Arboretum Announces BeOS Development Effort

RELEASED January 28, 1999

For more information contact:

Arboretum Systems Inc.
Todd Souvignier, Marketing Director, todds@arboretum.com
Tel: (650) 738-4750
Fax: (650) 738-5699

Arboretum Announces BeOS Development Effort

Los Angeles, CA - January 28, 1999 Arboretum Systems today announced support for the BeOS and the porting of their Hyperprism and Ray Gun audio software to the BeOS. The Hyperprism signal processing and sound design package and the Ray Gun noise reduction tool are the latest additions to the comprehensive audio toolset being assembled for BeOS. Announcements from other firms prior to and at NAMM indicate that Arboretum joins a wave of prominent audio software developers now migrating to BeOS.

"I am very excited by the BeOS" said Arboretum founder and CEO Georges Jaroslaw. "I have been longing for an operating system which is more audio and video oriented. There is a huge potential to benefit users and I see the BeOS as a major milestone in the history of the digital media industry."

BeOS features such as symmetric multiprocessing and pervasive multithreading hold special appeal for Arboretum's engineering team. "After spending several years working around the real-time limitations of general purpose operating systems, it is such a relief to work with the BeOS" said Chris Weare, Arboretum's Chief Technical Officer. "It's built from the ground up with real-time performance in mind. BeOS is opening many technological possibilities for the development team at Arboretum Systems; Possibilities that will result in novel and exciting features in our products to come."

About Ray Gun and Hyperprism

Arboretum's Ray Gun is the world's top-selling consumer noise reduction software, designed especially for the task of cleaning up old records and tapes in real-time. As featured on C|Net's Cool Tech television program, Ray Gun removes scratches, clicks, pops and hiss in real time; Ray Gun's Mac edition received a 4.5 mice rating from the editors of MacWorld magazine.

Hyperprism is Arboretum's multi award-winning flagship sound design product. It's considered a classic among electronic musicians and film/video/multimedia sound designers. Recipient of the Electronic Musician magazine Editor's Choice award and the NewMedia magazine Hyper award for best signal processing software, Hyperprism is used on top albums by artists including Nine Inch Nails, Duran Duran, Public Enemy, Celine Dion and White Zombie. Hyperprism is equally at home in post production and sound design suites, appearing on major films including The Fifth Element, Pulp Fiction, Contact, Twister and Apollo 13. It is also used by major game developers such as Sega and Activision, plus broadcasters, multimedia producers and digital video editors, and taught in music schools worldwide.

Hyperprism and Ray Gun work as stand-alone applications and plug-in to many popular third party sound editing programs.

About Arboretum Systems
Arboretum Systems manufactures, distributes and licenses audio software solutions to professional and consumer markets on a world-wide basis. Arboretum's speciality is innovative digital signal processing and sound shaping technologies, emphasizing real-time operation, gestural control and unique interface design. Founded in 1993 and incorporated in 1994, Arboretum Systems is a privately held firm based in Pacifica, California.

About Be

Be, Inc., founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée, is a software company focusing on building new foundations for the next generation of digital content and media design tools. With a team of industry-leading engineers and business executives in the United States and Europe, the company is dedicated to removing the limitations of existing computer architectures and delivering a new level of price performance.

In July 1997, Be published the first public release of the Be Operating System (BeOS), the core product of this strategy. Additional information on Be and the BeOS is available online at http://www.be.com/. Be, Inc. is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.