Beatnik

Beatnik, Inc. (Headspace, Inc before 1999) was a company focused on MIDI wavetable synthesis. The company was founded by Thomas Dolby in 1993.

History
Thomas Dolby first founded Headspace in 1993. Headspace's first products were the Virtual String Quartet, and music for video games such as Cyberia and Obsidian.

In 1995, Headspace acquired Power of Seven, which brought Paul Sebastien over to Headspace. Both composers made a few demos to demonstrate what they could do. In 1996, they began composing music for WebTV. While working on that project, they met the IGORLABS team (Steve Hales, Peter Drescher, Jim Nitchals, Brian Salter) and their SoundMusicSys engine. Headspace was also developing the Rich Music Format, a container for MIDI and samples. There were plans to integrate it with other software synth engines, such as the Yamaha SYXG-50, but they settled on acquiring SoundMusicSys as Dolby was impressed by it. The company developed it into the Beatnik web plugin, which could play Headspace's RMF files.

Salter joined the company too, as well as composers Blake Leyh and Kim Cascone. Sebastien served as the Director of Production, and built a music library consisting of several collections spanning various styles. Other composers were contracted to write music for the library too, such as Drescher. However, by 1998 the four composers left the company. Sebastien went on to become a marketing officer, while the others continued their music careers albeit as freelance. Salter continued to do lots of freelance work for the company, which had been renamed to Beatnik.

Mobile technology
Cell phone audio would end up saving Beatnik after the dot-com bubble, as the market for web audio had become too niche to be profitable. Headspace was preparing for cellphones to have polyphonic audio as far back as 1997, according to Sebastien. They were already designing mobile sound banks by that time, but it was not until 1999 it became their main focus. Salter, who still had a close relationship with the company, was contracted to create various mobile sound banks and ringtones for other companies. The BAE was reworked into miniBAE, a lighter version designed for portable devices.

Their first mobile client was Nokia, who licensed the technology for use on their phones to play polyphonic ringtones. Sony Ericsson and Danger also used the engine. They later rewrote the engine to use DLS files and named it MobileBAE. As well as the previous three companies, this was licensed by many other companies such as Motorola, Samsung and LG for various phones.

Later years
Dolby stepped down from his CEO position in 2002, and was replaced by Don Millers. He went on to found the company Retro Ringtones, which provided ringtones in a variety of formats intended for companies to license for their products. The company appears to have went defunct around late 2005.

Despite success with mobile technology, Beatnik continued to otherwise struggle and became defunct in December 2009. The company was fully dissolved by the end of 2011. Hales eventually open-sourced the miniBAE codebase with permission from the company. However, mobileBAE has not been open-sourced due to potential legal issues, as it was used by Nokia and Samsung until 2013, four years after Beatnik started shutting down.