Not a deal - UVI bought by Image Line

[kitekrazy]

Quotes from IL staff

The money to buy other companies actually comes from our own profits not from the investors.

Why do you think I am being coy?

My comment was that I think people, particularly the naysayers, would be very surprised how big FL Studio is these days.

Regards Scott

 

Not at all, we do not leverage Waterland's finances in any way. They bought a stake in IL. They do not finance us.

However none of this is really your business. You should be making music, instead of having digs at us about mergers and acquisitions and guessing at our financial arrangements.

The status with WL has been the case for years, and it's only just now anyone noticed.

No way on that one. Gotta have DAW drama.

[kitekrazy]

Dear mods please move this to the Coffeehouse.

[kitekrazy]

4 hours ago, abacab said:

I believe that the guy that was behind the original Cakewalk notation code was the guy who runs Sonic Scores Overture, Don Williams.

Don had approached Gibson prior to the Cakewalk shutdown to offer to integrate Overture notation code with Sonar. Gibson declined to take him up on the offer. Now it's a bit more obvious why they declined, if Gibson were already thinking about closing the Cakewalk product line down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overture_(software)

"Overture has been continuously maintained by the developer since it was first released. It was originally published by Opcode Systems, which produced MIDI sequencing and digital audio software. After Opcode ceased product development in 1999, having been bought out by Gibson Brands*, Overture found a new publisher, Cakewalk. Cakewalk published the software from 1999 to 2001. In 2001, Williams' own company, GenieSoft – now known as Sonic Scores – purchased Overture from Cakewalk. Greg Hendershott, CEO of Cakewalk at the time, announced, "The fact that GenieSoft founder Don Williams is the original developer of these products is great news for those customers. He's committed to continuing customer support and product enhancements."[1] GenieSoft later changed its name to Sonic Scores, and has published and developed Overture since 2001."

*An earlier strike for Gibson...

 

No one could take over the code.  That's what people forget with these silly mergers.   I guess it's hard to strip the authorization scheme from a product.  So far Izotope hasn't done it with EA verbs.  

I remember when Overture was a Cakewalk product. Then when it went solo the LE version came with GPO.  I thought it was a great notation app.

https://sonicscores.com/product/overture-5-ug/

$129 crossgrade

Edited February 12, 2023 by kitekrazy

[Brian Walton]

16 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

No one could take over the code.  That's what people forget with these silly mergers.   I guess it's hard to strip the authorization scheme from a product.  So far Izotope hasn't done it with EA verbs.  

I remember when Overture was a Cakewalk product. Then when it went solo the LE version came with GPO.  I thought it was a great notation app.

https://sonicscores.com/product/overture-5-ug/

$129 crossgrade

Well Izotope took the EA verb algos and put them in NeoVerb.  So I don't think it is earth shattering.  Honestly I don't think they ever truly intended to make the EA plugins into a stright Izotope port even though that is what many of us would have wanted.

Neoverb (while cool) is way to heavy on the CPU and the EA stuff is light as can be.  Such a shame especially since they are discontinuing it.  

[abacab]

9 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

Well Izotope took the EA verb algos and put them in NeoVerb.  So I don't think it is earth shattering.  Honestly I don't think they ever truly intended to make the EA plugins into a stright Izotope port even though that is what many of us would have wanted.

Neoverb (while cool) is way to heavy on the CPU and the EA stuff is light as can be.  Such a shame especially since they are discontinuing it.  

And Neoverb is selling for $25 today...

[kitekrazy]

I didn't realize Melda was owned by IL,  Maybe that explains the lifetime updates.

[Brian Walton]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy said:

I didn't realize Melda was owned by IL,  Maybe that explains the lifetime updates.

This is a fairly new change of ownership as far as we know and a surprise to basically everyone this even happened.

Edited February 13, 2023 by Brian Walton

[kitekrazy]

1 hour ago, Brian Walton said:

This is a fairly new change of ownership as far as we know and a surprise to basically everyone this even happened.

FL user went into panic mode when a former NI guy become the IL CEO.    No user knew who the previous CEO was.

[TheSteven]

5 hours ago, kitekrazy said:

I didn't realize Melda was owned by IL, 

Not that it makes any difference but I wonder when that happened.

[Nick Blanc]

I see people worrying about these kind of mergers, but I have to wait and see. In other lines of business, a merger can have consequences for quality because there is almost always some 'streamlining' to be done. I wonder how and if this is the case in the music software business. I think it is a pretty unique market. There are A LOT of independent developers who keep on making amazing products, rivaling the big names in popularity. The couple of big names became this way by delivering quality. And they can't drop that. Image Line can't drop the ball, because the switch to Ableton is made overnight (and a month or so to get up to speed). NI can't drop the ball because Orchestral Tools is right behind them. Izotope can't drop the ball because there are a bazillion other products which do the same. Every UVI product has an amazing counterpart. But they all co-exist because we can use them all together. And we do. I see people use FL for making beats, using Ableton the next day for a live setup and in the weekend they are in protools mixing and mastering. I can use Falcon in project A and Omnisphere in project B.

[kitekrazy]

18 hours ago, TheSteven said:

Not that it makes any difference but I wonder when that happened.

Don't know but Melda had LT updates for as long as I can remember. Maybe that was the appeal.

Since they are more focused on their DAW and are no longer in the 3rd party plugin business that could be why they have Melda, UVI, and W.A. to cover those markets.  They don't carry those products in their own shop so I guess they let them run their own business.

[Starship Krupa]

Here's a discussion on the Meldaproduction forum, including Vojtech himself weighing in:

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=593291

Since I have licenses for 90-some Meldaproduction products and none for UVI products, this was the bigger news.

When a larger more established company acquires a smaller one with fewer resources, the smaller company can gain access to the larger one's accounting, marketing, support, web design, IT, graphics and (praise heaven) documentation staff. In the case of Meldaproduction, I've always gotten the idea that he's been almost a one-man show, hiring contractors and part-timers as needed.

There are plenty of things that he's said he just doesn't have time for, and with luck, this might free him up to delegate. The addition of the graphical interfaces to many FX were welcome, but they're a mixed bag. Some look great, others kinda lame. Help from a larger company's graphics staff might improve things. Same with their longtime Achilles' heel: documentation. I don't know how good the FL Studio documentation is, but it would be hard for it to be worse than the existing stuff.

(Thanks to Meldaproduction's inadequate documentation, I have a huge collection of some of the most powerful processors in the business....and feel as if I've only ever scratched the surface of any of them. Fortunately they are still excellent at a basic level of use. Speaking of scratching, MRhythmizer is one that I've so far been utterly unable to create my own presets for but that I know if I could figure it out would be great for some things I have in mind. Fortunately the supplied presets still do a lot, as do the ones from the preset exchange. There are some vocal FX that I know I could get with it, but for now I'm stuck with the supplied presets.)

Unfortunately in the case where the acquired company already has that staff, they run the risk of being made redundant. I don't think Meldaproduction has enough staff for this to happen.

I'd also feel more comfortable knowing that he might educate other programmers about how to use his development framework and code. Seeing as one of Vojtech's hobbies is rock climbing, having someone else able to take over the coding would increase the value of the "free updates for life" license.

So, cautiously optimistic. I was 1000% right regarding BandLab's purchase of SONAR, so here's hoping I'm right this time. Worst case scenario is that I'm "stuck" with a collection of plug-ins that work great as they are and are so deep I will never reach bottom on their feature sets.

Regarding iZotope's acquisition and management of the Exponential Audio IP, I've personally benefited from it. They dropped the licensing down to the peanuts level on Phoenix, Nimbus, R2 and R4, which allowed me to start using reverbs that instantly leveled up the sound of my mixes. And they've kept Stratus and Symphony, which are the same algos. EA did the thing of adding features and reissuing their plug-ins with new names, requiring purchase of new licenses. They kept the older versions on the market. So Stratus is a tarted-up Phoenix and Symphony is the same for R2.

What iZotope did was weed out the redundant versions. Shoulda been done long ago, but at least we got to acquire licenses on the cheap. Also, as noted, they iZotoped the algos into Neoverb, which follows in the iZotope tradition of being a resource hog, but also follows their cool licensing policy. And they seem to be good for dropping the price on it. It's a deal at $25.