Beatnik

Beatnik, Inc. (previously Headspace, Inc) was a company focused on MIDI wavetable synthesis. The company was founded by Thomas Dolby in 1996.

Beatnik's first product was MiniBAE, which they bought the rights to from Steve Hales' Igor Software Labs. It was initially designed for small web audio, but after the dot-com bubble, their only remaining 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 developed another audio engine called MobileBAE, which used DLS files instead of Beatnik's proprietary soundbank format. As well as the previous three companies, this was licensed by many other companies such as Motorola, Samsung and LG for various phones.

Beatnik became defunct in December 2009, and subsequently open-sourced the MiniBAE codebase. 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 shut down.