Fleer Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 (edited) https://vi-control.net/community/threads/adachi-important-update-in-op.116094/ Edited November 14, 2023 by Fleer 1 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fleer Posted January 12, 2023 Author Share Posted January 12, 2023 Check from page 32 and be on your toes 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smallstonefan Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 (edited) I've got quite a bit from 8DIO and I've been happy with the quality. I suspect they are gearing up to sell the company - that would explain a lot of what I'm seeing on these often overly-aggressive sales tactics. EDIT: Read from page 31 on. YUCK! I'd hate to be 8DIO with that stuff floating about the internet. Then again, I focus HEAVY on customer service in my company and like to think I'd not let something get to that point. I still enjoy my 8DIO libraries. Edited January 12, 2023 by smallstonefan 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BTP Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 29 minutes ago, smallstonefan said: I suspect they are gearing up to sell the company - that would explain a lot of what I'm seeing on these often overly-aggressive sales tactics. They're probably just focusing on Soundpaint. It seems like they're releasing new versions of all of their 8Dio libraries on Soundpaint. I don't think their 8Dio libraries sell much without big sales anyway now, they're getting old and there are a lot of newer and more attractive alternatives from other companies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 (edited) UPDATE: I knew that Mario's story wasn't being told honestly because I gave him advice 13 yrs ago and I have communicated with Sarah, Mario, Cory and Tawnia directly and even seen the emails and screenshots. In the months since Sarah turned her 8Dio fan thread into a thread trashing 8Dio, she now says that 8Dio didn't treat her unfairly. Basically, she was just upset they didn't buy her fan project for her asking price of 5-6 figures and found anyone who had a gripe with 8Dio -- or in Mario's case, 8Dio's co-founder years before 8Dio even existed. Sarah and Mario hid that both work for 8Dio competitor Impact Soundworks (IS). IS' owner actually posted in the thread and failed to disclose that Sarah and Mario work for him. It's a case study in bad ethics and two competitors attacking another competitor. The narrative that Sarah, Greene and Mario painted is that 8Dio can't handle criticism and threaten to sue their critics, they're not telling the truth and I can tell you that Greene knows that from our direct conversations, he's told me as much, but feels taking down 8Dio is justified after he and Tawnia had a falling out, she pulled 8Dio's subscription and Greene claims she's trying to get developers together to boycott VI-CONTROL. Mario was caught shilling. He did a comparison post between ToneHammer's library (a company Troels co-founded prior to 8Dio) and the competitor's library he was working for, not disclosing that he was working for that developer. The same developer had plagiarized a bunch of copy from ToneHammer's website, so there was some bad blood. Troels simply PMed Mario and told him doing a comparison praising a library he worked on was unethical and he could be sued. Mario was worried and it was rumored that Mario was involved in piracy back then and he was especially worried about the law. My advice to him (this was 2011) was that ToneHammer was based on the US, he lived in Europe and they'd be very unlikely to pursue legal action. Instead, I recommended he not engage in similar behavior in the future and apologize to Troels. Clearly, Mario only paid attention to my advice that he was unlikely to be sued and -- I'm saying this based on my recent PMs with Mario-- still feels that Troels is the bad guy in this scenario. Sarah's story fell apart quickly and she now acknowledges she wasn't wronged in a DM to me and feels used by Greene. One of the three influencers they brought in only says 8Dio didn't offer her cash and she thinks they're cheap. Cory is a friend and his story is complex. He never actually did an 8Dio review under his own name. He opened up a sock puppet account when working for an 8Dio competitor and trashed 3 8Dio libraries. The sock puppet account never purchased any 8Dio libraries, so 8Dio's CEO tried to urge him to remove the reviews. Cory felt that Sarah and Greene were exploiting him in this thread and stopped posting at VI-Control. I share more in a later post in this thread. The bottom line is that VI-Control's owner, Mike Greene, who is also an 8Dio competitor, is angry with 8Dio's CEO after the company pulled its sponsorship of his forum, criticized him and has spent the last 10 months going on long, off the rails rants about 8Dio hurting other developers by lowering their prices too much. Edited January 28 by PavlovsCat 2 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 46 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said: Here's a thought. Go and make an honest, less than gold star review of an 8Dio and SoundPaint library and see if it goes up. Report the results back here. There's plenty of software especially games where reviews are not honest. No bad product exists at pluginboutique. Hornet shows all reviews. DAW drama.......I don't know what to say about that anymore other than that's Vi Control. Then again the posts about Dirk should have their own drama zone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 12, 2023 Share Posted January 12, 2023 (edited) On 1/12/2023 at 5:30 PM, kitekrazy said: There's plenty of software especially games where reviews are not honest. No bad product exists at pluginboutique. Hornet shows all reviews. DAW drama.......I don't know what to say about that anymore other than that's Vi Control. Then again the posts about Dirk should have their own drama zone. Knowing how VI Control is managed, you won't see a thread that negative stay up on a developer that buys a sponsorship or advertising there. I won't say too much, but there are bad ethics all over the place there if anyone seriously cares. I didn't know much about the Dirk stuff. I'm mainly focused on getting the best sample libraries and plugins I can get for the lowest price and not big into the other stuff. I have given advice to a lot of developers. But I'm not really up on which developer is ripping off which contractor these days. But the sleaze of some of these folks is pretty bad, but I wouldn't be turning to folks like influencers and unstable and hostile contractors bashing competitors of companies they work for, especially when they clearly have an ax to grind -- not if anyone is searching for truth. After reading through the thread, my take is that there's one very hostile individual (Ms. Mancuso) who has a vendetta and isn't a great source for a balanced perspective, especially when she works for a competitor that I didn't notice her disclosing (maybe she did, but I didn't see it, and those relationships are certainly going to impact her and it's very clear that she's bitter about not getting the deal she wanted with 8Dio, so the bias makes clear that we're not getting a very balanced/honest perspective; my personal experience with my single interaction with her leads me to believe she's not big on ethics and integrity). As far as Plugin Boutique, I completely agree with you, it's pretty blatant when everything is rated 4-5 out of 5 stars. But frankly, VI Control isn't a great place for honest negative feedback on developers who advertise there. I'll leave it at that. Edited November 15, 2023 by PavlovsCat 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Jones Posted January 13, 2023 Share Posted January 13, 2023 Why would Cory do that. Even worse, why would he post that he did that (acquiesce to 8dio in deleting his critical videos so he could get free stuff from them after what he said they did to him). I also listened to Corey's 4-year-old video about his experience with 8dio threatening to sue and libel him, and how that "crushed" him and made him unable to work for a while due to the emotional anguish. Idk I guess everyone's different in how they deal with stuff, and I know it's not good but I've tended to harbor grudges personally and I certainly wouldn't be making up with a company regardless of what free stuff they offered. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 13, 2023 Share Posted January 13, 2023 (edited) On 1/12/2023 at 6:00 PM, Christian Jones said: Why would Cory do that. Even worse, why would he post that he did that (acquiesce to 8dio in deleting his critical videos so he could get free stuff from them after what he said they did to him). I also listened to Corey's 4-year-old video about his experience with 8dio threatening to sue and libel him, and how that "crushed" him and made him unable to work for a while due to the emotional anguish. Idk I guess everyone's different in how they deal with stuff, and I know it's not good but I've tended to harbor grudges personally and I certainly wouldn't be making up with a company regardless of what free stuff they offered. Libel is only if you lie about a person or a business. If I state that I think XYZ developer's library of sample llama screams is complete garbage, that's not libel. If I state that someone said something to me they actually stated is not libel. If I falsely state that a certain developer is a serial killer, an adulterer and that he's embezzling from his corporation, that is libel. Libel means publishing lies. Now Corey stating in writing that he was blackmailed, if untrue, is both unethical and libel. Was Tawnia trying to persuade him to soften his negative comments or was it actually a threat? I'm not sure where his reviews he stated deleted appeared, but if it's on somewhere like Trust Pilot, 8Dio wouldn't be able to delete them. It's difficult to say if he's exaggerating on what he was told or not. I only know him from his videos, and he appears to be pretty honest, but then, in his own words, he stated that he was willing to delete his critical comments in exchange for free libraries. So the bottom line is, we really don't know if he's portraying his conversations accurately or not. We're only hearing one side of the story from someone we really don't know. If I'm going to be completely candid -- and that is my preferred way to operate -- I do find influencers commonly have very convoluted ethics. Their whole operation relies on getting free products and cash for doing reviews (and if those are popular enough, ad revenue from Google). If you're an influencer and you do a very negative review of a developer -- and Corey famously did one years ago for a developer whose name escapes me but he's a metal producer based out of Indiana -- and what happens then is that developer is no longer going to give you free product or sponsor your channel and pay you to promote them on their channel. The whole industry of influencers, to be super candid, is very ethically problematic. These are sales promotion people. Every brand has had influencers as part of their promotional plan for products for the last 10 years. Are we to be shocked even that our favorite influencer -- and he's my favorite in this space -- is not above being comprised because he was hyper critical of one developer? I stopped writing on marketing strategy a decade ago. I actually have contemplated writing on the other side, educating consumers on marketing strategies and tactics that are ethically problematic -- and the most common ethically problematic marketing tactic is the use of influencers, because they pose as unbiased reviewers when the truth is, they couldn't be any more biased. Their model is about trying to appear unbiased while getting free product and dollars from the folks their "reviewing" products for. Cory appears fairly honest for an influencer. In my experience, the closest shot people have to an unbiased review is still going to be at a publication that has a legit j-school quality editor and can make the balance between the editorial side and advertising (every publication faces those battles). But I wouldn't put any influencer on a pedestal. The entire model is pretty corrupt by design. Edited January 14, 2023 by PavlovsCat 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 13, 2023 Share Posted January 13, 2023 (edited) So, I won't say exactly, but I did go directly to a main source to find out what occurred with 8Dio (okay, it's easy to guess by that who I chatted with). Here's what I found. According to what I was told, Sarah Mancuso created a non-commissioned hobby project around a discontinued 8Dio library and then approached 8Dio to pitch them to pay her more than ten thousand dollars for it. 8Dio wasn't interested, but offered her something (money) for her effort out of gratitude. Sarah was clearly hyper offended and modified the thread she had made from praising 8Dio libraries to not just bashing those libraries, but repeatedly calling the same company she was praising "amoral" and bashing the same libraries she was previously praising and then citing anyone she knew who said anything bad about 8Dio even if it had nothing to do with her original objection. It's a very clear vendetta by someone against a brand, a clear effort to attack a brand. A smear campaign. Mancuso also didn't share that she works for one of 8Dio's competitors (the owner later chimed in on the thread). Look at my past posts about 8Dio. I'm hyper critical and guess what, I've never been told to take anything down and 8Dio has always been very professional with me. And I've NEVER at any point taken any NFRs from 8Dio or Soundpaint or money. I just hate terrible ethics and the toxic behavior in that thread and even the forum owner participating in it, It's one thing for Mancuso to share her specific experiences, but she's engaged in an all out attack and take down attempt of a business, She's urging people not to buy 8Dio and from her own story, she approached them to pitch them something she made for one of the retired libraries -- when pitching a developer something for an existing library is a crapshoot -- and she's angry that they didn't pay her what she feels it's worth. I don't find that is anywhere in the realm of bad ethics or exploitation. Now if 8Dio hired her and didn't pay her an agreed amount, that would be unethical. But if you perform work in advance and pitch it to a company and they don't want it, that's not a reflection of their bad ethics. It's their right to accept or reject anything they like. Does 8Dio make my favorite sample libraries? Nope. Have they ever been dishonest with me or pressured me to take down a negative review? Nope. But, of course, I'm not an influencer, and the reality is, brands routinely work with influencers before their "reviews" go live and brands will negotiate on negative portions of a review video. Again, I urge people to try for themselves rather than believe the words of someone trying to destroy a company simply because she's bitter that they didn't want to buy her non-commissioned work for what she wanted. FTR, I've heard her music and she's clearly very talented. I would suggest that she better focus herself and not do non-commissioned projects if she wants to be paid, as those are a crap shoot. From a strategy perspective, with VI Control's owner chiming in to declare that he's on "team Sarah," I don't think it would be a great idea for 8Dio to post there. No matter what their response, they're not going to get a fair hearing on that platform. I know that 8Dio is on Discord and that is where I think anyone who wants their side of things should check. Edited January 14, 2023 by PavlovsCat 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 13, 2023 Share Posted January 13, 2023 Last month, Mike Greene was telling me that his forum was the wrong place to air grievances against a developer and now he's actively participating in a thread against a competitor developer declaring that he's on "team Sarah." Troels commented in the thread for anyone following this toxic drama. To be really candid, this is exactly why I loathe VI Control. The bullying and the ethics are terrible there. Look back on my posts about 8Dio and I have been hyper critical. I've even been that way with Troels and he was still friendly with me. So Troels posted in the forum (and yes, he was the person I was chatting with) and guess what? The angry mob is attacking him because they blindly believe every charge made up from Sarah Mancuso. I can tell you, as someone libeled by her weeks ago, she's not someone I find even slightly concerned with ethical behavior. Again, who creates a thread praising a developer and their libraries and then after that developer doesn't pay her 5 figures she wants for her non-commissioned work she pitched to them, she goes back and modifies her praise of that developer to pure venom and trashing every product and urges everyone not to buy their products. If that isn't an obvious vendetta and libel, nothing is. She's deliberately trying to damage a developer, to destroy them. completely out of spite and the forum's owner is supporting her effort. I am done with VI Control after this. I would urge others to vacate that forum. Mike Greene is using his forum to sabotage a competitor. I hope developers stop advertising there after this, 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kal Elle Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 Evil Dragon is the best Forumist in the world (sorry Fleer, you are close 2nd) 🥰, and if ED confirmed stuff on the VI Control thread, that is enough for me to stay away forever. Specially if this behaviour has continued for years and years. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Technostica Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 The response by Troels put him in a bad light in my eyes I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after reading his reply I have taken a negative view. I have always found him to be somewhat of a quirky character, at least on YT. Now I am starting to wonder what is behind this quirkiness. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 (edited) 37 minutes ago, Technostica said: The response by Troels put him in a bad light in my eyes I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after reading his reply I have taken a negative view. I have always found him to be somewhat of a quirky character, at least on YT. Now I am starting to wonder what is behind this quirkiness. That post wasn't a great idea. But it's a pretty hostile thread and he was going to be attacked no matter what he said. And consider that I'm easily one of the top harshest 8Dio and SoundPaint critics at this forum, but I'm not okay with the mob action mentally of that thread. People aren't looking for facts, they're looking to burn the developer at a stake. It's a hostile echo chamber. Edited January 14, 2023 by PavlovsCat 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amicus717 Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said: That post wasn't a great idea. But it's a pretty hostile thread and he was going to be attacked no matter what he said. And consider that I'm easily one of the top harshest 8Dio and SoundPaint critics at this forum, but I'm not okay with the mob action mentally of that thread. People aren't looking for facts, they're looking to burn the developer at a stake. It's a hostile echo chamber. I rarely get involved in threads like that one, mainly because it's a waste of energy. What actually happened is a total unknown -- I don't know any of the people directly involved, and neither does 99.999% of the commentators -- and so drawing conclusions is pointless. And honestly, maybe I'm just getting old and tired, but the drama of it just wears me out. It kind of dovetails with my own mild distaste for VI Control, generally. I have never enjoyed it much, and rarely go there unless on a search for specific info that is hard to find elsewhere. I personally have not had a bad experience on the forum, but it's always had a chaotic schoolyard vibe that I found a bit off-putting. That's just my own sense of things, and I can understand others finding it a very useful community to participate in. I'm perfectly content with the Cakewalk forum. This is a good group. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PavlovsCat Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 (edited) 5 minutes ago, Amicus717 said: I'm perfectly content with the Cakewalk forum. This is a good group. This a great group, the best! It's part of why we're afraid to venture out from the deals forum. There's such a great group here. Dead serious. I'd be happy to hear music from everyone here after spending so much time here. I never even had the nerve to publicly share music with only me playing until last year and it was at this forum. It wasn't easy, but people were super nice and encouraging. Edited January 14, 2023 by PavlovsCat 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Technostica Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 6 hours ago, PavlovsCat said: That post wasn't a great idea. But it's a pretty hostile thread and he was going to be attacked no matter what he said. And consider that I'm easily one of the top harshest 8Dio and SoundPaint critics at this forum, but I'm not okay with the mob action mentally of that thread. People aren't looking for facts, they're looking to burn the developer at a stake. It's a hostile echo chamber. It's seemingly his only public response in that thread so it carries a lot of weight. That's why I personally took it to be a negative. I am ignoring all the responses by third parties as they are irrelevant. So if I just look at the responses by the three or more parties that had personal direct negative experiences and his reply, it looks pretty bad. Then I add on top of that my perception of him from watching many YT videos and the amateur psychologist in me has a field day. I like Troels, even though I don't care for his walkthrough videos. At least he no longer speaks at a hundred miles per hour which was an issue a number of years ago. But for my tastes, he talks too much and has the need to repeatedly tell us how wonderful the product is. When I add all this together, he comes across as seemingly being a troubled figure. I wish him well as I don't want to kick a man when he's down. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
antler Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 Lots of accusations in that thread. I wouldn't have any idea whether they were true or not. Some people claim to have proof of such and such; why not post them (or partially redacted screenshots) in addition to making assertions? 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fleer Posted January 14, 2023 Author Share Posted January 14, 2023 6 hours ago, Technostica said: I don't want to kick a man when he's down. +1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitekrazy Posted January 14, 2023 Share Posted January 14, 2023 2 hours ago, antler said: Lots of accusations in that thread. I wouldn't have any idea whether they were true or not. Some people claim to have proof of such and such; why not post them (or partially redacted screenshots) in addition to making assertions? This thread does not really belong in Deals forum and better suited for coffee house or Vi Control drama zone. Mod please move this thread. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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