We're not quite sure how this one slipped past us, but longtime Mac software developer BIAS, Inc. ceased operations back on June 9 after 16 years of serving the pro audio and music community.
Storify user Thomas L. Raukamp has assembled a timeline following the demise of BIAS, Inc., the California-based developer of such pro audio software as Peak and SoundSoap. According to a post on the company's website (which appears to be no longer working), BIAS closed its doors back on June 9, 2012 with virtually no fanfare from the blogosphere.
"BIAS, Inc. has ceased operations," the website post on June 9 reads. "We would like to thank all the BIAS customers and friends for the opportunity to have served the audio community for over 16 amazing years."
Founded in 1994 by composer and software engineer Steve Berkley, Berkley Integrated Audio Software (BIAS) launched Peak as Mac software for editing samples used in his own music. Berkley decided to offer the stereo sample editor as a commercial product which debuted at the NAMM show in January, 1996 and eventually followed it up with digital audio workstation tools such as Deck, SoundSoap and the Master Perfection Suite, a collection of audio effects processors.
CEO and president Berkley blamed the demise of BIAS on "the conduct of certain employees" which "resulted in disruptive interpersonal relationships."
"Despite the high quality of our products and team, the disruption contributed to a lack of sales and marketing effectiveness that was fatal to the company," Berkley noted in a forum post to GearSlutz.com. "Our products remain among the best in the industry, and we exploring various avenues that we hope will result in our customers still receiving the benefit of the products they have valued in the past."
It's not only the BIAS website that appears to be down for the count: The company's Authorization Manager Server throws back an "unknown explanation" that authorization or deauthorization efforts were not successful, meaning existing owners of the product are out of luck for now if they need to move the product to a new machine. (BIAS products were historically tied to fairly aggressive copy protection schemes.)
While BIAS software supported both Mac and Windows, the company was probably most beloved by Macintosh users, and that certainly included this particular writer. Here's hoping BIAS products will resurface, but in the meantime, Raukamp has assembled an excellent "Farewell from the Net" on Storify for all to see.
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