PavlovsCat

I referenced an FTC regulation in the US and marketing regulations in Germany, not my political views. My expertise is in marketing and strategy. I've spoken around the world on the topics, written on them. You can find Interpol quotes me in their documents. Yes, maybe it's geeky for me to point this out, the bottom line is simply, I hope that my fellow forum members realize that you can usually find this library selling for this same price or less as part or less as part of a bundle and not its list price. That is, that the list price, like Waves list prices, are not really what folks are paying. But I was not giving a political opinion like you, just mentioning the related regulations. Once more: Please stop. I will not reply to you further.

I wrote about Waves practices. You have posted in the past making hyper offensive joke about AIDS and argued and harassed Simon after that and I tried to calm you in a series of PMs and you eventually posted an apology to Simon and took down your offensive AIDS joke. Now you're attempting to turn this into a political conversation and I don't want that. Please stop.

I'm a business person and have managed strategy and business globally for decades and written about how to do so; I'm not here spewing politics like yourself. The regulations I referenced are designed to protect consumers from deceptive promotional practices and to give deceived consumers a bit of leverage against deceptive business practices. You may say that it's no big deal for companies to create inflated fake retail prices no one really purchases items at and then claim enormous discounts that cause unsuspecting buyers to act quickly to purchase with the mistaken belief that they're getting a tremendous bargain. I agree that there are much greater deceptions in the business world, but it's still a deceptive practice. Personally, in my experience as a director at large brands, ethical brands don't have a problem with the regulations I cited. Ethical brands don't engage in those practices and those in management at ethical brands are also consumers themselves and often have appreciation for the regulations -- which are really just written for those that don't operate ethically -- it's not something you're likely to do when you're managing a brand worth billions or a sub-brand worth hundreds of millions. US regulations are actually a lot more lax than many other countries, like Germany. These regulations do not interfere with free markets; you're clearly misunderstanding something if you think this is an intrusion on the free market, unless you oppose any regulations against deceptive practices or laws and support anarchy. But again, you're making a political post and that's against policy. I was merely stating facts how regulations that apply to the two companies not stating political views. Let's follow the forum policy. I'm not interested in discussing politics with you (or anyone else on the forum); I'm here for music related deals and music related discussions

I don't think it's a breech of the rules to let people know they can PM you for a discount code. Moderators, let me know if that's not correct. I'm not trying to circumvent the rules, just offering a solution that appears to not violate the rules.

I bought the sax and wouldn't recommend it. This library is priced right at $15 USD. I would be very disappointed if I payed the regular price. Instead, it was $15 wasted.

Just so folks are aware, Rigid Audio's regular prices are ridiculously inflated. Much like Waves, their list prices don't reflect reality (that is, they constantly have 90% off sales, so list prices are not reality-based). PadStation 1 and 2 have gone on sale as a bundle on numerous occasions for $6 USD, so $3.49 is pretty much like Waves having a "sale" for plugins at $29 USD. In the US, where Waves operates, there are regulations that forbid companies to claim a product is on sale for a significant portion of a year (Waves goes far beyond that period); I think Rigid Audio is out of Germany where their regulations are even more strict, but I don’t recall for certain of they're outside the rules or not, offhand, but they're definitely iffy/borderline. Personally, I've bought several of Rigid Audio libraries and find most of them to be meh. Of course, that's entirely subjective. Listen to the patch demos to decide if it's to your liking. The libraries -- on sale --are cheap; commonly around $5 USD each. Their greatest cost is hard drive space.

Okay, I only looked at this thread to see my past post requesting a "McDSP with cheese."

The purposes of Pianobook seemed rather apparent from the early days. I made a post about it here long before they started monetizing it. There are many benefits to Spitfire having Pianobook. But that doesn't make it bad for sample library users or for up and coming samplists. Where I think they need to tweak things is with the pricing. These samplists are up and coming and often their libraries aren't as sophisticated as experienced developers using good/great studios, expert engineers and talented experts handling KONTAKT scripting. My experience and instincts (without looking at research and data) is that these libraries are best priced in the range of Spitfire's Original series, more in the range of $29-49 USD, instead of the current pricing, which is closer to the range of what one would pay if purchasing from an experienced developer. This likely won't get a warm hug from a number of folks (because the subscription model for plugins in this market can often get a strong negative response; but I think for sample libraries, it's a different story) , but I think Henson should also explore a subscription model. Imagine, something a low monthly fee that gets users access to one premium library per month (it couuld be more modest than the newly introduced libraries). In any event, my experience and instincts tell me that they will need to adjust pricing for the current model to succeed no matter how many influencers they get to promote the libraries.

I think most of us have gone overboard with plugins and sample libraries-- me included. I don't mean that in any harsh way. If folks can afford it and it makes them happy, I don't see too much harm. I'm in the forum for a few reasons, to find out about great deals (d'oh), but also to enjoy a little online interaction with my fellow music geeks. But I have reigned my buying habits in in the past year and I spend a lot more time researching and asking other DAW users questions, hence why you'll notice I have a lot of gratitude to a number of people in this forum who've shared their knowledge and advice and I'm not spending as much. I'd be interested how others habits have changed over time and experience.

The Heavyocity Foundations series of free instruments all in the free KONTAKT Player are all wonderful and absolutely worth having. Their soft piano has a lot of character. I love playing it. https://heavyocity.com/product/foundations-piano/

I promised to update this thread with other completely free piano libraries with free players that I love. The Hammersmith Free is really nice grand piano. I seem to recall Simeon doing a video for it soon after its release. If anyone doesn't already have this one, get it! https://www.soniccouture.com/en/products/p322-hammersmith-free/

Thanks, It's now very apparent that my copy of the library came with a terrible pianist and yours came with a talented one. Sad. Haha!

I had MSoundFactory Player but deleted it. I'll download it again and give it another try. I do have SoundPaint and a bunch of their libraries, as they're so inexpensive, it was easy to give them a shot. But to be frank, I am not blown away by any of their libraries, but I'm having fun making my own SoundPaint patches/programs.

I always appreciate your advice and posts, Erik. I will look at Melda based on your advice. Thanks for sharing.

I've collected all of their freebies and may pick up their solo cello library the next time it goes on sale. If anyone reading this owns any of their libraries, I'd love to get your opinion.

It's funny you mentioned Spitfire, as I was holding back from sharing a similar story about them. Your observations are spot on, in my experience. I've made friends with a bunch of developers over the years, learned which are arrogant and which are decent human beings and also learned about some flat out unethical developers (no names, of course and I'm certainly not saying VSL or Spitfire are anything beyond arrogant). All of it makes me more grateful for the ethical, decent and kind developers, as you pointed out with Paalo, who I don't really know, but I'm a customer and observed how graciously he's handled criticism over at VI Control and have been impressed by his humility.

In my case,I have easily more than three dozen paid detailed piano sample libraries and that's just the straight piano libraries, not including the freebies, prepared and bowed piano libraries. I'm a sucker for a beautiful or quirky sounding piano library. So I guess another question I'd have is, what type of instrument sample libraries do you tend to have the most of. For me, it absolutely would be piano. The next instrument I have an outrageous amount of is drums. But my first instrument was piano (in terms of lessons) and my second instrument was drums (originally self taught before years of lessons). It used to be guitar libraries and VSTs -- I had every high end developer's guitar libraries and plugins, but then I came across Orange Tree Samples guitar and bass libraries, later developed a relationship with the developer and those are basically it for me, beyond the NI Strum libraries that come with KOMPLETE which are brain dead, easy to use loop players that are super convenient when initially working on songs. I suppose the next highest amount of instrument libraries after that would be synths and strings.

Yeah, I suspect you're right. But I didn't buy another license today, so I'm getting better, right? (Only the title applies, not the rest of the lyrics! I love the song and this was just my excuse to share it.)

I realize that this is not new, but just in case anyone else like me, couldn't get Vienna Symphonic Library's player plugin to work on their system, I just ran an update last night and used it for the first time. There are several free libraries, but the piano library, the Soft Imperial, Bösendorfer Imperial blew me away. I am in love with the tone of this instrument. I have no idea how many layers it has or round robins -- when I played a single note very quickly, I did not notice any machine gunning. I think this is my clear favorite free piano and I have dozens. And a short related note. There was a thread at VI Control a few years ago where I made a post to the developer behind VSL and suggested that while I wasn't arguing his use of a dongle requirement for his paid libraries, I had argued that the dongle requirement for FREE libraries, like this one, was a misttake, because, as it's free there should be no concern of anti-piracy measures and it's very unlikely that a prospective customer would purchase a VSL dongle merely to try out their freebies. The guy responded very rudely and arrogantly. So I always thought, this isn't someone I would ever want to deal with. But years passed, VSL stopped requiring the use of a paid dongle for their freebies and Guy Bacos, who I'm connected to on FB, had done a demo and video for VSL and I thought I'd give them a shot in spite of the bad behavior of VSL's owner. However, the app wouldn't load libraries until the update last night. So, yeah, a few years after my bad experience with the dev, I can get over it and I would be okay buying a VSL library, especially after using this freebie piano. There are several other free orchestral free libraries, but I thought piano would appeal to most of us here. I'll update this thread a bit later with recommendations for other recommendation worthy free pianos that run in free players and invite others to share their favorites. https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Product_Overview/Free_Instruments

I think a good follow-up poll, two questions actually, would be to ask how many plugins you regularly use and find out the number range and that number as a percentage of the overall owned plugins a user has. My expectation is that -- unless a person is truly a plugin hoarder -- that they may purchase several plugins that serve the same function, but after trying each one, they eventually settle on one or two that provide them with what they feel is the best combination of results and workflow.

Only by coincidence, I was updating the iLok app and notcied that I have multiple unactivated licenses for this plugin (I didn't even realize that I owned it before that, let alone, realize that I multiple licenses; please tell me that it was free at some point and that I didn’t buy the same plugin three times and then forget to install it). That represents a savings of $19 USD for today! Pretty impressive, right? Sincerely, your friendly fellow plugin hoarder.

Yeah, that was my point. An EA employee told me that Neoverb used R2, I was just saying that perhaps Izotope will do the same with R4 at some point or use it for an advanced version of Neoverb (if it doesn't already exist and I'm just not aware; the chat I had was when Neoverb was just released).

Awwww, I was hoping you'd post something silly. Come on, one silly post, pretty please?

I really want @cclarryto weigh in. Come on, please Larry. But yeah, without Larry my Mazda would have been a Porsche. Okay, not really, but I definitely would have spent less. That said, Larry, like everyone else, you know I'm super glad to have you back whether or not you post deals. You're a very important part of this place.

One of the truest statements ever made in the forum. Should we stone him?