PavlovsCat

I can't imagine anyone here would ridicule you over having that many plugins. It's more of a bragging right here! When I did this poll, I was wondering how I'd compare, figuring a lot of us regulars had a lot.

I'm in the Audio Plugin Deals group on Facebook, and that guy posts here and his posts are no different than those of Music Software Deals. The links deep link to specific pages. I find the deep links useful, as do a lot of people. My guess would be that a guy who has a competitor site to Music Software Deals that had made some very egoistical, hostile posts claiming that he had the first deals site for plugins and the Music Software Deals site was ripping him off is the complainer (I've been managing digital marketing since 1995 and one of the early members of KVR, VI Control, Cakewalk, V-Drums and other music related forums and I certainly don't think the guy is right, but anyways...). He made some nasty, bitter and egotistical posts he later deleted. My guess is that someone that egotistical and petty later came back to try to sabotage his competitor. But both Music Software Deals and Audio Plugin Deals guy are reasonable in their posting, I've never seen them post anything in the realm of spam. And there are literally thousands of threads posted by similar folks in the forum. Now Wookie has always been great, very friendly and very fair. That's honest praise. But I think this decision needs to be reconsidered. I think that Music Software Deals deep links add value and save users time. The only change I'd add is that the forum should require anyone posting affiliate links to disclose that they are affiliate links and to disclose relationships with developers and resellers.

@Bapu, you have a lot more equipment, but I may have you beat on a technicality. I have been coming here, VI Control and KVR for ten years when I wasn't even using a DAW anymore (my prior DAW PC hard drive died and I never replaced it; technically (I've actually been going to KVR, VI Control, this forum and a drumming forum since their earliest days), I had Sonar on my laptop but it was so underpowered I couldn't realistically use it to record several tracks). So in effect, until early last year, I have been posting here, buying plugins and sample libraries even consulting to sample developers and helping come up with a few sample libraries some of you bought that I actually wasn't even using beyond trying out on my laptop. I just thought I'd eventually get another DAW PC and use them. Which I did, but ten years later.

It's interesting that the most popular response is more than 1,000. But friends, I think most of us are plugin hoarders, me included. Kudos to those with less than 100 plugins, I have no idea how you do it.

That's a great point. I'm on my phone now, Cakewalk showed I have 670-something plugins, which is definitely a lot more individual plugins than I've purchased or installed, so I'm confident that many are VST2 dupes of VST3 effects and instruments that installers forced on my machine. After adjusting for that, I would be in the only mildly insane 400 something plugin range.

Some DAWS give you a count and/or count the plugins when scanning plugin folders.

Candidly, it's completely the result of my almost making a post in Fleer's thread about a delay to ask Fleer and others how many plugins they think are (1) a reasonable number of plugins (2) an abnormally large, ridiculous number of plugins (3) an excessive -- bats@#* crazy --number of plugins, beyond reason I just wanted to see, relative to my fellow plugin hoarders, if I am in group number 1, 2 or 3. I suspect I am in group number 2. I suspect that Larry and Bapu, and possibly Fleer may be in group number 3.

Yay! Thank you to whoever voted in the poll to make me feel like I'm not the worst plugin hoarder of all time!!!

I was looking at the number of plugins I have installed on my computer and was curious how it compared to other forum members.

I almost bought this last time it was on sale... And then I checked my plugins folder and realized I already own it. Now I have to try using it!

An influencer is literally an independent business person, an entrepreneur and many successful ones form corporations for their influencing. An influencer profits from someone watching videos (YouTube/Google gives them ad money) and they also profit when someone clicks their link to purchase the "reviewed" product. Consider that heavy hitter influencers in this business are getting paid thousands for "reviewing" products and they promote their business by linking to it in forums like this one. Granted, most of the ones posting here aren't the heavy hitters demanding ten thousand plus to "review" products, but they're still posting links to promote products. They are promoters of brands and they make revenue from when you watch their videos and buy the products they review. That is the reason they do reviews and post here -- it is literally free promotion.

Thanks for clarifying things. I think that's reasonable.

I own R4 and expect that Izotope will eventually take the technology and use it for an Izotope branded AI plugin (that's just a guess; no doubt, I could be completely wrong and they might have decided they're not going to use anything from R4). But my perspective may be a lot different than a lot of folks here as I really appreciate Izotope's AI tools, so I've always looked at the idea of Izotope's AI technology with the reverbs pretty favorably. Whereas, I can understand that if you're great with mixing and EQing, you might be perfectly happy with the current iteration of the product. And yeah, I didn't realize until your post, Brian, that R4 only came out in 2017. To be completely candid, I think I bought R4 in maybe 2018 and assumed it had been around for a while based on the GUI, which looked/looks pretty dated, IMO, as do the other EA GUIs.

The forum has always been excellent and you've always been fair and reasonable (I truly mean that for all you cynics!) and I'm definitely not interested in arguing for the sake of argument, but that rule would mean that every developer that makes a product announcement here and every YouTuber influencer promoting their reviews (which is their business venture that gets them free products, sometimes payments from developers of the reviewed products and revenue from Google) -- would violate that policy (quoted here): "Direct promotion of your own company in the text is a breach of the forum rules and amounts to free advertising."

Disagreeing is fine and way underappreciated in the era of culture wars where some demand others to line up in complete agreement with dogmatic views just to remain civil. Life would be boring if we all had the exact same opinions. But, I'm not Pavlov, I'm Pavlov's Cat. The idea being that while Pavlov could train a dog by ringing a bell, he could never do the same with a cat. Fuggedaboutit! Never gonna happen. So I guess, I could be referred to as "cat". Peter's also good!

Not related to our prior discussion... While I own a few of the Exponential plugins, they are ancient and it seemed obvious that Izotope only bought EA for the technology. An Izotope employee had once told me that Neoverb was based on R2, of course, adding Izotope's AI technology. I don't have any inside knowledge, but this looks a lot like Izotope's new parent company is just looking to make the company more focused and efficient. I own all of the Izotope products they just discontinued and a few of the Exponential ones, but considering the EA reverbs basically haven't been touched since Izotope acquired EA and Izotope recently being acquired itself, those being discontinued is unsurprising. Iris 2 and BreakTweaker being discontinued also doesn't come as a surprise. The only one that surprises me is Trash 2, as it's an effects plugin, so it fits more with the Izotope ecosystem. But hey, I am pretty happy with my Izotope plugins and I'm expecting they'll probably come up with an effect that does the same thing as Trash 2 and more -- although there are plenty of other alternatives if they don't. I like Iris 2, but guessed it wasn't a great success from the lack of chatter about it, even more so with Break Tweaker, which, candidly, I've never used in a production.

I'll leave it at this. Yes, of course, any company can go belly up. My point is that when a software product is dramatically discounted, that's something that would rarely happen to a healthy, successful product where the brand management sees a long healthy future ahead for that product. And no, the basic concept of fixed and variable costs which apply to tech support for software isn't something that just applies to problematic software. Issues occur with well coded software, it's reality. So back to my original point. When someone buys a license to software deeply discounted, by 75% or more, there's a significantly greater probability that product may not have a bright future ahead. That's not the same as saying that's certain, but there's a significantly higher probability that a deep discounted plugin is not going to be as actively invested in than a plugin a developer doesn't deep discount. Deep discounting can also be a sign of a developer having an urgent financial need, like needing to cover salaries and rent. With small developers, it can be less logical. Now I could analyze this from a branding strategy perspective too (I used to write on this stuff, and enjoy discussing it now that I'm not required to write about it every xx number of days). While there's no certain correlation to a business's financial situation from deep discounting (although it can be a signal), there's definitely a correlation that products that a developer is considering abandoning are more likely to be deep discounted. Okay, back to work.

It's fine to disagree, but your above statement is fundamentally incorrect. Without getting too academic, a seller lowering its price certainly is INTENDED to increase unit sales of a product and gross sales. Of course, the seller has to sell a lot more product to generate the same total profit as the net profit per unit is severely reduced. Unlike a product like soap or toilet paper, technology products (this is where I've spent my career, btw) come with support, and that is an incredible difference. Unlike soap, software products do require investment to be maintained and improved and each customer that paid $10 for a plugin costs the same to support as a customer that paid $199 (AKA there are variable costs that you need to consider; you treated tech support as if it was a fixed cost; it's not and that's why selling 1,000 licenses at $10 that each come with the same support as a $199 license is unlikely to be a sustainable model for most plugin developers). For an effect plugin, as you mentioned, one area of ongoing maintenance is compatibility with monitor technology, which, of course, changes over time. Then there's compatibility with hosts/DAWS, other plugins, hardware and OS's and that also changes over time. All of that requires the plugin has resources actively committed to a product, which costs the developer money and with any competently run business, human and financial resources are going to be directed towards those products that generate the most revenue. In short, it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to be maintaining and improving that ten dollar plugin for very long, but see it as a cash cow and take the money you made from the ten dollar plugin and invest it into more products that show greater profit potential. Now, you can disagree with what I wrote above, but all of it is business economics and strategy 101. There's nothing I wrote above that isn't considered fundamental. I have lots of opinions on this stuff, but they aren't contained in this very elementary explanation.

There is a lesson here for anyone interested. We all come to this forum to save money on plugins and sample and loop libraries. We've recently seen a good deal of plugin developers engage in deep discounting, including Izotope. It's gotten to the point where when there's a deep discounted effects plugin selling for $39 USD or $29 that regularly sells for several times more, it's inevitable that someone will come along and complain that they're not spending more than $10 or $15 for a plugin. But the reality is, a developer deep discounting a plugin that normally sells for say, $179 to a promotional price of $10 - $15 isn't necessarily a good sign. After a developer discounts that deeply, it's trained the market that the product may be deeply discounted again and its regular price can seem inflated. And that leads to the bigger problem of deep discounting software...a developer selling a plugin for $10 or $15, unless they can sell an enormous quantity of licenses, isn't likely to be investing in the continued development of that plugin. The lesson is, go ahead and bite on that super deep discounted plugin, but don't get too fond of it or expect updates and don't expect plugins that are very actively being improved to sell for the same kind of ridiculously low price as one that hasn't had major updates in years. The writing was on the wall for all of these Izotope plugins for years.

Okay, while this totally cracked me up, my geeky musician side also feels the need to point out that "Careless Whisper" has a saxophone, not a trumpet, part. So I fully expect you to redo this post with a saxophone library in the near future.

There's nothing secret that his site's links are affiliate marketing links. His whole motivation to build the site is to profit when people click the affiliate links to make a purchase. Legally, the site is supposed to state that, but a lot don't. But that's a whole different story. The site has real value, IMO. I think it's worthwhile (they just need to add a disclosure statement about affiliate links). Consider that every YouTube influencer giving "reviews " of sample libraries that posts links to their videos in this forum is an affiliate marketer for the products they "review" (hence why these folks aren't reviewers in the true, unbiased, journalistic sense, but are actually salespeople pretending to be unbiased reviewers, profiting from sales for products they're actually promoting with their "reviews," in fact putting product in influencers hands -- and giving the most popular ones financial incentives $$$$$$-- is part of every major brand's promotional strategy plans these days). These folks are using their reviews as vehicles for them to make affiliate marketing money and ad revenue from YouTube, and they still continue to post here. Consequently, I don't think it would be consistent to single out the MusicSoftwareDeals guy when the other affiliate marketers are posting their "reviews" here.

Double post.

That would be a strange rule, as you've mentioned, every developer that posts here is sending people to their site or a reseller site. The moderators here have historically been very liberal -- you've created threads about your YouTube channel and they haven't shut it down. A number of people made posts about missing Larry and most of us posted in it and until someone started trouble, those stayed up. Did you get this info from the guy who owns the site or directly from a moderator? I could understand if the mods are concerned about blatant repeated self promotion cluttering the forum, but I don’t think the MusicSoftwareDeals guy was anywhere close to doing that. He was always reasonable, straight forward and friendly.

TWO OF MY FAVORITE UNDERAPPRECIATED REID VIDEOS I enjoy this video, especially starting at 3:16 where Reid engages in some dead pan humor. I get a kick out of in a tongue in cheek analysis of Louie Louie. The moments that I particularly enjoy are when Reid talks about chords, A, "the most awesome chord," D -- "it does the job; very little more" and E minor and "normally you want to avoid minor chords, because they're too sad." It gets even more off the wall when Reid starts hitting pans to play the song as he doesn't want his YouTube video banned due to playing the actual song. The face he makes after putting down the last pan is pretty amusing. I also enjoyed Reid's "session musician" tips. Although, on a related note, just in case anyone watching this gets confused, it's not a copyright violation to play a chord progression from a popular, copyrighted song. A chord progression cannot be copyrighted (every song out today would be a violation of another song's chord progression if that were how copyright law worked in music) and YouTube won't take down your video if you simply play a chord progression from a popular song on your guitar. This video contains one of Reid's songs and it's really just sweet and I love the photo which is of the Brooklyn Bridge, taken by one of his neighbors. The view is similar to what Reid would see if he sticks his head out of the window. So there you go. I do appreciate you Reid, in spite of the Samir video.

Confession, I have given each of your videos I've watched a LIKE, with one exception. I do want my three minutes back for this one. But then again, the title should have been enough for me to know better, so I suppose it's on me! If my kids ever see this in my YouTube history (my YouTube account appears on our smart TV), I will never live it down.