An engineer, a keyboard player and a Commodore 64.

Steinberg began in Hamburg in 1984. Its founders were Karl “Charlie” Steinberg, an audio engineer, and Manfred Rürup, a keyboard player; Sound On Sound named the pair as founders in 2003, and the company says they met in 1983 at a recording session for a German rock band. English Wikipedia also gives Rürup’s wife, Nicole, a part in the founding and says the business started in the Rürups’ apartment; we note that, but the company’s own history names two founders.

Their starting point was MIDI, then a new standard. Steinberg says Charlie Steinberg wrote a multitrack sequencer on a Commodore 64 with a self-built MIDI interface, and that the two set up Steinberg Research and released Pro-16, the first program to carry the Steinberg name, in 1984. English Wikipedia dates Pro-16 to 1985, and Sound On Sound reviewed it in April 1986, so we give both dates. The Atari ST, with MIDI ports built in, came next: Pro-24 appeared in 1986, and the company says it was renamed Steinberg Soft- und Hardware GmbH in 1987. English Wikipedia, citing Peter Manning’s history of electronic music, credits much of Pro-24’s programming to Werner Kracht, whom Steinberg hired in 1985 while the founders worked on other products.

Cubase arrived in 1989, first for the Atari. Audio recording followed with Cubase Audio, released for the Macintosh in 1991 and for Windows a year later, according to German Wikipedia, citing the historian Peter Manning. The WaveLab audio editor followed in 1995, first for Windows.

VST, ASIO and a growing family.

Steinberg’s largest legacy is a pair of standards. In 1996 it built Virtual Studio Technology (VST) into Cubase; the company says Cubase VST was the first native software to put a real-time studio — EQ, effects, mixing and automation — inside the computer, playing 24 audio tracks on an Apple Macintosh. The Windows version followed in 1997, and German Wikipedia says that release established VST and the ASIO low-latency driver protocol as open standards for other companies’ plug-ins and audio hardware. Cubase VST 3.7, in 1999, added an interface for software instruments, English Wikipedia says.

The VST 3 development kit followed in early 2008. In 2025, the company says, VST 3.8 was released under the MIT open-source licence and ASIO moved to a dual proprietary and GPLv3 model; the VST 3 kit’s public code repository does list the MIT licence. In 2026 Steinberg marked VST’s 30th anniversary with interviews in which developers from Waves and Softube credited the format with opening plug-in making to small companies.

The product line grew around Cubase. Nuendo, a workstation aimed at post-production and broadcast, was shown at the NAMM show in 2000 after four years of work, German Wikipedia says; the sampler HALion, whose name German Wikipedia links to the HAL 9000 computer in Kubrick’s 2001, followed in 2001; and in 2002 a rewritten Cubase SX used Nuendo’s audio engine. In 2012 Steinberg hired the former developers of the Sibelius notation program after Avid closed its London office, and opened a London research centre that November; their program, Dorico, was released on 19 October 2016 and takes its name from Valerio Dorico, a Renaissance music printer in Rome, according to German Wikipedia, citing Sound On Sound. Steinberg also sells the Cubasis app for tablets and phones, audio interfaces and controllers, and the spectral editor SpectraLayers. In 2022, it says, it moved from the USB eLicenser key to account-based licensing.

Software as an instrument.

The seven makers in this guide build the tools of the home and project studio: digital audio workstations, the software in which music is now recorded, edited and mixed, and — in TASCAM’s case — the hardware that came before them. TEAC introduced the first Portastudio, a four-track cassette recorder with a built-in mixer, at a New York audio convention in 1979.

The oldest software house here is Steinberg of Hamburg, founded in 1984 by Karl Steinberg and Manfred Rürup and the maker of Cubase; Yamaha says it acquired the company in 2005. Cakewalk began in Boston in 1987 as Greg Hendershott’s Twelve Tone Systems, came under Roland’s majority control in 2008 and Gibson’s in 2013, and has been a brand of BandLab Technologies of Singapore since 2018.

Three are European and younger. Reason Studios, founded in Stockholm in 1994 as Propellerhead Software, was bought in January 2026 by LANDR of Montreal, Music Business Worldwide reported. Image-Line, the maker of FL Studio, was founded by Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen and gives its headquarters as Ghent, Belgium. Bitwig was founded in Berlin in 2009, and its company is registered there.

Cockos, the maker of REAPER, says it was founded in 2004; archived copies of its website show its postal address moving from San Francisco to Manhattan and, by late 2024, to Rosendale, New York. TASCAM is a brand of TEAC Corporation, which is listed in Tokyo, based in Tama, Tokyo, and was majority-owned by Gibson from 2013 to 2020.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Pinnacle to Yamaha.

Steinberg did not stay independent. It planned to list on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 2001 but postponed, Sound On Sound reported, quoting sales of €13 million in 1999 and €22 million in 2000. On 18 December 2002 the news broke that it had been bought by Pinnacle Systems, the Californian desktop-video company, for $24 million in cash and shares, the magazine said, a few months after Apple had bought Steinberg’s German rival Emagic. Pinnacle and Yamaha both date the purchase to January 2003. Two years later Pinnacle sold it on. Yamaha announced on 21 December 2004 that it had agreed to buy all of Steinberg for $28.5 million after a closed bidding round, and that the purchase would take effect in late January 2005; Steinberg dates its place in the Yamaha group from 21 January 2005. Sources therefore give both 2004 and 2005 for the takeover.

Yamaha traced the two companies’ ties to the mid-1990s, when it bundled Steinberg software, and to a joint project, Studio Connections, begun in April 2004. Steinberg says the closer cooperation brought new hardware from 2008, and it remains based in Hamburg as Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, with an office in London. Its website calls it “a world leader in sound technology.”

For a design guide, Steinberg shows how a company’s technical standards can travel further than its own name: the VST label appears on plug-ins from makers with no other link to Hamburg. Compare Yamaha, its parent, and Waves Audio, one of the plug-in makers that grew up around the format. For this guide we use a deep navy, a signal red and studio greys with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Steinberg’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.