Music Software Deals

We've just added much requested feedback for being able to exclude specific manufacturers, categories and stores from your search results.

If you click on the "More Options" link below your search results, you'll see the new functionality there (see screenshot)

So now you can get really focused results by including/excluding:

- Bundles

- Upgrades

- Educational versions

- Presets/expansion packs

- Sample packs

- Specific stores

- Specific manufacturers

- Specific categories (like instruments, FX, compressors, reverbs etc.)

Once you've setup your filters, you'll see the URL will update with the new filtering results - just save that URL and whenever you come back to it again it will still have the same filters.

@PhonoBrainer we've made that change now thanks

Current and previous prices for it:

15 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Ah, there we go, thanks! Perhaps instead of "no results found" it might say "no current deals found". ? Just a refinement that ups the user experience for dolts like me 😙

Great idea thanks, will implement that

15 minutes ago, PhonoBrainer said:

From my phone, I searched for "Reason 12", got no results. I see on your manufacturer's list that you have Propellerhead, which I think is their old name, but no products under that, either.

Unless it's a mobile phone search issue, you may want to add Reason Studios and Reason 12. ?

Thanks, its a great site, especially for BF!

There are no current deals for Reason, but if you tick the "Show Expired Deals" button it will show you Reason:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/?jsf=jet-engine:main&_s=reason&meta=active_prices_count!check-range:0_100

Today we added further filtering options to make your search results and the products you see listed more accurate. These new options are in the "More Options" dropdown and as you can see from the attached screenshot allow you to show/hide the following product types from search results:

- Upgrade/crossgrade versions

- Educational versions

- Presets/expansion packs

- Bundles

- Sample packs

By default these will all be unticked so products that are in these categories are hidden from search results. This should help declutter search results and help you see exactly what you want to see.

8 minutes ago, BTP said:

Ah perfect thanks we'll update that

17 minutes ago, BTP said:

When you click the product name, it takes you to the seller page. I think it should function like clicking the image and take you to the product page on your site.

Sorry can you explain a little more what you mean by this in particular? I don't really understand sorry

We've also just added a couple more quick search options. Now there are the following quick searches:

• Free
• Under $5
• Under $10
• Latest deals (all active deals sorted from newest to oldest)
• Over 70% off
• Kontakt Player deals
• Reverb plugin deals
• Synth plugin deals

We've accurately categorised a large majority of the 16k products in the database now so you should see this reflected in the search results

On 11/5/2022 at 8:23 PM, abacab said:

Just a quick suggestion regarding the date format used on the price history pages. 5 Nov 2022 is shown in the DD/MM/YYYY format as 05/11/2022, which could be misinterpreted as 11 May 2022 in some regions.

Can you please change this to something like YYYY-MM-DD so it reads more clearly as 2022-11-05 for 5 Nov 2022?

Great job so far! Thanks!

 

Hi good point actually. Maybe we should just write the date in word format just to make it clearer?

On 11/5/2022 at 10:52 AM, daveiv said:

Spring backend, running on WildFly + JSF & PrimeFaces in the front?

Yep!

Looking forward to picking up the Cory Wong Neural DSP amp. Last year it was 50% off I believe

21 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Wow, you're really doing a great job with your site, @Music Software Deals. From the content to the design and your responsiveness, great job. 

Thanks. Have lots of cool features coming soon hopefully. Just need to make a few updates to how we process the data first to make it easier to sort and filter, as well as make everything more accurate going forward then we can continue with new features again. 

Some more quick updates:

- Moved the "manufacturer" and "store" dropdowns around so the manufacturer dropdown is in the main section you see. Some users said they wanted to sort by manufacturer more than just select stores

- Added a slider for discount % so you can only show products on discount between X and X price

- We've improved how we show products that were on sale previously. Now when it shows as product is not on sale, it will show the normal price, "Not on Sale" and "Last sale price" (see screenshot)

- Added notice about affiliate links to the website 

More updates coming again soon!

What some people may not see with Pianobook is how it benefits Spitfire commercially in the long run. Previously companies would start as small developers on their own websites, growing from there then turning into a potential competitor in the long run. Now most new developers are starting on Pianobook and when they reach escape velocity, Spitfire is bringing them into their own ecosystem to make a "Spitfire"/Pianobook branded product (which of course is great for the developer I'm sure).

However, this effectively cuts off the majority of new entrants to the sample library market as once they get to the point where they could start to grow further, Spitfire takes them onboard to monetize them under the Spitfire brand.

Not saying its wrong or that it doesn't benefit the developers, its just an interesting point that some people seem to not see. Of course you can't expect a large company to just fund a huge platform with large hosting costs without getting something in return, but Pianobook has many long term benefits for Spitfire aren't immediately apparent. 

Anyhoo, moving on!

We've made two small changes:

1. Previously the manufacturer page (eg. Project SAM) would not show any listing if there was no deals. We've updated it now so that you can toggle "Show Expired Deals" or "Don't Show Expired Deals" making it easier to just visit a particular manufacturer page and see only their deals

2. We've added all of the brands that we have data on to the "Manufacturers" dropdown menu. It previously only showed the companies that were on sale (300+) but now shows all companies (600+)

More updates shortly!

1 minute ago, InstrEd said:

Yes it would 🙂

Done!

OK thanks, I won't post any links to MSD so. I guess someone doesn't like me creating the platform if they went and reported me!

7 hours ago, Wookiee said:

See the PM just sent.

But to clarify for other's;

No commercial enterprise should be placing direct links to specific product in the text body of their posts.  

They should only have a link to the Index page of their Website, i.e. the very first page you hit when visiting a website

They can make reference to a product or a deal but must not provide direct link.

Thanks. So for example these posts would all be breaching the forum rules?

1 minute ago, Wookiee said:

No Companies should be placing Links to their websites in the text portion of posts. 

It is OK for a user to share a link to a deal they have found

It is a breach of the forum rules to sell anything within the forums.  However we show a little leniency in the Deals forum to companies who only place a link to their website Index page in their signatures.

Technically you are again in breach of the forum rules by having a second profile.

I will remove the restriction on the understanding that you do not place direct links in the body of your text, you only have a link to the index page of your website in your signature.  Any one here should be able to browser to your current deal, they are after all using a computer and a browser to get here.

If any company is breaking these rules then report them, it is not fair to you, it is not fair to Bandlab who are providing free advertising, it could lead to Bandlab being prosecuted for copyright violations. 

The deals forum is provided for Users to share links to Deals they have found, it is not really for companies to gain free advertising.

Your Warnings have been reevoked, no points were awarded, there is no record of the warning being issued.

OK sorry I'm still a little confused.

"Companies should be placing Links to their websites in the text portion of posts. "

So no company should be posting a link to their own website here (other than in their signature) and anyone can post a link to another website if they don't own it because it links to a deal. Is that right?

Thank you for unbanning. I won't post any links from now on so...can you clarify though:

1. Can other people link to my website?

2. Can I link to other people's websites?

3. Can nobody link to their own website?

Quick update:

• (Re) Added the "Show Expired Deals" selection box so you can only show products on sale or show all products
• Added sorting by "Discount" - highest to lowest / lowest to highest
• Added sorting for "Newest deals to oldest deals" and "Oldest Deals to Newest Deals"
• Added "Random" sorting which is the default
• Improved mobile responsiveness
• Click product image tile will bring you to the price history page

More updates coming soon thanks

31 minutes ago, Kylotan said:

It looks like you took away the ability to sort by the price reduction percentage. Can you bring that back?

Yep it was overwritten by accident with the new price design - we'll re-add it back

16 hours ago, Brian Lawler said:

Really nice update.  Thanks for continuing to work on your site.  I would like a quick search by percent off.  Especially if it could filter out the stuff that is always "on a super sale".

<edit> Perhaps, stuff that is now at least X percent off versus the price last week. Since you track the history.

 

Thanks. Good idea about the discount % - we'll try add that to the search criteria so you can select a discount % range (ie. show me things that are between 70% and 80% off),

Let us know if you have any other suggestions!

We've updated the website design with a new look and some new features:

1. We've tagged a lot of the products in the database with the correct categories, tags etc. So you'll see many products tagged as effects or instruments, then digging down further into the effects/plugin type (compressor, EQ etc.) or instrument category like Kontakt full, Kontakt Player, plugin and even the instrument type (keys, guitar, bundle etc). This is still ongoing as it takes quite a while to manually tag 16,000 or so products but we're getting there!

2. One of the new sets of tags we've added are educational versions, upgrades/crossgrade versions and expansion packs. We found that these were clogging up the search results so we wanted to give users the option to remove these from the search results. You'll see in the "more options" dropdown menu, you can tick these boxes to show/hide them from the results. We'll also add sample packs and bundles as options here too to make it easier to show/hide these as some people may not be interested in either

3. Quick search options - currently you can see two quick search options - "Under $5" and "Under $10" for deals. We want to expand this section further to make it quick and easy to get what you want to see on a daily basis with the click of a button. We were thinking of adding the following options here - would love to hear your thoughts:

• Icon for each store so you can click it and it will just show the latest deals from that store immediately
• Latest deals
• Kontakt Player deals
• Synth deals
• Compressor plugin deals
• EQ plugin deals
• Sound design plugin deals

Basically we want to have the most common searches that people want to see the results for in one click. Anything that you'd like to see added here?

4. We've improved the layout on each product tile to show the stores where each deal is happening (previously it was only the store prefix with no logo but now its full store name and logo). See attached image.

5. We've improved the price history graph and product page layout to make the page a little easier to navigate and make it clearer where to setup a price alert. For example:

https://musicsoftwaredeals.com/price-history/Virtual-Guitarist-Sparkle-2-by-UJAM-53049/

6. Improved layout of the user price alerts page

7. Added a contact us page

What we want to do next:

1. Option to setup a price alert for an entire company/brand - maybe you want to get notified when any product by a particular company goes on sale? Thoughts?

2. Option to setup a price alert for a product category - maybe you want to get notified when any sound design plugins or compressors go on sale? Thoughts?

3. Potentially create an automated newsletter of sorts which will email you all of the latest deals on a timeline that you choose yourself. So you can select "I want to get notified of all the latest deals 1 time per week" with more options for timelines etc.

4. Figure out how best to integrate coupons - JRR coupons usually work for most of their products so we need to figure out how best to show the coupons for users for each store in a simple way

We also want to finish tagging all of the products so that's completed.

Thoughts? Any feedback or suggestions is greatly appreciated!