Since then Wheatstone has started to build up the distribution of VoxPro outside of its core market in North America, appointing dealers in Australia (Agile Broadcast), New Zealand (Southern Broadcast) and Switzerland (Media Engineering). The most recent is MRZ Broadcast in the Netherlands, which is familiar with the editor as well as handling the Wheatstone range. "VoxPro has been well-known in the Dutch market for years," comments the company's Danny Teunissen (pictured above left). "With this Wheatstone connection to the product it's a great opportunity for VoxPro users to meet the family of WheatNet-IP.

The VoxPro editor was conceived in 1991 by Seattle radio station KUBE 93 FM's morning presenter Charlie Brown after he saw a basic voice editing system on a Mac computer. Brown and computer programmer friend Buzz Hill developed what became VoxPro, with Audion Labs founded in 1993. A year later KHJ in Los Angeles became the first station to buy the product, which continued on the Mac platform until transferring exclusively to PC in 2001.

VoxPro will be marketed as an independent brand within the Wheatstone group, with Audion's chief technology officer, Rick Bidlack, continuing to work with the company from his base in Seattle. Wheatstone and Audion have worked together in the past and the console manufacturer's sales director Jay Tyler (pictured above right) says both parties recognised the potential for increasing integration and workflow between the desks and the editing system.

Tyler adds that "traditionally" VoxPro has been a US-focused company, with some penetration into Canada and "a handful" of international dealers. "We saw an opportunity in terms of audio over IP networks by just adding an extra network card as a tie-line interface," he says. "We've also been able to offer them worldwide distribution."

Describing VoxPro as a fast, on-the-fly editor for telephone calls and interviews, Tyler says material can be edited quickly within a PC for playout, rather than sitting down at an Adobe Audition or other workstation and then transferring the material. "In the US and also internationally there are not so many engineers running radio stations these days," he says. "So you might have a music show where the talent is doing the news and other things as well as presenting. Vox Pro is a human interface that is ten times faster than other systems and at a time when commercial broadcasters in particular are doing more with less, anything that improves the workflow in the radio business is being welcomed."

Tyler explains that VoxPro "sits next to" Wheatstone's audio consoles and integrates into the WheatNet-IP audio network. "Established integrators such as MRZ are looking at what whole networks can do, with stations working on WheatNet-IP," he comments. "This can be on other desks as well as our own but what we are doing is taking the human interface."

Wheatstone held a meeting to introduce dealers to VoxPro during December. Tyler says the company is looking at the comments it has received regarding VoxPro and seeing what else can be done with the product. "There is a lot of feedback and there could be new products such as VoxPro News and Sports in the future," he says.