One of the most promising projects in the history of BeOS (and believe me, there have been many), used to be SampleStudio. It was last developed on several months ago, after which it was opensourced. Ever since, nobody has taken on the project.

Dane Scott, radio host of BeOS Radio, has now shouted for action on his BeOS Audio site LeBuzz. He suggest starting a campaign to get SampleStudio finished, and have at least one decent and complete audio suite on the BeOS platform. The reason why Frans van Nispen dropped his SampleStudio project was this (from the Q&A that I posted several days ago): "SampleStudio required a lot of virtual memory, and BeOS was simply too slow for that. Refraction was already our biggest project and because I have not such a great amount of spare time to work on any project at all, it is just more important to get Refraction done first.".

After a series of request and some consideration, Frans graciously left us the source code of SampleStudio, available from the Xentronix website. It seems that Dane has been looking forward to see one of those begging for the source code to start working on it, and drag it out of the beta stage.

Great audio applications were in production for BeOS till Be, Inc. pulled the plug on BeOS (in some nicer terms known as the "focus shift"). These projects were all cancelled, and smaller companies, including Xentronix, started development on their audio suites, but these projects all hooked off one by one at a certain point as well.

SampleStudio is well-developed and just needs some work before it could be called "done" to some extent of being a professional audio editing tool. If you want to support the suggested campaign, don't wait up and go to LeBuzz!