SoundEdit was one of three audio applications created during a sabbatical by Steve Capps during 1986.

The Macintosh had no built-in sound input, so the MacRecorder audio digitizer was invented for this purpose in 1985 by Michael Lamoureux, a mathematics student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The MacRecorder hardware and software was publicly released through the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group as a kit in late 1985.

The new version also supported handling of sound files bigger than available RAM.

Shockwave content is created by using the Director multimedia authoring program.