Sonic Foundry Announces
Release of ACID® PRO 4.0

Newest award-winning, music-creation software offers advanced features for professionals

MADISON, WI, August 19, 2002 - Sonic Foundry® Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), a leading digital media software solutions company, today announced the release of ACID® PRO 4.0, Sonic Foundry's award-winning, professional loop-based music creation tool that allows users to create original, royalty-free music. This newest release includes sought-after professional features designed to help music and multi-media professionals produce high-quality musical arrangements - using pre-recorded sound clips called loops—for use in production, commercial recording, streaming media creation and corporate audio-video presentations.

Since its launch in 1998, ACID PRO has become the industry standard in loop-based music creation software. Intuitive, yet powerful, the software can incorporate an unlimited number of loops of almost any genre, and has been used in a variety of music recordings, television specials and films. Two of the more recent broadcasts include the ABC miniseries of Stephen King's "Rose Red" and HBO's "Path of War," both of which were scored by renowned film composer and musician Gary Chang.

"ACID is the most evocative product that I have owned in the past 10 years, and I used the software so much on my last film project that I bought a powerful new PC that will become my dedicated ACID PRO 4.0 computer," said Chang, who has more than 70 feature and television projects to his credit. "ACID provides for me a method of easily constructing electronic environments that originally may have taken days to create. I take the original elements apart and apply the ACID metadata properties to them so I can easily transpose, manipulate and modify the pieces for the score.. ACID has become an integral part of my creative process, and I can't wait to get my hands on ACID PRO 4.0 to see where that will take me. I am particularly excited about the 5.1 aspects of the new version as it is something that I will utilize full time."

"As we developed ACID PRO 4.0, we were constantly mindful of the type of features the professional would want," said Sonic Foundry's Brad Reinke, senior vice president and general manager of software. "This release represents a number of significant enhancements that will deliver endless possibilities to those sophisticated users."

ACID PRO can be used to create songs, remix tracks, develop music beds, produce 5.1 surround audio mixes, score videos, and develop music for Web sites and Flash^TM animations. It also has built-in support for MIDI, video scoring, and can save to a number of audio and video file formats, including WAV, WMA, WMV, RM, AVI, MOV and MP3. The new professional features of ACID PRO 4.0 include:

• VSTi support
• ASIO driver support
• Effects automation
• 5.1 surround mixing
• Alternate time signatures
• MIDI piano roll and event list editing
• MIDI step recording
• Loop Cloning
• Yamaha OPT support

About Sonic Foundry®, Inc.

Founded in 1991, Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ:SOFO) is a leading provider of desktop and enterprise digital media software solutions. Its complete offering of media tools, systems and services provides a single source for creating, managing, analyzing and enhancing media for government, business, education and entertainment.

Sonic Foundry is based in Madison, Wis., with offices in Santa Monica, Toronto and Pittsburgh. For more information about Sonic Foundry, visit the company's Web site at www.sonicfoundry.com.

Certain statements contained in this news release regarding matters that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Because such forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to, uncertainties pertaining to continued market acceptance for Sonic Foundry's products, its ability to succeed in capturing significant revenues from media services and/or systems, the effect of new competitors in its market, integration of acquired business and other risk factors identified from time to time in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.