 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2010) |
| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder | Justin Frankel |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Justin Frankel, Christophe Thibault, John Schwartz, Jean-François Bédague |
| Products | REAPER, NINJAM, Jesusonic |
| Website | Cockos |
Cockos, Inc is an American digital audio technology company founded in 2004, most notable for their digital audio workstation software REAPER.
Cockos was founded in 2004 by Justin Frankel after his departure from Nullsoft. [1] The company name stems from mis-hearing a quote from the movie Office Space. [2] While the company also develops small software tools often released under an open source license [3] its main focus is on music software. They released their first music software product, a programmable effects processing software called Jesusonic, on December 21, 2004. [4] Following up in 2005, they released the online music jam software NINJAM under the GPL, [5] with the release of their flagship product REAPER following later that year.
Cockos currently has two programmers. [6] Justin Frankel, the company founder, probably best known for his work on the Winamp media player application, and John Schwartz, who joined Cockos in 2008 and is the author of many audio plug-ins, notably a virtual analogue synthesizer called Olga. Christophe Thibault, an old colleague of Frankel's from his Nullsoft days, [1] was a Cockos employee between 2005 and 2014. Thibault is a French programmer and was the founder of the Kaillera and K-Meleon projects. In April 2014 he moved to Blizzard Entertainment.
Roland Corporation is a Japanese multinational manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, electronic equipment, and software. It was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on 18 April 1972. In 2005, its headquarters relocated to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It has factories in Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. As of December 2022, it employed 2,783 people. In 2014, it was subject to a management buyout by its CEO, Junichi Miki, supported by Taiyo Pacific Partners.
Justin Frankel is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer system, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) became an alternative to commercial products like InstallShield. The company's name is a parody of Microsoft. Mike the Llama is the company's mascot; this is frequently referred to in promotional material citing llamas. Frankel introduced the llama in Winamp's startup sound clip, inspired by the lyrics of Wesley Willis: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!"
WASTE is a peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend protocol and software application developed by Justin Frankel at Nullsoft in 2003 that features instant messaging, chat rooms, and file browsing/sharing capabilities. The name WASTE is a reference to Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, W.A.S.T.E. is an underground postal service.
Flanging is an audio effect produced by mixing two identical signals together, one signal delayed by a small and (usually) gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds. This produces a swept comb filter effect: peaks and notches are produced in the resulting frequency spectrum, related to each other in a linear harmonic series. Varying the time delay causes these to sweep up and down the frequency spectrum. A flanger is an effects unit that creates this effect.
Yamaha Corporation is a Japanese musical instrument and audio equipment manufacturer.
Origin Systems, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas. It was founded on March 3, 1983, by Richard Garriott and his brother Robert. Origin is best known for their groundbreaking work in multiple genres of video games, such as the Ultima and Wing Commander series. The company was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1992.
A digital audio workstation is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp creator, Justin Frankel and was first shipped in version 2.0a4 with Winamp 2.61. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. AVS is currently at version 2.83 and is included with Winamp, though the distributed version has later been reverted due to compatibility issues. Winamp currently ships with version 2.82 for Windows Vista and 2.81d for older Windows versions.
Digital Performer is a digital audio workstation and music sequencer software package published by Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) of Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms.
Tom Pepper is a computer programmer best known for his collaboration with Justin Frankel on the Gnutella peer-to-peer system. He and Frankel co-founded Nullsoft, whose most popular program is Winamp, which was sold to AOL in May 1999. He subsequently worked for AOL developing SHOUTcast, an Internet streaming audio service, with Frankel and Stephen "Tag" Loomis. After leaving AOL in 2004. he worked at RAZZ, Inc. He continues to collaborate with Frankel on independent projects like Ninjam.
Joseph Paul Montgomery was an American entrepreneur and inventor. In the mid 1980s, he was among the first to see the potential of personal computer technology in the field of video production and 3D animation. As Vice President of NewTek and Co-Founder and President of Play, Inc., Montgomery drove the creation of the first widely-successful digital video products, including the Emmy-award-winning Video Toaster and the Snappy Video Snapshot.
NINJAM stands for Novel Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music. The software and systems comprising NINJAM provide a non-realtime mechanism for exchanging audio data across the internet, with a synchronisation mechanism based on musical form. It provides a way for musicians to "jam" (improvise) together over the Internet; it pioneered the concept of "virtual-time" jamming. It was originally developed by Brennan Underwood, Justin Frankel, and Tom Pepper.
Music visualization or music visualisation, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way synchronized with the music as it is played.
REAPER is a digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer application created by Cockos. The current version is available for Microsoft Windows and macOS, as well as for Linux. REAPER acts as a host to most industry-standard plug-in formats and can import all commonly used media formats, including video. REAPER and its included plug-ins are available in 32-bit and 64-bit format.
REX2 is a proprietary type of audio sample loop file format developed by Reason Studios, a Swedish music software company.
Tomislav Uzelac is the Croatian programmer who wrote an amp MPEG audio decoder that is considered to be the first successful software MP3 player. Two students from the University of Utah, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev adapted the decoder to work on Windows and made it the MP3 decoding engine for the original version of Winamp.
Audio Random Access is an extension for audio plug-in interfaces, such as AU, VST and RTAS, allowing them to exchange a greater amount of audio information with digital audio workstation (DAW) software. It was developed in a collaboration between Celemony Software and PreSonus.