PavlovsCat

I love the sound of his viola in the demos; it sounds absolutely gorgeous. I'd love to hear thoughts on its playability and scripting from anyone who owns it. I've had some DMs with the dev in the past and he seems like a really nice guy. What Bunker Samples libraries would folks here recommend?

I didn't ask @Greg Schlaepfer, but from the shape, I think that's a Fender Jaguar electric guitar. Although I'm sure all of you guitarists know it from the shape. In any event, I love the tone!

That's the reality developers that engage in deep discounting face. Once they discount a product 70 percent or more, it can be very difficult to convince the market that the full retail price is the true value of that library. I've been a Sampletekk customer for two decades and they (Per) have been superb and worthy of recommending. But, to your point, we've all been trained to buy during their seasonal sales where they offer massive discounts and now, even seeing this library for far less than the regular price of $149 US requiring the full version of KONTAKT gets a less than positive reaction that the price is too high. On the positive side, this version includes a free sample player (Sampletekk's $149 version requires the full version of KONTAKT). While I agree with Kitekrazy that KONTAKT is superior to HALion, I think HALion is decent and HALion Sonic 7 is a good option for free. I'm certain that the $69.99 US full retail price will be discounted in future sales promotions. If this went on sale at $50 US or less, I think it would be very worthy of consideration for those who don't own KONTAKT. Of course, even at that price point, there's a good deal of competition (e.g., grand piano libraries with free samplers such as NIs pianos on their 50% off sales, XLN's Addictive Keys Grand on sale, SoundPaint's regular priced piano libraries, etc.). On a separate note, if this is indeed the same quality as the KONTAKT version, the KONTAKT version is clearly not priced appropriately.

I'm contemplating getting this for voiceovers in videos. I'd love to get some opinions from the experienced / knowledgeable mixers in the group about Vox Ducker and other, similar plugins, that are worth exploring.

Okay, I cracked up at with that. It's not my style to communicate with people that way, but it's certainly not worthy of a ban. All they had to do is tell you no name calling. Sorry about that.

I hope that's right about KONTAKT. I found the libraries that Hunter shared on Pianobook well done and imaginative. Also, kudos on the disclosure. I wish more influencers would follow your lead and do them. As always, like everyone else here, I look forward to listening to you play this stuff. It's always a blast and contagious to watch you enjoying libraries and music.

It does sound good. I recognize Hunter Rogerson's name from Pianobook. He's shared some really nice libraries for free at Pianobook. He's one of the people there I follow. I'm interested in what he does. Although I wish they didn't create another propietary sampler plugin. I'd greatly prefer if they remained with KONTAKT or another established sampler rather than create another plugin to learn, install, troubleshoot, and maintain.

That is how I understand what he wrote. I'm just surprised they would ban him and wondering what the heck would have resulted in the ban. @kitekrazy, as you brought it up, would you mind sharing at least, at a high level, what was it that resulted in NI banning you from their forum? If it was merely criticism of NI's products, that's pretty problematic.

Wait, you got banned from NI? If that's right, would you mind sharing? I'm wondering what the heck could have led to that.

I did post one deal earlier this year that wasn't a duplicate of one of Larry's posts -- and I realize that this sounds kind of cocky, and maybe it is -- but Larry even liked that post. Yeah, it was pretty special. My shinning moment in the forum. I hope we can all overlook this thread and reflect back on that glorious past achievement.

There, I changed the thread title to: "duplicate, moderator please delete." Oh, the shame. It's my scarlet letter.

I swear I looked and searched. I'm guessing I misspelled the name or something. Oh well. I failed. I'll put delete in the title. I'm no match for you, Larry! I'll stay in my lane and update my freebie lists this week!

I just cut and pasted this after seeing this dev's ad in Facebook. A talented developer and a nice guy who's made a lot of libraries and freelance work for a bunch of well known KONTAKT developers like Impact Soundworks over the years. I'm just a customer of his who had a few emails with him over the years and thought he was really helpful and friendly. This is from his ad, not me: "Unlock timeless melodies with Osiris: The Egyptian Lyre Sample Library. Save 75% today. Use code OSIRIS75 at checkout." https://librewave.com/product/osiris/

There's only one video from the nanoinfluencer with a video on the product page, The Sampliest. The rest, I believe, were made by the developer. Granted, there's nothing different from most developers in his using influencers, as I mentioned, I've even connected developers up with influencers from Simeon who posts at this forum to Cory Pellazarri (who I thought was the most honest influencer in this space who I know of and we quickly became friends) to macro influencers for this space like Venus Theory (who I really like and I enjoy his videos, I think he's a genuinely nice guy and has always been super cool in our conversations). What's different is how this small dev hypes up a nano influencer giving him a good fake review as if that's something rare. Nope. Give a nano influencer freebies and they do a video hyping up your product -- that is the way the game works. And yet this developer makes it seem like this nano influecer, whose videos reach a pretty small audience -- and hence, these are level of influencer called nano influencer who are trying to grow their audience and often will do a faux review video in exchange for free products and the hope of the developer sponsoring them in the future or paying them for walkthrough videos or other proomos. I enjoy Simeon's videos and have referred him over to some developers, and then he's gone on to do straight up promo videos for at least one developer friend of mine, Kirk Hunter. It's just the way influencer marketing works. These guys truly are just doing sales promotion for developers, but it gets scammy when they call them reviews, because they're not. That's when it becomes a straight up shilling game. Think of it this way. You're a small developer. You can buy ads and pay sponsorship fees at KVR, VI-Control, Bedroom Producer, Rekerd.org, Google's network, etc. which are really helpful for creating awareness of your brand/sample library/plugin. Google search is great for spreading awareness, but it can be really costly and unless you go after really specific keywords, you're reading A LOT of the wrong people, which is costly. With forum advertising and sponsorship you're reaching A LOT more of the right audience, but most of your advertising is building awareness for your brand and products. An influencer's business is all about persuading people to trust them, then selling that trust for cash and things of value to brands -- developers in this case. If you spend say $5k-10k for a non top tier influencer to hawk your product in a faux review, it will sell VASTLY more product than spending the same amount in advertising. So, influencer marketing is super popular in this space and really nearly every space. It's basically the same model as infommercials, except it's almost always inherently deceptive, as influencers almost always dishonest about their financial relationships with brands and what their business is about. My hope is that enforcement of regulations and consumer pressure will make practices at least a little more ethical. Influencers commonly start videos by declaring that they're completely unbiased when the reality is, they're really just salespeople being used to promote products that they're conpensated to promote. That's all there is to it.

Hey, to those downloading and installing this, be sure to give a review after you try it out. I think the library I was once most hopeful for in this group was the Mellotron library, which I got free years ago and found was extremely bloated and some of the samples, I recall, weren't even from a Mellotron. If anyone's looking for some great free Mellotron libraries check out my free sample libraries threads. I included a few of them that are gems.

Not the nano influencer, apparently. UPDATE: I watched some of the influencer's video and I give the guy credit for at least admitting that he got a free full copy of the library. What follows is a really bad promo video for the product. It doesn't in any way resemble a serious review. It's like a car salesman pushing a rust warranty on a new car. It's a bit over the top.

It's just a side note, but it's kind of hilarious when a sample developer does a promotion using a nano influencer (this one has around 2k subscribers) that hawks sample libraries giving a good review. It's the equivalent of celebrating your salesperson giving your products a good review. It's somewhere in between deceptive and the business equivalent of Spinal Tap. Any dev who gives a nano influencer a bunch of free products that normally cost money gets a favorable review; that's how the system works. Sorry to give away the secret formula, but that's it. You give them free product, sometimes cash (and macro influencers always want cash, only the little guys work for free product), and the promise of future goodies and they do what is nothing less than a promotional video for you without the proper legal disclosures to make it deceptively appear unbiased. And yes, I still tell developers to get products in influencers hands, because it's highly effective and cheaper and faster at getting sales than other forms of promotion. I always urge them to try to push the influencers to do the proper disclosures, but, of course, it's not happening, so I, instead, want to do my best to inform consumers how things really work. So let's celebrate a shill promoting us! I call BS. But it's on a level that's also verges on absurdity.

Yes, right after you pay $499 US for the upgrade (as per Doug's above post). That's what has kept me from picking it up.

Yes, to clarify, I was refering to what would occur if someone uses the Waya tool.

I didn't spend time looking over all of the data Waya.deals collects, but I did visit their about us page (it doesn't list any names or any location about the company, which is pretty sketchy, although the contact info did show an address), I think the big concern that people should have with this business is trusting them with your personal and financial data, the sites you go to and what you enter at those sites, and then their data security procedures. Because even if you believe this company is legit, if you're giving permission to collect your personal data, they have to store that data and if their data security processes aren't solid and they end up getting hacked, you may find that data on the dark web. But having tried Muse's libraries in the past, I can say, without question, it's low quality incredibly bloated sample libraries that are not worth the data transfer to your computer. You can do far better with free libraries from respected developers and the best libraries from Pianobook. There's really no need to download this stuff. It's excessively bloated garbage to be really blunt.

Larry is a great part of any music community. But I seriously do understand how a moderator might notice how prolific Larry is and wonder how one person can do all of that or whether it's a team of people and then question if they might be compensated. Hmmm...or is Larry AI? But if that moderator spent a little time and examined Larry's posts -- which this KVR mod clearly neglected to do -- they'd notice that Larry doesn't inject his opinions on developers very often (with IK being the exception years ago) and Larry posts about a very wide range of developers, two things that you don't see from shills. So, yeah, banning Larry was a profoundly bad mistake and Larry deserved a serious apology for that. KVR, Cakewalk, or any forum should be thrilled to have Larry as a member. I know this community-- of course, including me -- is rightfully, enormously glad to have Larry as a member. Larry's irreplaceable. He's the Michael Jordan of deal posting. He literally is responsible for this subforum existing and being such a valuable resource to many people, including me. As far as KVR, I used to be a regular. I mostly enjoyed it, but it would get toxic from time to time. Not VI-Control level toxic, but toxic enough where I didn't think it was enjoyable as it should be and prefer the much friendlier vibe at this forum. We have a much smaller community, but overall --with only a handful of exceptions-- it's a very friendly and helpful group of people. Plus, we've got Larry, which is very nice.

On a positive note, I think the BandLab folks to a great job of operating this forum at a high standard. I realize that probably sounds like I'm schmoozing them (as I'm posting it here), but seriously, people can post whatever they want to say about the brand and its products freely on this forum and their policies go a long way in keeping this forum from being dominated by developers promoting their products and instead making it very user-centric. As much as I call out the troubling state of influencer marketing which I find unethical and manipulative, this forum is, IIMO, a great example of a brand that has gone a long way to create a very healthy environment that promotes the free exchange of ideas, opinions and information. I just hope they'll make an announcement about their Sonar pricing soon!

All he has to do is disclose upfront what his financial relationship is with the developer for the products he's featuring. That's what I do if I decided I wanted to be an influencer in that space. Funny enough, I actually could be considered an influencer in my business and regularly get pitched to promote colleges and various businesses as a business "thought leader."(Of course, that's not as fun as being a musician.) And I recently did sign a few agreements with some companies and I turned down a ton of them over two decades of being pitched (I only accepted a contract last month; this is largely academia, in my case, with universities like Pinceton, Yale, UChicago, etc.). But I'll always operate by disclosing clearly upfront when I have a financial relationship with any business I discuss, not say I'm doing completely unbiased reviews. My rule is that I won't even discuss companies that I don't respect and educational institutions I wouldn't recommend for my own family members. And beyond that, whenever I discuss these relationships, I will always begin by being transparent and disclosing that I have a business relationship. That's all these influencers need to do, but they refuse to do it. That's not ethical and it violates laws and regulations -- but they don't care. If someone thinks when I say, "I find this business training from Yale is worth consideration," after I disclose that I have a business relationship that my opinion is incredibly biased and my credibility on that recommendation is suspect, that's their call. They deserve to be informed that I have a business relationship with a company that I have a business relationship with. Hiding that fact and pretending to do an unbiased review is incredibly sleazy and there's not enough money in the world to get me to do that. Think I'm kidding? I once got pitched a 7 figure deal to lead digital marketing by a famous -- now infamous -- billionaire who called me up after reading an interview with me in Wired or Forbes. His business was the biggest or one of the biggest payday loan companies in the US. Their business model is basically exploiting the poor to rip them off with outrageously high interest rates. The CEO actually boasted to me that they were getting interest rates of more than 1,000% off of these poor people (small loans, giant interest). When I shared the story with an acquaintance he called me "nuts" for turning down the offer. He didn't even appreciate my self-depricating joke, "I'm Italian-American, I've already been a director in the insurance business, I can't go into loan-sharking next, I'll be fulfilling some kind of ugly stereotype of my people!" Three or four years later, I think this event vindicated me (spoiler, he got a 16 yr jail sentence; it turns out that he answered wrongly when I asked him, "Forget about the terrible ethics -- is charging those interest rates even legal?" He told me I was an "idiot" for turning down his offer and hung up the phone pretty ticked off at me and my candor in telling him that I value my soul more than money: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1EV00S/ So yeah, some of us draw lines.

I realize the developer wrote "less than ideal recording quality," but the amount of undesirable artifacts -- the pops, very undesirable sounding clicks when keys are hit and various noises on the solo piano in the tracks called "Improvisation" and "Film" is not what I'd consider desirable low-fi. I love low-fi sample libraries when they go after a retro vibe. But that's about EQ, lower bit samples, etc., not tons of pops, clicks, and other artifacts. This just sounds like a really poorly recorded library. It's not as evident when mixed with other instruments, but once the piano is soloed, it's not something I would want. Pianobook has plenty of free character pianos without all of these problems. I can make a piano sound bad on my own by playing poorly, I don't need help from a poorly recorded sample library. Hard pass.

Interesting. I'm friends with 8Dio's CEO, and she's very passionate that sample library prices as a whole are too high and need to come down, largely due to the 8+% CAGR for the market, and the maturity of the market. Basically, there is a large enough amount of buyers in the market that developers can afford to price libraries lower, as production costs can be spread among the larger group, whereas in the past, developers have looked to smaller numbers of sales to get to the break even point. Of course, that makes high quality sample libraries more accessible, putting them in more hands, instead of charging more money to get higher profit margins out of a small group of customers as has been the historical practice -- and one that a lot of sample library developers don't want to abandon, because it's been the path to high profitability and fast ROI. But we've never discussed any specific new releases, and, as a hobbyist musician, seeing a new 8Dio library released at this low of a price point is pretty exciting (I've been a customer for far more than a decade). The pricing has inspired some competitors to go into attack mode, making defamatory attacks instead of using traditional, ethical marketing strategies in response to 8Dio's past sales. I anticipate that this could end up unintentionally inspiring a new round of attacks. Consider how far prices have come down from effects plugin developers like UAD, Waves, Izotope and other leaders in the past few years. A lot of us -- including me -- have picked up effects plugins from high end developers we never be a consideration only 5 years ago due to prices being far out of our range. But in the past couple of years, you could pick up a native UAD plugin on sale for $29 US that has historically been selling for $30 US. Then look at what sample developers like NI, 8Dio, and Cinesamples (with Musio) have been doing. CineSamples created their Musio line and is selling some of their superb sample libraries like Tina Guo Cello and Piano in Blue for a small fraction of what they cost a couple of years ago (or what they still cost in the KONTAKT format). NI is discounting at unprecedented levels. They previously held to a 50% deep discounting maximum, but last year, they discounted their own sample libraries and third-party sample libraries more than 70%. Their Alicia's Keys acoustic piano library that lists at $100 US is now on sale at Plugin Boutique for $13 US. I have spoken with a number of sample developers about this trend and they're all, rightfully, paying attention to what's going on. and thinking about their pricing and questioning if they too should be adjusting their pricing, contemplating what they might do and how it all might work if they do lower prices. Of course, it means that they're going to have sell more licenses to make the same profits if they're going to cut their profit margins tighter. So, a lot of them are apprehensive. If enough competitors follow this "race to the bottom" as one competitor puts it in long, defamatory attack rants made on another forum, they're not going to be able to maintain their current high prices for their product lines. As a hobbyist musician on a tight budget, I love seeing prices come down dramatically. I want it to catch on for my own sake and for others. I want sample libraries -- and music creation as a whole -- to be more accessible to everyone, but especially to those who simply cannot afford current prices. The idealist in me would LOVE to see music creation to be accessible to everyone (no exceptions). This clearly isn't that ideal, but it is a lot closer than we've been in the past. It's actually a BFD and represents far more than one developer doing low pricing and that is what worries some competitors, but should excite all buyers of sample libraries.