Batwaffel

3 hours ago, Piotr said:

In normal circumstances I would fully agree with you.  But unfortunately last years showed their shop was just unable to hold huge traffic... So I am afraid it will be down anyway...

But well, we will see soon... I hope I am wrong...

 

Being that the site is hosted and supported by a third party now, I'm much more hopeful. Since they've come back up from the last blunder, it's worked much better than it did before. I can actually even use search now; something that should never have been as big an issue as it was but it gives me hope.

2 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Glyn is very receptive to suggestions.  He's also a developer, involved with Divergent Audio.  I think they'll get there eventually.

The big problem is the server is overwhelmed by all that stuff, so it's slow.  He needs to spend big money for an upgrade. 

But I think he was nuts to make such a massive change just as Black Friday is dawning.  If I was selling on that platform, I'd be pissed. 

 

That is exactly why I was convincing Uncle E to not launch JRR's new site this month. They've had too many rocky Novembers in the past so it would be foolish to take the risk.

Loot Audios site has the look of a high end hotel. Very pretty to look at which would be fine if they had 10 products on it. For a massive store though, it's a pain in the *****. 

The one thing I wish these sites would do is allow you to also be able to sort by when they were added. The hardest thing I've found to be productive while posting is to see what deals they snuck in overnight or while afk. You have to go down through and constantly as yourself "did I post that already?"

When I talked to them last, they were hinting that AD3 was coming. That was over a year ago now though so who knows what they are doing. I use AD2 as my main drum plugin but I'm seriously considering just moving to SD3 at this point.

I never saw any of us as competition. In fact, I often reference both here and your BF threads to make sure I'm getting everything up.

Been talking with Eric lately about the site. The new site goes up next month  (which I think is a bad move to launch a new site right as sale season kicks in) and the website is now handled by an outsourced company so hopefully this takes care of the issues they've been plagued with for the past few years.

The last AD2 update or worth I believe was their Mallets adpak which was 3 years ago this month. I've talked with them a few times and they've said they are still working on AD but so far they are quiet. Whatever it is they are working on better be epic enough to compete with and overtake Superior Drummer if they want to survive in that battle.

The non-notification that this is happening is a bit troubling. I'm not sure about this move to Loot Audio. It seems to me like their idea of a humble bundle style plugin system was failing big time so they are trying to move the traffic there in hopes that people see it more. 

Just now, Grem said:

I understood that. Still not acceptable for me. I'm out.

Just way too many options out there.

Yah, I'm not going to be posting them for the foreseeable future, either. As much as I like Eric, the issues with their site have plagued them for far too long without any long term solutions. This is unacceptable for a company like theirs who have been around for a long time. He needs to step it up with a professional website company who can handle the site because whoever he has doing it now is doing a piss poor job.

3 hours ago, abacab said:

This thread over at KVR has a response from Uncle E that says he should have a new site up next month.

JRR shop is still down?

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=549392&start=150

Uncle E's post about the new site at the bottom of page 11.

However on page 1 it seems he was saying that back in July...

 

If I had to guess, I'd say they wanted to make sure the current site was still working while they got the new one ready and hit delays. I will say, them launching a new site in November is very stupid. They tried moving servers two years ago in November and it was a disaster. They pretty much missed the entire month and a half of sales because their site was never up.

11 hours ago, Grem said:

  Quote
Update 1: Uncle E has said they store no personal information for billing. All transactions with credit cards go directly through the credit cards company portals so the website doesn't even obtain that data. Same with PayPal.

This is his solution to the issue? Not acceptable for me.

He was just calming people's nerves and letting them know none of their information was stolen as they don't store it. A lot of people were concerned that credit card information could have been exposed.

Yah, I'm officially done posting them until Uncle E gets his shit together and fires whoever is working on his site. Years of constant issues with that site should have been the first clue but if their security is compromised, that is unacceptable.

They really should do something. It happens every year at the worst possible times. When is the last time they were able to take part in November sales? Something's gotta give. People are really getting fed up of them being constantly down.

There's been a lot of summer sales this year (though to be honest, they weren't nearly as good as previous years. Most single products averaged about $10-$20 cheaper in previous years) and I think a lot of the developers are a bit concerned about the uncertain future that is coming and wanted to make sure they had a little more in case the money is all gone by November if things end up closing back up.

The smarter thing I feel would have been to go a bit lower and have more sales than to go higher and have less but I don't think they were much higher that it would have made much a difference. Everyone is just concerned about where things are going. It's going to be a very interesting holiday season this year.

5 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Yeah you're still leaving a lot of details out there, and since we've been at this for a while it's safe to assume bad faith here. You can keep believing that a company that is doing its layoff cycle, and a change of ownership, while making anti-consumer decisions for the sake of gaining more money, because they needed it is doing well. I am going to continue helping my colleagues get better deals for what they need.

I mean what is it, are they doing well enough that they do not need to change their model, or are they doing so poorly that they are resorting to pulling anti-consumer moves in order to squeeze more money out of prospective customers BeCaUsE dEvElOpMeNt Is ExPeNsIvE?

Well you have fun with that.

2 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Look, you can save the excuses. The fact is, we're in a global pandemic, less people are able to afford things. Sure, people can throw in $130 during the summer sales, but if people have been using free libraries to get to that during the summer instead of having to pay $199, and that is suddenly taken away because they "need money" that is not a good look, and it is one that erodes consumer trust.

That was my point.

For the record, I already own the full version of Kontakt. This isn't about me, don't deign to make it about me.

You may want to check your facts there. People aren't really spending less money. At least those who are buying plugins aren't spending less overall. Whether that changes, no one can say for sure. Most people are back to work for the moment.

What you're basically saying is that you believe it should be free or cheaper because a couple other companies have free players or put out cheaper products so your personal opinion is that it is the way the world is going so a company with no real competition at all should change their highly successful business model because people won't be willing to dump all that money into them that they've been dumping in for much longer even though their sales of Komplete are really strong and buying Kontakt offers them a cheaper way to get to the ultimate (no pun intended) goal of having it much cheaper.

Yah, okay there.

5 hours ago, abacab said:

Just asking for a friend, when do you think the next 50% off deal on Kontakt 6 will happen?

November sale is their single instrument sale. The summer sale has been a bundle sale for a long while but they started including crossgrades and upgrades in it as well a couple years ago. So the next time to pick it up for $130ish will be late November. Just make sure you have a Kontakt library registered on your Native Access account that is crossgrade compatible such as Embertone Arcane or any of the paid Kontakt Player compatible libraries.

7 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Now that's just quitter talk. I have been seeing more and more developers creating their own bespoke engines, and move to engines like UVI Workstation/Falcon. And keep in mind, the restriction to use 3rd party libraries with the free Workstation isn't as rough as with Kontakt Player and the whole demo thing.

And you know, sometimes, you don't really need the massive glut of features that Kontakt offers, and it would be better to use something simpler.

It's not "quitter talk", it's reality. Very few companies have moved to UVI; Virharmonic being the the most popular, Acousticsamples and VILabs. Most of the other companies have put out a single product that uses them.

Developing your own engine isn't something a whole lot of companies are willing to do. It takes time, lots of money, testing, more money, bug fixing before release, money. You get the point. On top of that, once released it can run into the same issues as companies like EastWest or Spitfire Audio have faced and take many years before they have a solid product (Play wasn't what I'd call a "good engine" till version 4). It can turn into a sinkhole for a lot of companies which is why they use engines put out by other companies. They are more able to focus on the sampling aspect which is what was intended from the start. 

The whole discussion about that is kind of off the original statement you made though because more people are willing to throw $130 at Kontakt during sales season than you think. It's been a sales model that has worked for them for quite some time now.

3 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

Again, you're missing the point. The point is that they are resting on their laurels, and this move is just going to remind producers that looking for alternatives is a good idea, actually.

I got the point. NI have been lacking in development for a long time now despite us screaming about the issues in plugins like Kontakt but they can do that because at the moment, there is no competition in the market. All we can really do is hope that changes but that also means that developers will have to adopt a new engine and scripting language which many are comfortable in right now with NI products so unless a ground breaking sampler comes out that people want to move to, they know they will keep raking in the money.

Falcon is a good option but barely any developers have moved to it. It also hovers around the $400 mark. Their sale on it isn't nearly as good as Kontakt, either and it's the only sampler out right now that I believe even comes close to Kontakt.

Best Service Engine is another option but right now, it's not even in the same league. This may change when Engine 3 comes out but again, you need to be able to convince developers to make the switch. 

So there are no good alternatives at the moment which is why nothing is going to change.

15 hours ago, Fleer said:

If I remember well, Spectrasonics also charges for extra downloads of Omnisphere. 

They do but they also give you a set amount of downloads you can use before that which don't expire or in the case of the way most people buy it, it comes with a hard drive backup. 

They are decent. I've bought a couple things from there before and they were delivered quickly. Their biggest issue it seems is they can't compete with the pricing on some of the bigger sites. If they focused more on exclusive sales, it would get them a lot further. I think Plugin Boutique has really learned that in the past couple years as well.

1 hour ago, Peter - IK Multimedia said:

Sure, anybody can use crappy hosting but we don't.  We use a top-tier CDN and give you 180 days to download as many times as you'd like.  If you don't prefer to do your own backups, you can get access to all of your large sound libraries for the one-time fee and for another 180 days.  That's cheaper than most cloud storage plans and you don't even have to use it...

Come on now. "You have 180 days to download this as much as you want". If that's the case, why not open it up to unlimited time and a download limit of say, 10? That way they are there if someone actually needs them later on rather than having only half a year to do it then get cut off? At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter if someone has to redownload it after 180 days or not if they've not redownloaded it previously. So you pay a little extra per month than maybe you'd pay for someone like Amazon's servers. Doesn't mean Amazon's servers are bad or slow.

Hell, you could even make a bittorrent with just the sample data in them and offer that as an option for people who need it past their 180 days but then you couldn't get that extra $10 to pay for your "top tier CDN". 

5 hours ago, Freyja Grimaude-Valens said:

...and chopping off $150 from that gate would help get more people started. Far less people can afford $400 compared to $250.

(If people could just fart out $400, they'd be buying Omnisphere sooner than Kontakt anyways)

The people who pay $400 for Kontakt are extremely minimal. Most people who look into buying it now get information on it first and one of the first things they are told is to wait for a sale. On top of that, NI's goal isn't to sell them Kontakt; it's to sell them Komplete. That is where their money is these days and again, people are told to wait for sales so that's what they do. I've never seen a single person in the past 5 years or so who paid full price for Komplete.

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