OSC Deck
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OSC Deck and OSC Deck II (later versions sold as Macromedia Deck II and BIAS Deck 3.0) were multi-track digital audio workstation software applications for the Macintosh computer, originally designed by San Francisco software company OSC and marketed by Digidesign in 1990.[1]
The Residents are known to have used both the first and second iterations of Deck in the 1990s, beginning with the production of their Freak Show album in 1990. When they encountered difficulties using the original 4-track version of the program,[1] OSC are said to have sent programmers to The Residents' studio (at the expense of the software company) to revamp the software on the fly to accommodate The Residents' needs.
Some of the improvements developed by OSC's programmers on-site in The Residents' studio were apparently integrated into the later 8-track version of the program, Deck II, which was available by 1994.[1] In 1996, Deck II was bought by Macromedia,[2] who released their version of the program shortly thereafter (typically bundled with Macromedia's own SoundEdit 16 and Director Multimedia Studio software).
In August 1997, Deck II was the subject of a rare endorsement by The Residents, in a magazine advertisement which ran in Electronic Musician, Mix and Keyboard magazines. The Residents appeared in the advertisement for free, in return for the favor the developers had previously done for the group in coming out to their studio to assist them, and out of genuine appreciation for the program.
By the end of 1997, Macromedia had abandoned development of the planned Deck 3.0 upgrade;[2] the following year, Deck was bought by digital audio software developer BIAS, Inc., who introduced their Deck 3.0 in 2001, followed by Deck 3.5 in 2002.
See also
External links and references
- "Deck II Advertisements" at RZWeb (archived via archive.org)
- BIAS at Wikipedia
- Macromedia Deck II at Macromedia Wiki
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Michael Goldberg, "Consume the Minimum, Produce the Maximum", Wired, December 1st 1994
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Matt Smith, "Death of a Multimedia Phenomenon", SF Weekly, December 24th 1997