A German PC magazine has found out that that Microsoft pirated a copy of Sound Forge 4.5 to edit .WAV files.

In the listing:

„WindowsHelpToursWindowsMediaPlayerAudioWav”.

There are exactly nine WAV files, which have all a size between 80 and 360 kilobyte. They serve the sound under painting with the Windows Media Player route. If one opens one of these files with Notepad, it becomes really interesting> Why? Because if you will scroll completely to end of file, there is a kind water-mark, showing, which software was used to create the Wav files, provided by Microsoft musicians.

There we found the following text:

LISTB INFOICRD 2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT sound Forge 4.5

Sounds first of all more unspectacular. Apparently, the Microsoft musician used or Sound Forge software from Sony (in former times of Sonic), version 4.5. Sound Forge is a Profitool for the production of WAV -, AIFF -, Mp3 and other music files, it’s price is 400 US dollar.

Basically, Sound Forge watermarks every file it edits, complete with the name of the licensed user. In this case, the licensed user was the head of Radium, which is the major audio program warez group.

Well, it was found that Deepz0ne was a member of a warez group. Apparently, someone in MS admitted to trialing it with the warez version but then went on to purchase a licence for it. Interesting non-the-less.