Splash Sound Black Friday Sale Is On! Up to 90% OFF and new Freebies.

[cclarry]

https://splashsound.org/index.html

[Niky Serrano]

I haven't found new freebies

They are the same that they had before BF

[PavlovsCat]

Just now, Niky Serrano said:

I haven't found new freebies

They are the same that they had before BF

Yep. I think you're right. 

I bought some of this developer's libraries a couple of years ago. They're okay. But I thought the developer was really nice. I sent him a link to a YouTube video I came across when I was researching his piano library where a pirate was sharing a free download.  He sent me back his ukulele library as thanks. I felt and still feel guilty to take something just for doing the right thing. But at least I can share the nice gesture he did. 

I think his ukulele library is a lot of fun and I would recommend picking up his freebies. They're not deep sampled, super high end libraries, but they're priced accordingly.  

Be advised that they're based in Russia, so some credit companies do not do transactions due to protesting Russia's war on Ukraine and human rights abuses. 

[Niky Serrano]

12 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

Yep. I think you're right. 

I bought some of this developer's libraries a couple of years ago. They're okay. But I thought the developer was really nice. I sent him a link to a YouTube video I came across when I was researching his piano library where a pirate was sharing a free download.  He sent me back his ukulele library as thanks. I felt and still feel guilty to take something just for doing the right thing. But at least I can share the nice gesture he did. 

I think his ukulele library is a lot of fun and I would recommend picking up his freebies. They're not deep sampled, super high end libraries, but they're priced accordingly.  

Be advised that they're based in Russia, so some credit companies do not do transactions due to protesting Russia's war on Ukraine and human rights abuses. 

Curious

This week I found a package completely free from one of the most influence and very known people
The link was in his web site

I noticed that he was selling the package via other link/site, so I contacted to advise the problem

I got the package from his web site freely before contact him, but he didn't know, and after our emails, he offered me to get it free 
I felt and guilty getting this freely, but he reply me that all was fine!

We have to protect and promote the industry and developers with common sense. I understand the tentation to get some libraries, packages, etc., but is true that we need to have more empathy

Edited November 18, 2023 by Niky Serrano

[PavlovsCat]

7 minutes ago, Niky Serrano said:

Curious

This week I found a package completely free from one of the most influence and very known people
The link was in his web site

I noticed that he was selling the package via other link/site, so I contacted to advise the problem

I got the package from his web site freely before contact him, but he didn't know, and after our emails, he offered me to get it free 
I felt and guilty getting this freely, but he reply me that all was fine!

We have to protect and promote the industry and developers with common sense. I understand the tentation to get some libraries, packages, etc., but is true that we need to have more empathy

And the reality is, there are some developers in this business with incredibly bad ethics that play dirty. I'll be very candid.  I will never buy Fluffy Audio,  Realitone or Impact Soundworks libraries on ethics principles alone. All three of those developers make good quality libraries, but their ethics are indefensibly bad. Life is too short. You can be a successful business person without resorting to unethical practices. 

[Niky Serrano]

10 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

And the reality is, there are some developers in this business with incredibly bad ethics that play dirty. I'll be very candid.  I will never buy Fluffy Audio,  Realitone or Impact Soundworks libraries on ethics principles alone. All three of those developers make good quality libraries, but their ethics are indefensibly bad. Life is too short. You can be a successful business person without resorting to unethical practices. 

Add Karanyi to your list

[PavlovsCat]

18 minutes ago, Niky Serrano said:

Add Karanyi to your list

But very candidly,  I attributed Karanyi's treatment of you not to their having bad ethics, but to a lack of maturity, a lack of trust and then some vindictiveness on their part.

It was foolish and immature the way you were treated.  That's why I offered to intervene on your behalf. I looked at it like they jumped to the wrong conclusion about you and what you reported, not respecting that you're a software developer trying to be helpful. So I don't think it's so much bad ethics as much as it is boneheadedness and stubbornness on their part and I stand behind that assessment if they see this. I think that you're a good man and I still would be happy to reach out to them if you ever decide you want that.  

Also, if you think I've gotten anything wrong with the situation, please don't hesitate to correct me. 

[Kirean]

Some are much cheaper on Pulse's site. Maybe even price glitch territory. Epic Percussion 3 for example is ~40+ bucks on Splash and 14.90 on Pulse.

https://pulse.audio/developer/splash-sound/

Edited November 19, 2023 by Kirean

[Andrew Aversa]

On 11/18/2023 at 10:44 AM, PavlovsCat said:

And the reality is, there are some developers in this business with incredibly bad ethics that play dirty. I'll be very candid.  I will never buy Fluffy Audio,  Realitone or Impact Soundworks libraries on ethics principles alone. All three of those developers make good quality libraries, but their ethics are indefensibly bad. Life is too short. You can be a successful business person without resorting to unethical practices. 

Hi, owner of Impact Soundworks here - you've invoked me/ISW many times in the last month or so here, and I'm genuinely confused... what specific thing do you think I (or we) have done that is "indefensibly bad" / unethical? 

[Vst0nE]

splash sounds at pulse.audio seems like good deal, harmo $2.50, you will get $1 credit after each purchase to lower price as well.

so guitar strum $4.70 and retrowave $6.80 with each separate purchase credit $1 applied

[Kirean]

Note that some of the things are cheaper on Splash's site.

Gentle Keys at $5

Old School Keys and Indie Voices are free on Splash, whereas at Pulse they've got a small price tagged on.

[Vst0nE]

12 minutes ago, Kirean said:

Note that some of the things are cheaper on Splash's site.

Gentle Keys at $5

Old School Keys and Indie Voices are free on Splash, whereas at Pulse they've got a small price tagged on.

yes get freebies at splash and the rest at pulse.audio. do not forget $1 credit to lower each purchase at pulse.audio (make separate purchases)

[PavlovsCat]

On 11/19/2023 at 10:21 PM, Andrew Aversa said:

Hi, owner of Impact Soundworks here - you've invoked me/ISW many times in the last month or so here, and I'm genuinely confused... what specific thing do you think I (or we) have done that is "indefensibly bad" / unethical? 

Your employee/contractor, Sarah Mancuso, took her VI-Control thread sharing her fan project scripts for an 8Dio library and showering praise on 8Dio libraries -- made prior to her employment with Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor -- and transformed it into at a defamatory attack thread after 8Dio didn't buy her scripts and she began employment with ISW. She proceeded to edit her past posts from praise for your competitor to attacks in more than 20 pages of highly defamatory statements and engaged in bullying behavior against your competitor's two founders when they posted in the thread. It was incredibly vicious, and unprofessional.  Your employee never even once provided support for any of the allegations made ( I knew two of the stories being told were being told falsely; as one of your employes, Mario, received advice from me 13 years ago on the matter and told me the story quit differently from what he told in the thread, as the original notes make clear).  But simply engaging in a public defamatory attack on a competitor alone is profoundly problematic in itself, not adding in hiding that it's a competitor.

Further, in addition to Mancuso, attacking your competitor and not disclosing her employment with ISW,  she was joined be another
Impact Soundworks employee, Mario / Evil Dragon who also concealed his employment with ISW, while making a series of defamatory attacks against an ISW competitor.  When you later joined in the attack thread. it took someone else calling you out revealing that Sarah was your employee, but you still didn't disclose that Mario was also an ISW employee. But the ethics of participating in an attack thread on a competitor is simply ethically indefensible.  

My day job includes being a writer on marketing and business ethics with Ivy League accolades for my writing on both topics. I literally could write a case study on your company's attack on its competitor. I have been an ISW customer for several years and I have recommended some of your libraries and defended ISW -- I even defended you in this forum when someone was giving away a discount code intended only for specific customers (you made an appearance in that thread, and I believe I was the only person defending you). But what I witnessed your company and its employees in its attack and use of dishonest narrative that I knew first hand from one of your employees to be false, is something I cannot condone. 

Edited November 26, 2023 by PavlovsCat
clarifications and improvements to grammar

[Andrew Aversa]

8 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Your employee/contractor, Sarah Mancuso, took her VI-Control thread sharing her fan project scripts for an 8Dio library and showering praise on 8Dio libraries -- made prior to her employment with Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor -- and transformed it into at a defamatory attack thread after 8Dio didn't buy her scripts and she began employment with ISW. She proceeded to edit her past posts from praise for your competitor to attacks in more than 20 pages of highly defamatory statements and engaged in bullying behavior against your competitor's two founders when they posted in the thread. It was incredibly vicious, and unprofessional.  Your employee never even once provided support for any of the allegations made ( I knew two of the stories being told were being told falsely).  But simply engaging in a public defamatory attack on a competitor alone is profoundly problematic in itself, not adding in hiding that it's a competitor.

Further, in addition to your employee. Sarah Mancuso, attacking your competitor, and not disclosing her employment with Impact Soundworks,  she was joined be a fellow ISW employee/contractor, Mario / Evil Dragon who also hid / failed to disclose his employment with ISW, while making a series of defamatory attacks against an ISW competitor.   When you later joined the thread attacking your competitor, you hid the fact / didn't disclose the fact that Sarah and Mario worked for ISW -- until someone prompted you -- and you also joined in on the attack on your competitor. It's simply ethically indefensible.  

My day job includes being a writer on marketing and business ethics with Ivy League accolades for my writing on both topics. I literally could write a case study on this. I have been an ISW customer for several years and I have recommended some of your libraries and defended ISW -- I even defended you in this forum when someone was giving away a discount code intended only for specific customers (you made an appearance in that thread, and I believe I was the only person defending you). But what I witnessed by your contractors and by you directly in that thread was not something I can condone.  

"Your employee/contractor, Sarah Mancuso, took her VI-Control thread sharing her fan project scripts for an 8Dio library and showering praise on 8Dio libraries -- made prior to her employment with Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor -- and transformed it into at a defamatory attack thread after 8Dio didn't buy her scripts and she began employment with ISW."

That would be interesting if it were true, which it isn't.

Go back and look. The tenor of that thread changed because of an exchange between Troels and Sarah in April 2022. You can go see it for yourself - it's all public record.

We hired Sarah as a contactor way back in October 2021, before she even started the thread! 

And prior to that, she had done beta testing for us, including paid testing, going back to 2018, well-before she even started the Adachi project at all.

And let me clarify that I have no issue with Sarah or Mario sharing their personal opinions or experiences. That includes praising products developed by other companies... which Sarah did.. for months/years.

"Mario / Evil Dragon who also hid / failed to disclose his employment with ISW, while making a series of defamatory attacks against an ISW competitor."

First, Mario is employed by Native Instruments. He does limited, part-time, hourly work for us. (Which of course I'm grateful for, because he's awesome.) He has also contributed to work from many other companies.

If you think for some reason this reflects poorly on me or my company, why not apply the same standard to Native Instruments or any other company he's worked for...? 

I don't believe he (or I) "hid" this any more than he "hid" the fact that he works for NI. It wasn't relevant to whatever he was posting at the time. Not to mention he's one of the oldest contributors to VI-Control and KVR , with probably 20 years of posting history.

If this were a situation where a new poster randomly showed up, posted a negative opinion and vanished - and then it turned out they worked for us - I agree that would be suspect and unethical. That wasn't the case here. Mario is a pillar of the Kontakt, plugin, and virtual instrument community. He's well-known and well-respected. 

"When you later joined the thread attacking your competitor,..."

When did I do that?

I don't believe I've ever made any public comments about 8dio or any of its products. Literally, my one and only post was confirming that Sarah works for us. I took the opportunity to praise her work further, because she does great work. 

[PavlovsCat]

On 11/20/2023 at 8:15 AM, Andrew Aversa said:

"Your employee/contractor, Sarah Mancuso, took her VI-Control thread sharing her fan project scripts for an 8Dio library and showering praise on 8Dio libraries -- made prior to her employment with Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor -- and transformed it into at a defamatory attack thread after 8Dio didn't buy her scripts and she began employment with ISW."

That would be interesting if it were true, which it isn't.

Go back and look. The tenor of that thread changed because of an exchange between Troels and Sarah in April 2022. You can go see it for yourself - it's all public record.

We hired Sarah as a contactor way back in October 2021, before she even started the thread! 

And prior to that, she had done beta testing for us, including paid testing, going back to 2018, well-before she even started the Adachi project at all.

And let me clarify that I have no issue with Sarah or Mario sharing their personal opinions or experiences. That includes praising products developed by other companies... which Sarah did.. for months/years.

"Mario / Evil Dragon who also hid / failed to disclose his employment with ISW, while making a series of defamatory attacks against an ISW competitor."

First, Mario is employed by Native Instruments. He does limited, part-time, hourly work for us. (Which of course I'm grateful for, because he's awesome.) He has also contributed to work from many other companies.

If you think for some reason this reflects poorly on me or my company, why not apply the same standard to Native Instruments or any other company he's worked for...? 

I don't believe he (or I) "hid" this any more than he "hid" the fact that he works for NI. It wasn't relevant to whatever he was posting at the time. Not to mention he's one of the oldest contributors to VI-Control and KVR , with probably 20 years of posting history.

If this were a situation where a new poster randomly showed up, posted a negative opinion and vanished - and then it turned out they worked for us - I agree that would be suspect and unethical. That wasn't the case here. Mario is a pillar of the Kontakt, plugin, and virtual instrument community. He's well-known and well-respected. 

"When you later joined the thread attacking your competitor,..."

When did I do that?

I don't believe I've ever made any public comments about 8dio or any of its products. Literally, my one and only post was confirming that Sarah works for us. I took the opportunity to praise her work further, because she does great work. 

Andrew, as I wrote, your employee, Sarah Mancuso, originally created the VI-C thread to share her KONTAKT scripts for a retired 8Dio library and praise 8Dio's libraries and later, modified her thread from praising 8Dio to attacking 8Dio, renaming her thread "Adachi: Important update, 8Dio threatens reviewers and competing devs." When Sarah modified her thread into an attack thread on an ISW competitor and failed to disclose that she's an ISW employee, that was, in itself, a conflict of interest.  Maro, like Sarah, also concealed that he worked for ISW throughout the course of the thread. You're now asserting that their concealing their employment with ISW while attacking an ISW competitor wasn't relevant to the thread. We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

Mario's story was well known to me because 13 years ago, Mario came to a developer for advice, and that developer brought me in to give Mario advice. Consequently, I knew the story Mario told very well. I also had the benefit of notes, as the developer still has the original notes and sent them to me.  The story Mario told in the thread was untrue. Troels wasn't upset because someone did a negative review on one of his libraries as Mario and Sarah falsely presented. Troels was upset because Mario was shilling and disparaging his library. Mario created a KVR post that made it appear he was merely comparing two sample libraries he had nothing to do with and that one of them was a lot better. What Mario actually did was conceal that he was working for the developer whose library he praised as superior to Troels' company.  It was unquestionably, unethical and I told Mario that back then and I recall that Mario, the developer friend and I all agreed that what Mario did was wrong. Even more, for context, the developer Mario worked for had stolen a good deal of intellectual capital from Troels company in the packaging of their library (the FAQs from ToneHammers website, legal copy, etc.) which, of course, is unethical and illegal. When Troels saw Mario's KVR post, he PMed Mario that the shilling he was doing was unethical and that he could be sued and ruin his reputation in the industry. Mario became very worried that he could be in legal trouble and that is why I ended up being called in by his developer friend to give him advice (although I agree that it would be more logical that they consulted a lawyer, they called me in due to my business experience).  

My advice to Mario 13 years ago was that what he did was wrong and that he should modify his post and apologize to Troels. Mario was most greatly worried about getting into legal trouble. I'll just share this so that people reading understand, because the context is very important to understanding the story. It was rumored back then that Mario was involved in the piracy world.  I don't know if that was true or not, but I suspect it might have been true and a significant factor in Mario's concerns about getting into legal trouble.  I told Mario that the logistics and costs of ToneHammer suing him when they were based in the US and he was based in Croatia was very small and Mario should just focus on doing the right thing and apologizing to Troels and avoid future unethical acts moving forward. To find that 13 years later, Mario -- who I've always gotten along with extremely well with  -- was retelling this story in a very dishonest and misleading manner to defame Troels and 8Dio was problematic to me.  That mutual developer friend and I had conversed and he still had his notes from 13 years ago. He had PMed me and told me that Troels and my story was accurate and Mario's was false. Again, he's a friend of Marios. There's no ill will towards Mario, we all love him. But he simply was not telling the truth and he and Sarah ethically, had a responsibility to share that they work for Impact Soundworks, an 8Dio competitor, but at no point did they ever disclose that fact. 

I was actually the person who posted that Mario and Sarah worked for Impact Soundworks that, I believe was responsible for someone later posting the question to you in the thread. I had made a series of posts interacting with Mario stating that I was the person who gave him advice 13 years ago and he was not telling the story honestly in the thread. It was a friendly exchange. However, Mike Greene (owner of VI-Control and sample developer Realitone; someone I've known two decades and once gave marketing consulting advice) deleted all of those posts along with hundreds of other posts, some of which questioned the fairness of the attacks on 8Dio. Mike had PMed me not to get involved in the thread,  sharing his contempt for 8Dio and their owners to me (Mike later went on in private correspondence to try to persuade me to never work with 8Dio; acknowledging that his actions in the thread may not have been right, but that he detests 8Dio and believes that they were deserving of the treatment). 

Andrew, you misunderstood my remark, "When you later joined the thread attacking your competitor,..."  To clarify: you participated in a thread where two of your employees made defamatory attacks on one of your competitors without disclosing their employment with your company.  I believe that was not ethical. Obviously, you think your two employees hiding that the company they were attacking is one of your competitors and using a dishonest version of what occurred 13 years ago when Mario was working for a competitor and shilling in a fake review when your competitor confronted him is ethical behavior. We disagree.  I think your participation in a thread where your employees maliciously defame a competitor is unethical. I knew that Mario was presenting a false story. I later learned that the story presented about Cory was false and from Sarah Mancuso and Mike Greene directly, neither had ever even reached out to Cory -- who was a beloved friend of mine -- and instead only leveraged Cory's story to manufacture a defamatory narrative on an Impact SoundWorks competitor that they attack and bully people who make harsh reviews about their sample libraries.

Edited November 26, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[Kirean]

[PavlovsCat]

38 minutes ago, nicolae said:

Pavlov cat bingo. Drink everytime he:

 

- brings up 8dio drama ✔️

- mentions how he's a renowned published author

- mentions how he's done marketing for fortune 500 companies so is an expert

 

You've made 11 posts in this forum, and -- literally -- around half of all of the posts you've ever made in this forum are trolling attacks targeting and disparaging me, and theyre all related to the attack thread at VI Control (his past troll posts have since been deleted). It's obvious that you're account is only participating in this forum in order to engage in trolling.  I would ask people to report the nicolae account. 

Edited November 20, 2023 by PavlovsCat

[PavlovsCat]

FTR, I responded to Andrew's post in this thread because I thought it was fair to provide him with an explanation he asked for of why, I, a former Impact Soundworks customer, will no longer buy from his company due to their poor ethics.  But I realize that 99.999% of the people in this forum don't care about any of this.  I did send Andrew a PM offering that I don't think the community is interested in this conversation. 

I get how he doesn't enjoy seeing a customer saying that they stopped buying from his company due to their bad ethics, but this isn't the appropriate place to engage in that discussion at length -- and it's a complex situation. I really don't have an interest in further conversation on the topic,  as I've already shared what I have to say, but my suggestion, @Andrew Aversa, is that there is another section of this forum where you could start a thread if you desire to do so.  

Edited November 20, 2023 by PavlovsCat