I don't mean this to be criticism against Magix and in actuality I'm thankful they seized the opportunity to take Vegas out of the hands of Sony and continue to develop it.
However, today I was thinking of the original reasons I jumped onboard the Vegas as well as Acid, and Sound Forge bandwagons back in the Sonic Foundry days.
1st let me define "Game Changing". To me Game Changing is a technology developed that solves a common problem in the industry which no one has yet thought of or been able to solve, where once it's out there, all the other competitors end up having to catch up and attempt to solve that problem as well, to remain competitive.
So what is anything that has been a "Game Changer" that you can think of which has been developed since Magix has owned the product? Personally, I'm coming up empty. It's all been more along the lines of follow the leader and catch up, rather than anything ground breaking.
Some examples from the past.
When Vegas 1st came out, it was the 1st DAW where you could easily manage working with different audio with multiple sample rates and bit depths, and audio formats. Prior there was ProTools where you often found, you were working on a project at a 44.1Khz sample rate and the audio had to be in .AIF or .Wav format, but then a client brings in some audio for you to load into the project which is at 48Khz and .MP3 format. So you throw that audio into the project and the 1st thing you notice is that it sounds like the voice over people are drunk because it's playing back at a slower speed or you just can't load it into the project. You then had to take that audio, load it into another program, further process it so it was now at that common denominator sample rate and format. Vegas comes along, and amazingly you can throw most any audio format as well as sample rate at it and move it around your project with ease. At that time, this was something unheard of but since then everyone had to catch up and provide that same type of solution which we now pretty much take for granite. Then they followed that and did the same thing for video, all in the same program.
When Acid Pro came out it was a game changer. It was the 1st program to solve the problem of being able to change the tempo of audio without changing the pitch, but if you wanted to change the pitch to make it play in a different musical key signature you could do that as well. It was a solution to what many had been doing with midi sequencing prior but now working with actual audio instead. Since then pretty much every DAW had to come with a similar solution to remain competitive.
When Sound Forge 1st came out, it was really the 1st real serious work audio program on the PC platform and it came with an easy to use interface. Prior to Sound Forge the common misconception was that "You have to own a MAC to be able to do any serious audio recording/mixing work." Sound Forge came out and pretty much broke down those walls for every DAW we see on the PC today. Then the solutions on the MAC side was Digidesign's "Sound Designer" which compared to Sound Forge at the time was much harder to work with and had an awful user interface.....but it was "reliable and stable".
I originally got excited, when Acid Pro "Next" came out by Magix with a feature called "Stem Maker". I thought I was seeing a game changing innovation from Magix. Stem Maker attempted to provide a solution to the problem of not being able to unmix your audio once it's already mixed. It promised to take a mixed audio track and be able to extract the separate vocal, drum, bass, and guitar parts out of it so you could use those pieces as separate audio tracks. In the past, this was unheard of, where we used to use the analogy "you can't pull the white out of already mixed can of red paint". However, I later learned this was a technology developed by Zynaptic and licensed to Magix to use in Acid Pro. Further disappointment came about when that licensing fell through like they often do when you're licensing technology and they removed that feature from Acid. More salt into wounds, now other audio programs are adopting the same type of feature but using a technology by Deezer which works better than Zynaptic's.
So can anyone think of any game changing innovations that have been developed by Magix, or are they mainly one of the many technology followers continually playing catch up?