antler

Wavetables maybe?

No problem - with all the developers that start Audio-*, I get confused all the time 😊

A mixing/mastering mini ecosystem. The modules (i.e. plug-ins) can be bought either as bundles, or a la carte. Each module can be used either independently in your DAW, or in the T-Racks host. If you buy the individual modules, (I believe) there is no upgrade path towards a bundle.

To avoid confusion, I think PhonoBrainer means Audio Modeling https://audiomodeling.com/swam-engine/solo-brass/ It seems Audiomodern have now completely abandoned their instrument range and are focussing on plugins.

Not quite a whoopie cushion, but this will probably be your next best bet: https://soundiron.com/collections/micropaks/products/flatulus

When you buy an OT Sine library, is it like Native Access in that you can download/redownload any time you want? Or is it like IK where you must download it within a time limit and store it?

It sounds wonderful. I said to myself that Pianoteq would be the extent of my piano collection - small footprint but great sounding. Revelation Scoring Grand came out a while ago with an intro price (direct form Sound Yeti)... and I added it to my list of exceptions.

I work as a software developer. At work, we use something that used to be called Visual Studio Team Services to build the code we write. It's been renamed as something else now, but the acronym VSTS is still in use. I had difficulty in getting used to it as every time I saw VSTS, I though it was referring to some VST plugins 😁.

But NI aren't partnering with PA (like Dear Reality, etc.); they own them - they get to set the rules.

☑️

I think I understand what you're saying, but I also think the outcome is deceptive. Let’s imagine a similar situation: Alice lives in a small town. She rents a store at the local marketplace where she sells various handcrafted toys, decorative items, etc. Business is fairly good, so she hires Bob and Charlie to help her make her goods. One day, Alice notices that sales are declining. It’s a small town; everybody who lives there either has bought all they want from her, or isn’t interested. To help pick things up, she decides to look for a new range of products to make/sell. After some research, she finds that a certain type of toy is really popular in another part of the world and decides to do her own take on this product range. She does some research, buys in some new (but required) materials, upgrades her workshop tools/machines to be able to do the necessary techniques, and gets to work – in short, she puts an upfront payment into her product range. Once she has some stock, she puts them on the market but finds she misjudged the market for her part of the world: there are significantly fewer sales than expected. However, she’s already put some cash into product development and now she’s at a loss. This is on top of already declining sales overall – she’ll have to live with a smaller personal budget and consider either giving Bob and Charlie a pay cut, or even letting them go. Let’s contrast this with a different outcome: The new product is really popular and sales rocket. It’s so popular in fact that her marketplace competitor Malory becomes jealous with envy. One night, he breaks into Alice’s workshop, steals the entire batch of toys and smashes the machinery out of spite. In the best-case scenario, Alice claims this back from insurance. In the worst-case scenario, she again has to live on a smaller budget and consider letting Bob and Charlie go. There’s one other aspect to consider too. In the worst-case scenario where Malory intervenes, there’s some possibility that costs can be partially recovered through crowd-funding – think about when the Brainworx studio was destroyed by flooding. In the case where a product isn’t selling (because of piracy or incorrect market), I suspect that crowd-funding wouldn’t be as effective.

It's not quite the same thing though. If a raffle ticket holder doesn't win, nothing much happens - they bought a ticket, had their funds decreased by the cost of the ticket, and that's pretty much it. If someone pirates a library, writes a score for a multi-million dollar movie, and collects royalties from it the situation is different. No funds go to the library developer, no funds go towards royalties for the musicians who were recorded for the library to be made (if this is the case), but the pirate goes on to gain funds. In this case, it's more like somebody steals the winning ticket or somehow changes the outcome of the raffle so they win.

Didn't Project SAM used to have their own website? I'm pretty sure they used to have a Master Pack (i.e. 'Everything Bundle') for sale too? (The latter question is for curiosity more than anything - it's vastly out of my budget)

You're right - don't worry about it. I'd heard that too - can't remember where or who though. It must suck to be a ghost-writer non-voluntarily.

I suspect they care a little - they partially backtracked with an offer to do a partial refund. They seem to have stopped communicating in this thread. It's disappointing - if there's a genuine reason for all of this and they explained it transparently, PA customers on the whole would probably be more likely to accept it. Instead they've given us a story's that inconsistent with their previous communications. Perhaps it's a marketing tactic: give a believable story (to people who are new, have short memories, or don't search forums), and create an 'enemy' in it to help win people over.

But how did anyone know? It's not like you can listen to a score and know whether the libraries used were licensed. I remember when a certain orchestral sequence library required a special unlock file beyond a (quite large) number of starts. The process of getting one wasn't that painful, and once you had it you could use it forever. But the lack of transparency on the website caused quite a panic. In the following library of the series, that mechanism had been dropped.

And musicians' royalties too for some libraries.

Is this seriously what Winamp has become? It comes as a bit of a shock as the last time I used it was at v2, where one of it's best features was its compact interface. I suppose everyone needs a big and spacious UI these days, but did it have to look exactly like Spotify?

David - wouldn't it make more sense from a business point of view to give some idea as to what these features might be, rather than potentially provoking existing customers. While Deskew have repeatedly stated that they simply wish to be paid the correct amount for their software (with exceptions made for those in academia), PA customers will necessarily need to violate this rule to Deskew's advantage by paying more than the asking price by way of an 'admin fee'. Many of Soundiron's libraries can be upgraded to a larger edition (where applicable) by paying price difference. They ask for proof of purchase, and offer a discount before the sale that will reduce the price by the price already paid. They ask for no admin fee. I'm a customer of another sample library developer that offers loyalty discounts where, again, you email them upfront and they issue a discount code with no further charge. It might help if you could explain what the admin fee goes towards - is the process of issuing a coupon truly arduous such that it deserves the equivalent of $15 remuneration? Does it go towards paying another entity for data transfer? Alternatively, it has already been mentioned in this thread that perhaps Deskew wish to keep their customer base small; not staying with PA (and thus now NI) would achieve that. Perhaps this is simply a tactic to dissuade customers from staying.

Desk Bell has been free before, but this looks like an updated/improved version. The previous one was surprisingly versatile - the sounds in this are entirely Desk Bell (previous version):

Any good? How does it compare with the others? PA have dropped my voucher amount now, so it'll probably be a while until I pick this up.

I think Pulse codes just have to be unique - they just typically have a certain format. I bought some stuff from T+S a while ago that had an NI serial number. When T+S packed up, I wrote to a developer asking to download an update for their library. My NI serial got added and I could use it in Pulse to (re)download the library.

Is there anything in particular that you didn't like about them?

🤯 Is that a spinner, SSD, or m2?

That one was a great deal - a la carte too.