It’s everywhere. Anytime you read a news piece about music manufacturers, somebody is buying somebody else. The latest example is Digidesign buying the German Wizoo. The announcement came on the 22nd of August.

Wizoo is known for its books, and recent virtual instrument and effects products: Latigo, Darbuka and the W2 Reverb.

The company features famous film composer Hans Zimmer as one of its shareholders. Wizoo has collaborated extensively with Steinberg:

In 1999 Wizoo began a successful alliance with Steinberg Media Technologies, starting with the LM-4 software drum machine and producing pioneering and best-selling software instruments such as The Grand, Virtual Guitarist, Xphraze, Hypersonic and Virtual Bassist.

Digidesign, on the other hand, is the maker of the acclaimed professional DSP-based platform for music production, Pro Tools, which is used in studios around the world.

Prior to buying Wizoo, Digidesign’s parent company, Avid, also bought out hardware manufacturer M-Audio. This explains the radical entry of Digidesign into the small and mid-market segment with Pro Tools M-Powered.

Watch out for the latest release of Pro Tools 7, this October 7, together with a new M-Powered version.

It is to be noted that Kawai has announced a partnership with Wizoo.


Cakewalk, the American manufacturer of the Windows-only Sonar sequencer as well as the all-in-one software studio Project 5 v2, has itself reecently acquired virtual soft-synth maker RGC Audio. The latter is known for its excellent free and commercial VST instruments, namely Triangle II, sfz, and Z3Ta+.

This acquisition enables Cakewalk to integrate RGC Audio’s know-how about excellent-sounding soft synths into Project 5 v2. The new Dimension synth as well as PSYN II are the results.

A year ago, Roland and Cakewalk announced that they would collaborate. This explains the integration of an Edirol GM synth and more recently the Roland GrooveSynth module into Cakewalk’s products.