United Kingdom
15 years of MAGIX - 15 years of innovation
The history of the company's products
15 years in any branch of the IT industry feels like an eternity. Events like the failure of the Internet startup bubble at the turn of the century, the crisis after 9/11, and last year's market crash continue to shakeup the industry. Apparently unscathed by these disasters, MAGIX has developed from a five-man team of founders to a company of 300 people; a mid-sized company with branch offices all over Europe and overseas. Under the motto "15 years of innovation", MAGIX celebrates its 15th year since the release of its first multimedia program, MAGIX Music Maker.
Innovation and the MAGIX success formula
The MAGIX success formula's main ingredient is innovation, but here is a more detailed explanation from MAGIX chairman Jürgen Jaron: "Our vision to make innovative multimedia technology accessible to private users was often doubted back then. Computers were purely devices for calculation and not intended for brightening up everyday life with music, videos, and photos. In retrospect, we can say that we took the right step by working to make this vision a reality. Just like VW in Wolfsburg in 1974, we created Music Maker and managed to produce a new class of product that is the standard today. Innovation is still our motto, and that's why the majority of our company's investment goes into product development."
Founding years in East and West Germany
Back to the beginning: On exactly 15 September 1994, MAGIX Music Maker appeared as the first product from MAGIX Technology GmbH, which was founded one year earlier. MAGIX is an East-West German joint venture between developers Tilman Herberger and Titus Tost from Dresden and marketing and sales experts Dieter Rein, Erhard Rein, and Jürgen Jaron from Nordrhein Westphalia. Herberger and Tost can trace their beginnings to the Technical University of Dresden, and since 1989, they have been perfecting their digital audio workstation Samplitude Furore. By the way, the first version of Samplitude was developed for the Amiga. After 1994, Samplitude was the top product in the MAGIX audio portfolio. Herberger and Tost already achieved fame with their digital audio workstation.
The first MAGIX Music Maker - the seed of success
The common idea of making Samplitude's technology accessible to everyone by combining it with musical content (Music Maker) provided the five founders with their first real hit in the industry. Even the first Music Maker included a CD filled with sounds in addition to the program disks. This version offered numerous design options and managed to get the best out of private PCs.
The technical founding principles of MAGIX - the basis for growth
The first MAGIX product was very sparing with processor resources. The basis for this was the principle of non-destructiveness, meaning that the original sound files are not changed while they are being edited, but rather that the software creates a sort of superstructure around them so that the changes may be heard in real time.
Another founding principle of MAGIX was and remains object orientation. The material on the editing tracks may be split up into any number of pieces, moved, and faded in and out. Editing is easy thanks to "handles" that are attached to these objects. All effects are calculated in real time because no new files need to be created. Another founding principle of MAGIX is connected to this. Objects may be placed freely in the editing workspace.
"It's all about the music", or "Why content is so important"
One of the main factors that was so decisive for the success of Music Maker was simply the musical content. Essentially since the birth of MAGIX, musicians have always been a part of the team, and they have produced, composed, and played these important musical building blocks - the loops. Michael Rubner, a music producer at MAGIX, had this to say about the success: "The concept that a meal is only as good as its ingredients is easy to apply to the sound loops in MAGIX Music Maker and the success experience that the user gets from this product." At the beginning of the nineties, house and techno sounds started to form into concrete genres like film music, lounge, rock, and even flamenco. Completely new musical building blocks from version to version are also an attractive purchasing factor for Music Maker.
Good sound is key: Sound neutrality
The editing steps have always been and will always be open to numerous file and media types. Another technical cornerstone for MAGIX audio applications was introduced in 1998: The continuous use of floating-point technology guarantees that the sound maintains its nuances in spite of heavy digital processing. "This technology has become the maxim for the good sound preserved by the MAGIX pro products Samplitude and Sequoia", comments MAGIX Chief Developer and Co-Founder, Titus Tost, regarding the technology of the company's flagship product.
"Our technical founding principles are also essential today for MAGIX products and enable relatively short development times for new products and a product policy that adjusts to flexible market conditions", elaborates Tilman Herberger, MAGIX Chief Technical Officer.
From music to video, photos, and the Internet
It's therefore no surprise that MAGIX Music Maker was followed by additional innovations in other areas. The ability to create music videos easily has already been provided by Music Maker since 1997. The actual start in the video sector was in 2002 with MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, which provides freely editable tracks for a special level of flexibility. "No wonder the program has won more than 60 product comparison tests over the years, received numerous consumer awards, and dominated 70 percent of retail sales", adds Board Member and Chief Marketing Director, Dieter Rein with regard to the success in the video segment.
Besides audio and video, the photo segment is also extremely important in multimedia. In 2002, MAGIX Photos on CD & DVD started to develop the idea that normally conventional slideshows could be modernized by enriching them with movement and music, and it rocketed nearly instantaneously to the tops of software charts.
Still not satisfied, MAGIX expanded its multimedia portfolio in 2005 with a series of online services. Since that time, users have been able to present their multimedia results in the Online Album product, and even as a Flash website since 2006 with MAGIX Website Maker.
MAGIX sees things like you do - Music and facial recognition
2005 was also the year in which MAGIX introduced another technological innovation. MAGIX musician-recognizing technology called mufin analyzes and matches pieces of music using their similarity of the audio data. This method allows the technology to listen to music according to the mood, and then discover new titles on the Internet or on the local drive that match. After B2B cooperation, this innovation was made public in 2007 with the first Mufin MusicFinder and integrated with familiar programs like MAGIX MP3 Maker. Since 2007, mufin has been developed and marketed further by mufin GmbH, a MAGIX subsidiary.
The principle to make technical innovations available to the broader public was also maintained by MAGIX in 2006, when the company went public. In the photo segment, MAGIX Digital Photo Maker 2007 gave private users the option for the first time to detect photos according to the faces featured.
MAGIX managed to expand its photo and graphics segment significantly by acquiring Xara Group Ltd. in 2007. Xara products have been primarily successful in England in the USA since the 1980s. The products are also based on the principles of object orientation and non-destructiveness. No matter whether the subject is photos, graphics, or websites - all changes are immediately visible on the screen thanks to vector technology. "You could say that MAGIX and Xara were looking for each other at a technical level, and that they managed to find each other", explains Charles Moir, Founder of Xara, regarding the similarities of the two companies.
"Cloud computing", a concept that still wasn't common in 2007, describes one of the first products in this area that was introduced by MAGIX at CeBIT in 2007. MAGIX myGoya enables a clearly laid-out method of accessing applications and files remotely, and today it's a component of MAGIX Online World together with other MAGIX Online Services.
"Rescuing" day-to-day tasks with innovation - new product series, new target groups
A new approach, to combine software with hardware to make daily tasks easier, has been the goal since 2008 with the "Rescue" series from MAGIX. The first product to appear was "Rescue your Videotapes!". The message, which was simultaneously the product's name, was well received and made the solution one of MAGIX best-selling titles for 2008.
MAGIX attracted new target groups with new developments like 2008's MAGIX PC Check & Tuning, a solution for computer problems, and like 2009's MAGIX Video easy, a program for absolute video editing beginners, and MAGIX Xtreme Web Designer 5. "Website programs were around before, but these were either too rigidly connected to their templates or they were too complicated to use, maybe even requiring HTML knowledge. The solution from MAGIX allows all templates to be changed, and HTML websites are essentially drawn freehand and published for free. That's just another example of innovative technology that has been made accessible to users to open up even more doors of creativity", notes Jürgen Jaron, MAGIX Chief Executive.
MAGIX as an "upcoming champion" - company growth
Thanks to a high degree of innovative power, MAGIX has been the market leader in Germany and many European countries like France, Spain, Italy, and Benelux for a long time. At the end of 2008, the Berliners even managed to top American video software charts. Innovation and market leadership are also criteria for the Handelsblatt's list of upcoming world champions, which also featured MAGIX in 2008.
Parallel to developing its portfolio of over 60 products in Germany alone, the company has also continued to grow. Although it started as a small group of five at its Munich headquarters, MAGIX moved to Berlin in 1999 with a team of 15. The company now employs 170 people in Berlin. After its debut on the stock exchange in 2006 until today, the company has grown to a size of approximately 300 employees. To continue to remain innovative, MAGIX invests intensively in research and development. A large portion of MAGIX, nearly 90 employees, is employed at the company's development center in Dresden. Circa 35 employees are active at international branches all over Europe and in the USA, and these locations have been continuously expanded since 1997. MAGIX programs are also available in Russian, Polish, and Czech. The company's products are sold throughout Japan and in Saudi Arabia. Almost in the middle of Germany, MAGIX has placed its well-positioned logistics and administrative center in Lübbecke/Westphalia, which forms the third main headquarters of the company besides Berlin and Dresden.
About MAGIX:
MAGIX is a leading provider of high-quality software, online services, and digital content for multimedia communication. Since 1993, MAGIX has developed top software in Germany for creating, editing, managing, and presenting photos, graphics, videos, and music. MAGIX also operates internationally with branches in the USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and in the Netherlands. The products are targeted at nonprofessionals as well as professionals, and go beyond the limits of personal computers to seamlessly integrated online and mobile phone applications.
Measured by retail sales figures, MAGIX is the market leader in the field of multimedia software in Germany and in the most important European markets, and it also counts in the USA as one of the country's most successful market participants. 15 years of market activity and more than a thousand awards worldwide are proof of the company's innovative power.
15 years of MAGIX - 15 years of passion for innovation
