired the first salvo in the digital-audio revolution with its Sound Tools, Macintosh-based editing system. But it was still expensive, and couldn't truly replicate the capacity of a top-of-the-line studio.
Rosen and Dalton wanted some sort of multitrack capability for their own techno compositions, and they found their salvation in Myrberg, the brilliant Swedish engineer who worked with Rosen at the audio software company Blank Software.
Rosen asked Myrberg if it would be possible to soup up Sound Tools to work the way a professional sound studio worked. That is, Rosen wanted to be able to record one track of music while listening to another that had already been recorded, thereby adding greater depth to his compositions.
Myrberg approached the problem by going to the source. Much like a true classical scholar will read original works in obscure tongues rather than in Greek or Latin translations, Myrberg approached Rosen and Dalton's problem by using programming language closer to Machine Code -- the original ones and zeros at the heart of a computer's instructions. In this way, Myrberg discovered that he could force Digidesign's Sound Tools to record and play back simultaneously.
Myrberg had taken the revolution begun by Digidesign to its next logical level: Multitracking, the essence of modern stereo recording, was now possible directly on a home computer. Myrberg, Dalton, and Rosen brought their discovery to Digidesign in hopes of selling it through a licensing agreement.
