Brian Salter

Brian Salter is a composer who worked for Beatnik, joining in 1996 and leaving in 1998. He wrote many music tracks while working there, as well as aiding the design and testing of their software such as the Beatnik Audio Engine, which the company had acquired during the development of WebTV. After going freelance, he maintained a close relationship with the company and was later involved in creating many ringtones and mobile soundbanks.

Outside of Beatnik, he composed and designed sounds for video games such as Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, Oni and several downloadable Danger Hiptop games. He also composed tracks for royalty free music libraries following his work with Beatnik, although he is no longer active in the field of music.

WebTV and Beatnik
Salter was employed by game development company Presage during 1994, but left the following year. In 1996, he was contracted by Igor's Software Laboratories to create music for WebTV using SoundMusicSys, as he previously had experience composing for games using the engine. Thomas Dolby was also involved in composing several tracks for the project, and was impressed by the engine; this resulted in Headspace acquiring Igor and its engine. This led to Salter joining said company as a composer, where he wrote several tracks in a variety of styles for the Headspace Music Library. He was also consulted to aid a redesign of SoundMusicSys, which became the Beatnik Audio Engine.

He left during 1998 and became freelance again, but continued to do contract work for the company, now renamed to Beatnik; this included composing further tracks for the library, as well as creating CD audio versions for FirstCom Music's CD releases of library material.

He also created many miniBAE soundbanks, such as Nokia's small and large soundbanks. His involvement with Beatnik is known to stretch as late as 2005, where he created several mobileBAE soundbanks that shipped on some phones using the engine.

After briefly moving to Japan in the early 2000s, he worked on projects for many of Beatnik's Japanese clients, as well as a Yamaha SMAF version of the Headspace Music Library. This impressed Sony Ericsson, who contracted him to write ringtones for their phones, as well as producing the sound bank used on Symbian UIQ phones.

Regarding where the instruments were sourced, Salter wrote: "I was involved in most or all of the soundbanks. We sourced a lot of the sounds from our own recordings; Matt Levine contributed guitar, bass, and drums, I did clarinets & saxes, and some other acoustic instruments such as strings were recorded with volunteer student musicians if I remember correctly. Some sounds were sourced from a Yamaha VL-70, an early physical modeling hardware synth. Finally, some more sources were provided by a musician who had done sampling for Yamaha romplers. His name was Ed Mann, IIRC. Additional samples may have come from Jennifer Hruska, founder of Sonivox, who worked briefly for Beatnik around the time that Mobile BAE was in development."

Nokia
Salter created Nokia's small and large soundbanks. Prior to those, he created a bank named SalterNokia, which was a predecessor to the small and large banks, and an edited version was later used as Sony Ericsson's UIQ bank. He also created dozens of polyphonic ringtones and alerts for Nokia between 2001 and 2004.

Sony Ericsson
Sony Ericsson was another one of Salter's clients via Beatnik. He produced SMAF conversions of tracks from the Headspace Music Library; these were specifically intended for its Japanese phones. He was later hired to create arrangements of various classical and pop tracks, which he found challenging due to the lack of pitch bend support. Later, he created optimized versions of the SalterNokia bank for the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900 respectively. Three of his older RMF tracks were also licensed for use as ringtones on the P800.

Danger
Salter later went on to do contract work for Danger, creating the music and sound effects for games such as Pumpjack and Bob's Journey: Lake of Doom.

Credits
See Brian Salter/Credits