Carl Ewing

Oh man - this is going to start getting confusing. Can't wait for all the Brainworx plugins to look like Massive X.

Did a quick search through that site - most prices are absurd. Love seeing people trying to get $100+ from PA plugins though. Lolol. VI-Control still better for second hand licenses. Something about having to interact with the buyer on a public forum - and getting publicly called out for absurd resale prices - makes sellers much less likely to gouge. And easier to make offers or buy multiple things in a bundle.

Those drums gave me more anxiety than Uncut Gems.

Oh - I meant the recent coupon drama.

Awwwkward....

What? Lol. Now that's 100% bullshit. Do we also blame piracy for the shuttering of all the Blockbuster video stores and DVD plants? Strangely, Apple and Netflix were rolling in $billions of new revenue...for some reason. How do people read numbers like this and think "ya, that seems about right - clearly nothing in the music industry has changed the last 20 years except the Pirate Bay. What's that? Music streaming crushing retail and manufacturing? Irrelevant!" Also - global music industry revenue is now higher than it was in 1999 (not inflation adjusted). But it's twice as big as it was 10 years ago (2012 - 2022), with streaming accounting for 70% of revenue, and physical now dropping to ~15%, and digital downloads accounting for 4%. (The remaining revenue is mostly performance rights). And with a higher percentage of revenue going to independent artists & labels than ever before. This is currently the best business era for indie artists in the history of the artform. Ironically - we can all thank digital music piracy for warp speeding the evolution to streaming - because digital music piracy is what helped consumers make the switch to listening to music digitally (especially on their mobile devices) rather than buying physical going to the store...which in turn motivated the creation of commercial services like iTunes to grab that market.

You are flat out wrong about this. Almost every studio and every colleague I've ever met in the music business has used or still uses pirated software. Same applies to graphic design and video work. This can be everything from full scale libraries to preset packs, loop packs to effects. In design it's effects packs, fonts, full design programs, brushes, textures, clip art, and on and on. See it all the time. And these are studios that spend 10s of thouands on software every year. Why do they do this? Some of it is habit - always that nerdy engineer guy who has a portable harddrive filled with pirated shit. This guy is in every studio - everyone knows that guy. Other reason is trying out full products (like full sample libraries) before paying for it. Again - I see this happen all the time in large commercial studios.

There's a reason a totally an obscure company from Sweden ended up taking over the music industry. Or why a company that didn't exist prior to 2000 took over television and movies (for a period). Both Netflix and Spotify were answers to industries that weren't giving customers what they wanted, despite the technology being available. While people were yelling at each other about piracy, a couple companies were like "hmm, maybe we should just give people what they want: convenience. Every movie and every song you could ever want on one platform, with one app, at the click of a button, on demand." If The Pirate Bay would have charged $9.99/mo for access to their tracker list, they would have been as big as Netflix. It wasn't about piracy. It was never about "free". It was about convenience. People would have paid for it. How the movie, television and music industry never figured this out, and instead tried to fight their consumers by putting artificial & obsolete roadblocks in their path, is amazing. Both of these 100+ year old industries got their ***** handed to them by companies that either didn't exist (Spotify, Netflix) or had nothing to do with either industry (Apple) prior to digital piracy. It's incredible how that happened. But a great lesson in idiocy.

If I could download a car I would totally do it. Often. Quite often actually. But I always found that "you wouldn't steal a car would you?" kinda funny. As if duplicating a digital file is the same as duplicating a car. If duplicating a car was easy as pirating a Game of Thrones episode, literally half the world would have a Ferrari, and an entire new department of government would be formed to investigate the illegal use of the Star Trek replicator.

Just checked through a torrent site - virtually every Kontakt library is available, and Kontakt is fully cracked, just like it was 15 years ago...including Kontakt 7. Meaning any library built for Kontakt 1-7 will be totally piratable (word?). What's interesting is that the only products I see from developers who have their own proprietary players (Orchestral Tools, Spitfire, etc.) are the Kontakt versions. For example, all Kontakt version of OT libraries are on torrent sites. I'm sure that was a motivation for some of those devs to get away from Kontakt - too many resources devoted to cracking all things NI.

In a massively absurdly oversaturated market it was just a matter of time until price wars brought priceless down to rock bottom level. This means smaller developers who have have significant overhead will be eliminated, because they can't price compete and likely never sell enough products at traditionally "normal" prices to stay in business. In this environment, small companies REALLY have to think hard about what products they want to develop. Because anything that is even remotely "generic" or remotely similar to products from companies that have a) ginormous marketing teams b) ability to sustain rock bottom prices, will be a problem. ISW does have unique products - that do fall into niche territory (Shreddage series, Tokyo Scoring Strings), but they are really at the mercy of companies like, say, Native Instruments, that can run a 50% off sale offering consumers a terrabyte of sample libraries and a gazillion effects / tools, including guitars and orchestra, for $600 (current sale price for Komplete 14 Ultimate). Or a Creative Cloud subscription for $200 a year. Tokyo Scoring Strings sells for $449. This is an absolutely brutal market for small developers. As a note - Spitfire Audio and Orchestral Tools get away with their absurd prices because their marketing is at Apple-tax levels, and their you-will-pay-an-absurd-premium-hipster-black-turtleneck-level-pretentiousness is unrivaled.

50%? Lol. Black Friday is the only time of year they run sales where you might get something for what's it's actually worth.

I think it's a good rule to never buy Spitfire products unless it says Black Friday Sale on their site. Same goes with Orchestral Tools.

Ah yes - There is a little red notification. However, right below that, it says that I can upgrade to the bundle (that I own) via duplicate individual plugins I own that are inside the bundle. For example, I have a duplicate license for Renaissance Bass and H-Comp that I got through some promos. It says buying this upgrade will add 39 new plugins to my collection (a collection I already own). If I add it to the cart it does give me a discount on the bundle based on my ownership of Renaissance Bass and H-Comp. It does not give me a discount from owning all the other plugins in the collection. So my upgrade cost of owning 2 plugins in the collection is $242. My upgrade cost of owning 39+ of the plugins in the bundle is $242. I've noticed it does this with other bundles as well. If I buy, say, Waves Diamond, it will only consider individual plugins that I own as part of the discount pricing. It will not consider any plugins inside of collections I own (nor the bundle itself). Interesting.

Yay - I can still upgrade to a bundle I already own for $250. Nice to see Waves still hasn't fixed their bundle discount problems. They will quite literally allow me to add something I own to the cart (while logged in), give me payment options, allow me to click "complete order" and not once tell me that I already own the thing I'm buying - even though it's an UPGRADE option. It's been like this for years. Lol.

Because Amplitube takes FOREVER to load and run through presets. Sometimes I just need quick effects for background guitar-like effects. It's quite a fast / snappy program considering the amount of features. Also have Fractal Audio hardware, but sometimes you just need something done ITB that takes 2 seconds. Not even close to the same quality. But yep, GR loads fast and is faster to edit.

Getting tired of companies that do this sketchy stuff with the upgrade / crossgrade pricing. Impact Soundworks is another company that doesn't show your discounted pricing from the main store, and require you do go through a section of your account to access "Deals / Crossgrade / Upgrade" options. Clearly intentional, as I'm sure half their customers don't even see the upgrade / crossgrade pricing. If I go through the main store, this deal gives me a price of like $60 with coupons - forget the exact price, but somewhere around there. If I add through "My Deals" in my account (as OP said), I get $11. That pre-coupon crossgrade / upgrade price should be shown in the main store. It might even get them more sales, since prior customers could actually see their upgrade price when browsing the shop. I wasn't even aware of how many upgrade / crossgrade items I qualified for. But now I'm miffed, so won't bother buying anything lol.

Check the Vi-Control sales forum. People sell FabFilter stuff all the time, often for way better deals than their usual sales prices. https://vi-control.net/community/forums/for-sale-music-gear-classifieds-free-service.66/

I remember back in the day trying to figure out Absynth's installation directory logic. It was completely insane. Just ***** files and folders all over the C drive. Complete and total mess. It hasn't improved at all. Which is amazing considering the resources NI have. There are software companies with 4 employees that write better code and have better program management than this company. Love their programs though - I just can't over how messy the software is.

Bingo. My guess is that the product isn't very profitable, PA discounts we're killing their margins, and they're now using this cross grade to make money back from existing users who became user via heavily discounted PA purchases. That's awful business practice. What they should do is offer free crossgrade, and then charge those customers when the product is updated to version 5. Ain't no way I'm paying MORE money for a product (specifically the product version) I already own, and paying a price reflective of the sales price I got it at. Lol. I doubt that's even legal. Not the consumers fault they signed a contract with PA.

Their appeal is still offloading processing to their chips. Still useful today because of the abysmal multi-core support across most of the industry. My template runs about 40 UAD plugins off the Octo card, covering most reverbs, channel strips (on all groups), and master bus inserts, before I even start working on a project. Can't imagine working without it, at least on my main system. Constantly bottle neck the single core limit. even on two systems with overclocked high end CPUs. But I'm guessing they're picking up a nice bit of change on the Native stuff, since many of their emulations are still the best on the market.

I believe it's also illegal in some states. I.E. Depending on time in between sales, having regular price, then 50% off, then back to regular price, then 75% off is a legal no no if the product doesn't revert back to regular price for a set period of time. I think in the UK it's 28 days. Not sure how it works in the US exactly, but I know some form of these laws exist. The legal justification is that the consumer must have a reasonable understanding of a) what the regular value of the product is and b) what discount percentage the sale actually represents. In the case of, say, Waves and Plugin Alliance, it's doubtful that the general consumer would view their "regular" prices as "regular", and likely views the sale price as the regular price since the sales are so frequent. This is a legal problem for these companies IMO. And I'm guessing they stagger their sales with just enough time to have their products at regular price to remain within the law. Or not. I doubt they really care when they see their sales plummet during non-sale times. A lawyer would have fun with this I think.

No. Not the same as what I'm talking about. PA's is a proprietary installer for their products (and a limited range of 3rd party plugins they sell). And Plugin Boutique doesn't even have a desktop installer so what are you talking about? You've used Steam before? You've used the app store on your phone? You've used the XBOX or Playstation store? This is what I'm talking about. One app, on your desktop, hundreds of developers, sales, registration, installation and updating from one single app. Just like Steam. And just like Steam it would allow for an enormous community ecosystem of reviews, tutorials, forums, and a robust platform for developers to advertise their products. Just like Steam there could be sales seasons / promotional focus for indie developers, section specifically for iOS / Android apps, a whole section on freebies, spotlights on artists, producers and sound designers, industry news, multi-language / region support, ability to preorder or reminders for upcoming releases. Just a massive platform and community for audio software. Instead of the totally fragmented disaster zone (and software security & ecommerce nightmare) it is now. To put the industry in context - the global DAW market (including all audio / music software instruments, plugins, DAWs) was $2.49 billion in 2021, and projected to double and hit $4.95 billion 2027. And that entire market is more fragmented than ever, with 100s of developers competing for their own proprietary ecosystem. It's like having 80 Netflix apps to watch movies from each studio. It's ludicrous.

I've suggested some ideas to help with this problem on a couple forums and was shot down. For example, a Steam type marketplace app like there is for gaming, where all manufacturers sell their products, and also acts as installation, copy protection, etc. So everything you own is on one app, and the "Steam" app can focus on security and e-commerce, while the developers can focus on their products. Easier said then done, but really this 'every-developer-needs-there-own-damn-product-manager' horseshit has been a bane of the audio software industry for 20 years. I guess it's better than the days were you had to save all those pieces of paper and boxes with serial numbers, and drag 'em out every time you did a new system install. Glad that's over with. But really - something has to change. It's just going to get worse and worse with these proprietary ecosystems, and it must be affecting sales, as there are a few developers I don't buy from because I don't want another damn piece of software on my system just for one or two plugins / instruments.

Always, from what I remember.