antler

3 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

230mb for presets?

Wavetables maybe?

28 minutes ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Thanks Antler, that's it exactly! The cogs, they slip.

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

8 hours ago, El Diablo said:

What is T-Racks?

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.

3 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Audiomodern SWAM offerings

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.

29 minutes ago, InstrEd said:

With it being Whoops as the title, I thought it was a Whoopi Cushion VSTi 🤣

I had to click on it to see how it aired-out

 

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?

28 minutes ago, cclarry said:

BTW...do NOT listen to Revelation Scoring Grand....you've been warned!

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.

10 minutes ago, mettelus said:

Is funny how many acronyms span industries with entirely different meanings.

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 😁.

2 hours ago, John Maar said:

Plugin Alliance really screw over the devs of the plugins and apps they sell. They will never get another dime of my money. I wonder how long it's going to take NI to realize that they just made a deal with the devil.

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

☑️

2 hours ago, MusicMan said:

In ways I see where you're going with that, but the fundamental point of difference that actually is very similar in my opinion, is the developer still doesn't get something that they never had anyway. So whether the pirate makes money or not, it's somewhat moot as the developer hasn't experienced a loss in the same way they would if the pirate stole money or physical assets from developer. To put it another way, it doesn't cost the developer in a direct sense.

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.

9 hours ago, MusicMan said:

If I enter a raffle and don't win, I can't blame ticket holder 555735678 because i didn't win, as I was never guaranteed a prize. In ways piracy is similar. It's hard to claim an actual loss of a purchase that was never guaranteed to be made. If we assign that assumed loss to the company for every single pirated copy that any user has, that's completely unrealistic.

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)

7 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

I don't think it's worth bugging him for the trip down memory lane

You're right - don't worry about it.

8 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

I had no idea that this is the way that some of the most successful composers work (that is, by coming up with a motif and passing it on the employees to flesh out)

I'd heard that too - can't remember where or who though. It must suck to be a ghost-writer non-voluntarily.

10 hours ago, Matthew Carr said:

What is weird is they seem to realise they are pissing off customers who bought on a sale from PA, but don't care.

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.

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

I think it's been more than a decade now, but there was some very high profile composers that were caught using pirated libraries and in one high profile case, that I believe went to court, a composer had his staff illegally sharing his license on their computers (so that was about misusing his license).

But how did anyone know? It's not like you can listen to a score and know whether the libraries used were licensed.

1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm not a fan of developers who sacrifice a better user experience for their obsession with believing they can make their work uncrackable.

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.

1 hour ago, Craig Fowler said:

What I do appreciate from Andrew's comments here is some insight into the impact NI licensing could have and the way those costs are based on full price rather than a discounted one. 

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?

23 hours ago, David Jameson said:

I will take that bet. Any amount you like!

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):

1 hour ago, Bapu said:

Finally, Installed!

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.

3 minutes ago, jngnz said:

Really? Didn't look like a Pulse code to me so I didn’t try.

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.

13 hours ago, jngnz said:

Teehee, I just sold the remainder of my non-NFR Fuse plugins on KVR for a decent price.

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

34 minutes ago, Bapu said:

I store all my libraries on a single 16TB  drive

🤯

Is that a spinner, SSD, or m2?

5 hours ago, Fleer said:

And last August had a pretty amazing “5 for $249 bundle” offer I took advantage of. 

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