Love this company, Sad to see it go, but the sign was everywhere, since X4 a decade ago there was hardly any developments and you Were paying for backward compatibility as one had several important projects on it and the export/exchange feature never worked…
Fortunately SpectraLayers had already found a new home in 2019. 
The long and winding road of SpectraLayers goes from Divide Frame ==> Sony Creative Software ==> Magix ==> Steinberg
A discussion on the Magix forum. Pinch of salt required?
Thank heavens SpectraLayers escaped in time … unfortunately, MAGIX also now have Acid (which they destroyed) and Vegas … what will happen with their activation servers now, I wonder?
Activation servers are truly frightening for customers who depend on the software they have legitimately purchased.
It’s quite nerve-wracking about Steinberg’s current licensing mechanism.
Magix lost me a few years back with their dismal and buggy Sound Forge upgrades at full street price. I tired of it and bought into Wave Lab and am glad I did.
I still have an affection for Vegas Pro, it is just that upgrades feel like money grabs instead of genuine product improvements.
Agreed, their policy is not to offer upgrades, it’s to sell you the same product all over again each year, with totally artifical discounts, nevertheless the product is never sold at what they claim is full price. Oddly enough, I just got another one of these “offers” today, to “upgrade” Vegas Pro, yet there’s no warning that you may be giving your money to an insolvent company.
I did the exact same thing. I was using sound forge pro since the beginning of the sony era, and move it to magix. But they expect full price for every upgrade. I bought Wavelab and move on. I also left my Vegas license behind, and replaced it with Da Vinci Resolve.
Upgrading Samplitude Pro X Suite was only < $40 less than crossgrading to Cubase Pro, never mind the $169 crossgrade deals to Studio One Professional during promotional periods. Why pay that price to fight for your life just to have issues and MIDI Production feature requests heard over there?
Their pricing basically functioned as a marketing campaign for competitors within their own user base.
Cubase,Studio One, REAPER, DaVinci Resolve Studio, WaveLab Pro, etc.
Its at the point now that the only reason [Edit: many] people consider buying it is to get SpectraLayers pro at a discount when MAGIX has a mega deal outside of Steinberg promotional periods.
They buy it for the SpectraLayers license and never bother installing the DAW. And just get on the Steinberg upgrade path from there.
Samplitude has the issue where the devs dont want to put in the work to address the producer and composition markets, and a small niche of dedicated fans - willing to pay anything for very little - made the idea of monetizing existing users like new users actually seem like a viable long term strategy to them.
They dramatically increased upgrade pricing while contracting from a 2 to 1 year release cycle. So, you were paying a LOT more for upgrades twice as often… and many of those upgrades would pass for 0.1 patches in other products.
My upgrades from cubase 10.5 up to 13 cost not much more than one Samplitude Pro X7 → X8 Suite upgrade. Had i stayed on Samplitude, I would have paid almost 4x as much unless I’d committed to always being 1 version behind and waiting for mega deals - and it still would have been noticeably more expensive… …
They finally lowered Sequoia pricing with this release. That probably needed to happen years ago. Upgrade costs are still illogical. $815 for a $1,600 DAW.
What other DAW on the market delivers 50%+ in value year over year via product upgrades? Samplitude has a similar pricing strategy.
This is like Steinberg charging $249-299 yearly for Cubase upgrades.
They probably bought that abandonware off of Sony with borrowed cash. Not good. Illogically, they sold off the one product from that acquisition that had a competitive future in the current market.
I bought Samplitude at Christmas for Spectralayers and a crossgrade to Cubase 13 discount. I actually like Samplitude i insalled it and checked it out. I use it occasionally. I bought Vegas 19 a while back from a humblebundle deal it and soundforge work just fine.
Vegas Pro is the least performant, most crash prone NLE I’ve ever used in my life. I went to Resolve Studio and never looked back.
Magix is still existing and still working on Vegas Pro. I use it a lot without any issues that prevent me getting my work done. A new release of Vegas 21 is due out soon with lots of fixes and new features.
Vegas Pro 21 was released in November 2023, and yes, updates are still being released … yet there doesn’t seem to be any mention of the insolvency of the parent company over on the Vegas forum. The concern is about what will happen to the product lines if and when the parent company is sold.
Perhaps Steinberg need a video editing solution? 
So you’re not using Sony Vegas Pro 12 anymore? 
My website badly needs updated . Vegas 21 pro and Cubase 12 and 13 pro . In fact most of the stuff listed is long gone.
Times change and we adapt in time. We had heavily invested in ‘discreet edit’ Autodesks cutting edge NLE and all of sudden it was discontinued with no rhyme or reason. For audio we loved Nuendo Version 2. But at the same time it was sold to Yamaha.
We instinctively knew that It was MC and FCP for next 20 years . FCP was an interesting move as it worked with Shake our main compositing software and came with a fabulous “Soundtrack Pro” a 5.1 surround Audio editor|NLE . while Magix S/P remained part of our audio toolset.
After for more that 20 years we are back to Nuendo and DaVinci Resolve which reminded me of ‘Discreet Edit’ and Fusion has replaced Shake.
MAGIX appear to be having something like a fire sale at the moment, “upgrades” (repurchases) are cheaper than ever, yet there’s still no mention of the insolvency on their website, and I don’t see any discussion of it on either the Vegas or ACID forums.
Is it “everything must go”, and then power down the activation servers?
Well, they ARE the experts on “useless upgrade” money grabs.
Why not one more for the road? And thanks for all the fish, er… lettuce, er I mean money.
Nonsense. I have been a Vegas Pro and Soundforge user for many years. And a Cubase user even longer. I have bought every Cubase upgrade and quite often they don’t seem to offer much to me. Most Vegas upgrades genuinely offer new facilities that are useful. And their suites offer BorisFX plugins that are industry standard. I hate to see companies like Magix and Waves being bashed for offering “sales” or “deals”. They make great products.
Acid Pro 11 going @ 96% discount for only $79.99. Now, if ACID Pro was worth 2 grand, that might be something. But, no, it’s barely worth 79 bucks. This is the kind of marketing shenanigans that insults the intelligence.
