KRISTAL Audio Engine
The KRISTAL Audio Engine (commonly referred to as KRISTAL or KAE) is a digital audio workstation for Microsoft Windows. It is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use. The successor to this product became what is now known as Studio One. HistoryInitial Development![]() KRISTAL began development in 1999, as the university thesis project of Matthias Juwan. At that time it had a different look and feel, and was known as the Crystal Audio Engine, a name derived from the song The Crystal Ship by The Doors.[1] Following a public beta period, the initial version, renamed to the KRISTAL Audio Engine, was released in 2004, under the developer name of Kreatives.[2] K2 and KristalLabsOn 24 December 2004 the KRISTAL development team announced that they were working on the successor to the KRISTAL Audio Engine, based on a new infrastructure. The development team planned for this successor to include cross-platform support for both Windows and macOS.[3] The new software, known as K2, entered the Alpha development stage in July 2005.[4] ![]() On 18 September 2006, it was announced that all work and rights to the source code of K2 had been taken over by KristalLabs Software Ltd., a private start-up company co-founded by KRISTAL lead developer, Matthias Juwan, and Wolfgang Kundrus, who had previously worked on Cubase, Nuendo and HALion.[5][6][7] Ownership for the original KRISTAL Audio Engine, however, did not transition to KristalLabs.[8] PreSonus and Studio OneKristalLabs further developed K2 in cooperation with the American music technology company, PreSonus, before becoming part of PreSonus in 2009.[9] Following this acquisition, the final result of the K2 development was re-branded and released as the first version of the PreSonus DAW, Studio One, for macOS and Windows.[5][10] The former KristalLabs logo (representing a series of hexagons, like the one from the original KRISTAL Audio Engine logo, tessellated together) was used as the basis for the logo of Studio One.[11] Since this time, all versions of Studio One have been developed and released by PreSonus. FunctionalityKRISTAL is free for personal & educational use, with licensing options for commercial use.[12] The primary window of the application is a digital mixer, but it provides separate, built-in components for additional functionality, such as audio sequencing and live audio input/recording.[13] It includes built-in effects, such as EQ, chorus, delay and reverb, but also supports the use of third-party VST plug-ins.[14] It can support up to 16 channels of audio; however, it does not provide support for MIDI.[14] The application uses 32-bit audio processing and supports both MME & ASIO drivers. In addition to its native Kristal project files, it is also compatible with WAVE, AIFF, FLAC and OGG Vorbis files.[14] See alsoReferences
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