joegratz.net

So it turns out that some of the sample WAV files that come with Windows were edited with Sound Forge 4.5. Not surprising — that was my editor of choice in my sound designer days.

The surprising thing is that Microsoft was using a pirated copy of Sound Forge.

See, Sound Forge marks every WAV file it creates with the name of the program and the name of the user that copy is registered to. And in the case of the Windows Media Player demo WAVs, that name is Deepz0ne. You can see the output here, and I’ve confirmed it by opening the copies of the WMP demo WAVs up in a hex editor on my machine. Deepz0ne is a member of the renowned audio software cracking group Radium. (This group may be the most influential factor in my successes as a sound designer for theatre — but I digress.) They released cracked versions of all manner of audio software in the late 1990s until they petered out in 2000. The really remarkable thing about Radium was that they weren’t just pirates; they made installers that were slicker than the real thing, and occasionally released their own codec packs that proved more reliable than the official versions.

So the lesson here is twofold. First, scour every bit you release, especially when pressing millions of CDs and installing files onto every Windows desktop in the world. And second, pirating software is bad and wrong, but everybody does it when they need a special-purpose tool for a one-time job — even Microsoft.