Denis Goekdag is a renaissance man. As the co-founder, CEO, and lead product designer at Zynaptiq, he seems to be able to do it all. A former professional musician from the age of 15, he also produced various musical acts and eventually got into sound design for films, games, and software companies. This led to designing the products and the algorithms to accompany the sounds he was making and ultimately the formation of Zynaptiq. In December 2011, along with Stephan Bernsee, a veteran of audio software creation, the company was founded – creating science, not fiction.
We're a technology-focused audio software company. We mainly do plugins, but we also create applications and licensable technology, such as our time-stretching and pitch-shifting products, which Stephan was one of the pioneers of. It is used all over the place, from streaming services and frame rate conversion applications to mobile phone voice changers and pro audio sequencers.
We focus on inventing new things. We don't do emulated compressors with photos of knobs and tubes and stuff like that. We actually look at workflows and try to figure out how we can do things in a more modern and convenient way. This has led us to invent quite a few things that are now commonplace. For example, in 2012, we released the first general-purpose reverb remover. Then we followed that up by creating an equalizer that adjusts itself, which is a commonplace thing nowadays—it's called a smart EQ. We also have things like real-time source separation and adaptive reverbs that adjusted themselves to fit your signal. So we do some fancy stuff, but we abide by our company claim: science, not fiction.
Other companies focus mainly on what's being sold right now, and then they jump on the bandwagon and do focus groups. What are people buying? What are people using? And then they base their ideas on that, which makes a lot of business sense. But we don't do that. We actually kind of ignore what others are doing, except in terms of the broad strokes. We look at what isn't being done and then we focus on what we think the next thing will be regarding how to work with audio. That's why our UIs look more like a heads-up display in a sci-fi movie than a vintage compressor. That's why we have some weird names for the functions because they actually describe what it's doing rather than copying some terminology.
Exactly. I'm just a musician, and I actually build the things that I’ve always wished I had in the studio—things that would solve the problems that I run into when working with audio. In a way, it's not really anticipating a need, but understanding that you need a specific item or a particular workflow. For example, we have this product called PITCHMAP. It takes real-time audio input and allows you to change the key and scale on the fly. And that really just comes from me doing disco house remixes. So I think that working in the musical world really helps with creating solutions that give other musicians the opportunity to use products that are useful and expand their creativity.
It’s an interesting topic right now. What we're seeing is a lot of venture capital-funded non-musicians pushing into the music market out of a purely commercial perspective, where they ideally just synthesize the music based on the producer's description of what it should sound like and just skip the whole musician doing anything creatively. That is the opposite of what we are aiming for.
What we use AI for is assisting the producer or the musician in doing what they want to do and not doing the job for them. So the way we employ AI is more like an exoskeleton, empowering someone to do the heavy lifting rather than having a robot do it. Because what's the point of making yourself obsolete? I don't see that. Many AI products out there right now are also very traditional in the sense that they are kind of a black box design. It learns a bunch of stuff, and then you give it some sort of parameters as input and you get something back. It’s very hit or miss. You like it or you don't. And if you don't, you click it again and you keep going until you hear something that resembles what you meant. But you cannot really customize it or adjust it or tweak it. So it's not a very accurate representation of what you had in mind. But we aren’t aiming at an end-to-end AI solution. We aim at empowering people.
There were two things. One, Pro Tools (AVID) required us to code sign the AAX plugins with PACE, and two, our users requested it! We have a lot of customers in the post-production business—very high-end professionals that move around to various studios, and they just love the convenience of attaching their iLok and being ready. Other areas where it was requested were large facilities that would have air-gapped workstations where there's no internet inside. And your typical online activation system just won't work for these people. They need the ability to transport a license to the workstation without any security breach possibilities because of an internet connection.
"We are really happy with PACE products and the flexibility of their licensing solutions. Their support is reliable and solid."
The relationship is really good because all of them are very cool, always available on short notice, and very cooperative. If we have some special licensing terms that we need for a project, they assist us with everything we need no matter how complicated. We are really happy with the flexibility of the licensing and the license management for the user. We think it's a very solid solution.
It’s a cool system. We like it. In terms of our backend and build infrastructure, it works reliably. It's easy to integrate into our scripts. There aren’t a whole lot of things we found that it couldn't do.
We would probably be licensing a competing solution or building our own. And that means investing a lot more money to come up with our own solutions. So it’s a very convenient thing to work with PACE. The scope of the solution is very complete. For many users, it really is a must-have.
We trust the brand. It's reliable. Downtime is very minimal. Updates are very fast. If a third-party computer solution changes security features that end up breaking something, the PACE guys are very fast with fixing it. It’s a good solution for our products and our business.
