Member Profile - Jean-Marie Cannie - CTO and Co-owner of Image-Line Software

Based in Belgium, Image-line is the developer of the FL Studio software. For this issue of the IMSTA Bulletin, we have had the pleasure to interview one of Image-Line’s principal figures, Jean-Marie Cannie. Jean-Marie is the Chief Technical Officer and one of the owners of Image-Line Software.

Jean-Marie, could you please tell us a bit about yourself?

I am a joint owner and the Chief Technical Officer of Image-Line. As the CTO I try to get things done technically, which is basically begging our developers to develop stuff they don't like to do.

I don't have any real musical taste. For my 12 birthday I got two albums: Powerage, by AC/DC and a compilation of horror movie themes, which coincidentally enough contained Tubular bells from Mike Oldfield. He is now one of our FL Studio Power Users.

After that I was mainly into hard rock (Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Judas Priest) until I was about 16 when I bought 2 singles: Enola Gay’s OMD & Moonlight Shadow (which coincidentally enough…). These days I'm just listening to what is hot over here: Scissor Sisters, Black Eyed Peas, Anastasia, Kane, DJ Tiesto, etc…

Outside music my interests are my wife & kids, soccer, wakeboarding, snowboarding, kitesurfing, motorcycles, cars and chicks.

I don't have any real musical taste. For my 12 birthday I got two albums: Powerage, by AC/DC and a compilation of horror movie themes, which coincidentally enough contained Tubular bells from Mike Oldfield. He is now one of our FL Studio Power Users. After that I was mainly into hard rock (Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Judas Priest) until I was about 16 when I bought 2 singles: Enola Gay’s OMD & Moonlight Shadow (which coincidentally enough…). These days I'm just listening to what is hot over here: Scissor Sisters, Black Eyed Peas, Anastasia, Kane, DJ Tiesto, etc… Outside music my interests are my wife & kids, soccer, wakeboarding, snowboarding, kitesurfing, motorcycles, cars and chicks. <<Jean-Marie Cannie and his wife Elke

How did you get involved with music? Do you play an instrument?

I used to have an electric guitar when I was 12 but I traded it for a disco/mirror ball 3 weeks later.

How long have you been in this business?

We have been doing (stock market) software since 1988.

Could you take us back and let us know how Image-Line got into the music software business? 

After doing stock market software with Pavell Software (www.pavell.com) we wanted to have some fun & quickly turned a previous Tetris clone into an ‘adult’ game and offered it on floppy disks in the ‘little ads’ in Computer Magazine.

Surprisingly enough, this caught on and people asked for more.  This was the time CD ROM games like ‘The 7 Sense’ started to appear and we decided to do a CD ROM and got in bed with Private, one of the bigger players in the adult games market. They released a whole bunch of our CD ROMs including ‘Private Prison’ and ‘Private Castle’.

Around the same time, IBM launched the “Da Vinci” contest where the first prizes were color laptops (which cost about $8000 then). As Image-Line didn’t have a lot of cash to spend on laptops we turned one of the game environments into a more or less related game, mailed it in and won the first prize in the multimedia category.

This contest even got us some national (Belgian) press and TV coverage where we cooked up a fake story about how our ‘games department’ brought new ideas and technology to our ‘stock market department’ like the Formula 1 teams brings new technologies to the ‘regular’ car industry…. However, the most interesting part about this whole thing was a 19 year old developer called Didier Dambrin (nicknamed Gol), who not only won in the ‘Game’ category, but also won the ‘Overall’ prize - a trip to the US plus the laptop. We immediately noticed his talent and convinced him to work for us.  Gol’s first game for us was Private Investigator. This was our last adult product and it was pretty sick. Anyway, as this whole adult adventure was getting us a pretty bad name around here (and didn’t bring in any real money), we decided to use Gol’s talent for something better and asked him to develop a platform game called “Eat This”. Sadly enough for us, this was the time that everyone went 3D and for the most part the game went by unnoticed.   <<Jean-Marie Cannie and Paris Hilton

The rest of our developers continued on our other products like “Fact2000” (invoicing software), “E-OfficeDirect” (a content-based web tool). We even topped the Belgian game charts 4 years in a row with the CD version of a popular Belgian TV show called Blokken (funny enough based on Tetris as well).

In the meanwhile, Gol got drawn into the music scene by applications like Hammerhead and Rebirth 338. As he wanted to merge both apps into a stepsequencer with rows and steps he started developing FruityLoops. When he dropped it on our machines it was a simple, midi-only Step Sequencer that we really couldn’t place inside the range of products that we were doing at that point. What we DID notice was the fact that people went WILD about it and sucked our servers dry downloading the demo in no time.

The first couple of years were pretty tough as there were hardly any sales and we always had to fight and beg to find servers that wanted to host the demo (thanks Maz!).

In the meantime, FruityLoops grew from a simple midi drum machine into the fully featured virtual studio you are all using now (you can check out the history of FL here:  www.flstudio.com/history) and E-OfficeDirect grew into EZGenerator (check it out at www.ezgenerator.com), one of the best tools to quickly build a decent website. You may have noticed the www.flstudio.com site is built with it as well.

How does Image Line approach the software piracy problem?

In the +20 years we have been selling software we have tried just about everything that's out there (we even developed our own parallel dongles) and they ALL got cracked.

This meant that in the end you're only bothering & punishing your paying customers as those using a crack don't have to deal with all the problems that come along with it.

As a matter of fact, our own customers started using a crack in order to make sure they didn't run into any problems when they were on the road and didn't have access to the net.

What we try to accomplish now is to set up an online community where only our paying customers get support, see video tutorials and download what we call 'dynamic content', where a lot of the material are streamed from our server to those that own the software.

What are some reasons that you joined IMSTA?

It's a nice initiative. Just talking about the problem (in interviews like these) will hopefully open some eyes.

As you know, IMSTA faces the software piracy problem with educational campaigns. As a valued member, what suggestions do you have for IMSTA?

For me everything could be a little more aggressive but I'm not running IMSTA.

Here is your chance to say anything you want to say to the pirates out there who maybe reading this interview?

Some of the crackers out there must be pretty talented so it's a shame they waste their time the way they do, messing things up for small companies like ours. In the end you will see a lot of smaller companies disappear or start producing other kind of software.!

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