Say „MOTU" and you think of a company that made games and text editors before it ever touched audio. Mark of the Unicorn was founded in 1980 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by four programmers: Jason Linhart, Craig Finseth, Scott Layson Burson, and Brian Hess. Their first business had nothing to do with music at all — the company sold productivity software and games for CP/M machines, the Macintosh, the Atari ST, and the Amiga, including the Emacs-like text editor MINCE and the arcade game Mouse Stampede (1984), one of the first Macintosh titles to use the mouse. Everything changed with the launch of the Macintosh computer — inspired by what it could do, MOTU's engineers built one of the first music programs for the platform, the notation editor Professional Composer.
The real breakthrough, though, was the MIDI sequencer Performer, which began shipping in 1985 and quickly became an industry standard — eventually evolving into today's Digital Performer. In the 1990s, MOTU was the first company to combine a high-end MIDI interface with SMPTE timecode sync, and when its main rival, Opcode Systems, collapsed in 1998, MOTU effectively took over the entire professional MIDI interface market. Another industry first followed soon after: the first FireWire audio interface on the market for Mac and Windows — a standard that shaped studio connectivity for years to come, in both home and professional setups.
At Wired Tunes we carry the full MOTU audio interface range — from the compact UltraLite mk5, to the M series (M2, M4, M6), to the multichannel 828 and 24Ai/24Ao with built-in DSP mixing. It's the choice for anyone who values low latency, solid conversion, and software built by people who've been writing music tools for over four decades.
MOTU
