Acustica - Magenta Eq

[bmanic]

I`m done, nuff said

Dude, you are a complete douche.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

there should be a language barrier.
I want to help but I don't understand the question!!
What are you asking?

GianCarlo you can make acustica a huge success but your current
business strategy is ill advised and, I am afraid, catastrophic
in the short term even. Nebula can easily go the way of the
electric car, thorium reactors and every other awesome technology
that did not have sound business strategy behind it and as a result
got killed in the market. It will be a shame for your legacy and a detriment for us all if this happens, but you need to raise the bussiness bar IMO to be on par with the tech.

Since Omcar is too pissed(?) to elaborate, I will elaborate.

1. Nebula is a promising technology that has inspired me and
many others. It trully has the potential to make the audio word
a better place. GianCarlo (GC from now on) deserves huge praise for his innovative briiliance. HOWEVER nebula also has a serious usability problem. One needs to load one plugin for each eq band for example.
That effectively makes nebula unusable for efficiently doing
complex professional projects. However sound quality
is very good to excellent and library prices very affordable
(because sampling is a low cost process) and competition stiff.

2. To address the usability problem acustica introduced
aqua vsts that can load all samples and be used like regular
plugins. Awesome, BUT:
- price jumps 5-10 times compared to prior nebula libraries prices
for same level of development cost (only minor cost difference being
the professional skins)
- third party developers cannot develop aqua plugins and compete
with acustica price-wise

3. Nebula development aiming to obtain all sample loading
and any advanced aqua recording capabilities becomes the subject of uncommitted responses of the type "we will see, needs serious development resources, it is the same product because it can
load the libraries", etc. To many this looks like a poor excuse to
take the project to a completely different place. See the following
exhibits:

4. While nebula is in essentially arrested development, aqua plugs
propagate like rabbits, with 10 plugins appearing in last 6-9 months or so
and a reported 50 plugins (!!!) expected in the next year or so
(info from acustica forum thread on demos).

5. To add insult to injury, acustica does not even bother to
offer demos for the aqua plugins. The sheep, excuse me
the loyal customers, are expected to buy, buy, buy, without
questioning the cult leader, excuse me i meant the good shepherd GC
who transformed to "Dr Hyde GC" and assures us that each aqua perfectly captures the corresponding hardware and thus no demo is
necessary, just give us your money without annoying inquiries please.

6. Simultaneously GC gives talks to technical forums (see youtube) where he admits that the tech does not capture all aspects of the hardware -as is obvious to anyone who is not brainwashed, or has even modest understanding of engineering or the sciences.

7. Moreover, the legality of sampling hardware for the purpose
of selling clones that will naturally eliminate some of the hardware sales, without proper permission and profit sharing with the legitimate owners of the hardware intellectual property, and in all likelihood
in violation of several convolution related patents to boot, is a ticking time bomb for acustica and its customers.

I could elaborate further on the ridiculous and offensive pricing but then I run the danger of my commentary becoming too acidic, so i prefer to pass, for now.

Does the above make clear what are the key problems?
These are very serious threats to the future of nebula.

I'm happy for your detailed and long list of questions and concerns, now I understand and I'll answer to all your question. As you will see, things are bright for nebula, and we are working exactly in the direction you (the customer) are asking

1. Nebula is a promising technology

wow, thank you

2.
- price jumps 5-10 times compared to prior nebula libraries prices
for same level of development cost (only minor cost difference being
the professional skins)
- third party developers cannot develop aqua plugins and compete
with acustica price-wise

it happens acustica is creating his own libraries, high quality libraries, and we need to cover costs.
Acustica, as company, needs a lot of money, because here in italy, in this particular time, taxation is around 70%. I'm not joking, and you are reading things correctly, 70%. It is possible we'll move away from this country which is now in complete bankruptcy.

Acqua are simply nebula acustica libs. And they are expensive for us, skinned or not.
They are particular libraries which work also as standalone plugin, in that way we are selling more than as expensive-high quality nebula libraries because there is a market interested in standlone plugins
What I can say here: they as nebula libraries ARE expensive, but as standalone plugins ARE cheap. There is no other company who is selling a magenta for 150 eur and initial price 100 eur. We are speaking about one of the best eq on the market, both hardware and software.
And don't be fooled by introductionary prices used in products like vmr or similar, because if you want to be fair, we sold in the past plugins based on thousands of possible models (not 4 or 5), provided tons of free products and libraries (not one), adapted the price to very low values (not 100 eur/ 150 dollars but 20, do you remember nebula2? it was 19). We'll do the same with OUR vmr, which is nebula4 and was announced way before it (but we couldn't develop it quickly due to the fact we were not a structured company yet).
It will cost a little, upgrade will be fair, we'll introduce tons of free products as usually, and you will load thousands of emulations inside, as usually.

3rd party developers can't develop acqua for the exception of 2-3, and basic acqua plugins, you are correct.
We'll this tech is acustica tech, not 3rd party developers's. When they build a nebula library we don't earn NOTHING. But we accept it, we earn selling nebula. Wen they buid an acqua library we don't earn NOTHING, but we have a new competitor on the market based on our technology, developed using that crazy taxation and costs. So from my point of view, a 3rd party developer will NEVER be allowed to create a standalone plugin based on our technology and for free and being my/our competitor. Otherwise I would really a crazy guy driving a complete mad company without a future.

3.
To many this looks like a poor excuse to take the project to a completely different place.

Forget for a while our 70%.
There is a cost you are not seeing. Developing a 3rd party library using our tech is damn easy. You grab a gear, you sample it, you release it. Costs are high (ie sample tuning), but not sky-rocket.
Now go figure developing a tech for making titanium compressor possible. Guess how many developements we are doing for getting program dependent compressor working,or improve our *poor* compressor tech and making new awesome products, or making our skinning language able to support from a single engine - acqua- a plugin like it or like magenta.
When you build a plugin which is priced 100 or 200, it HAS to be good. You can't release a library which needs 1 gigabytes of ram, you need to load 10-20 presets and it takes ages to load. We were FORCED to improve our tech. Magenta loads in 1 second, ram usage and cpu usage is very little compared with nebula and so on.

Beware, what we are developing will be available to 3rd party developers in the future, so we are building for them. But we need to cover costs. So we are paying those developements releasing our products, and everyone will be happy, because you'll have the usual 15 eur library in the future based on the new awesome technology we are building now.
Now think to 70% and sum it all.

4. While nebula is in essentially arrested development

it is not true. When we build a new compressor or eq tech, we are developing nebula4.
When we create an acqua product we are creating a product for the new nebula4 market, which will be a skinned library for it. So for us nebula development and acqua developement have the same importance. Otherwise as soon as we release nebula4 it would be a fancy plugin with an awesome gui and maybe a decent workflow but featuring ALL previous issues: high loading time, high cpu load, bad compression
behaviour and so on.
Do you want a zero latency plugin? we are checking if it is possible now and making research.
Do you want a zero cpu load plugin? we are cheking if it is possible now and making research
Everything we are doing now IS nebula4, not just the porting to a new graphic framework

Meanwhile, you have nebula3 and acqua plugins, so you are not stopped in the waiting.

5. To add insult to injury, acustica does not even bother to
offer demos for the aqua plugins

we decided to not use ilok, because it is anti-economic for standalone plugins with a little price tag and possibly low sales (not all acqua plugins sell like magenta). Ilok is incredibly expensive. And a lot of customers hate it. Our protection is complex and did not allow easy demoing, but we are working on that. We are just developing a way for making it possible. It is possible you'll have our first demo product before the end of the year.

6. Simultaneously GC gives talks to technical forums (see youtube) where he admits that the tech does not capture all aspects of the hardware -as is obvious to anyone who is not brainwashed, or has even modest understanding of engineering or the sciences.

we are a fair company with a fair talk, and we never say lies (as company!! )
That video was produced in january, when the company was still not a daily job yet. During this year we improved things in incredible way.
Just a little note: ALL nebula technology was created by me in a SINGLE year, 2006. Everything just stopped till 2014.
I had a different (and well paid job )
I started again in june 2014, back to coding, more or less. You can just guess how many things I solved (and you still maybe don't see them, they will be introduced in next products) in other 6 months.

About what we are doing now, it is simply incredible.
It is dead easy to create a zero latency plugin based on iir arma models from a sampled fir filter, like someone else is doing. It is incredibly complex the creation of a plugin which is loading gigabytes of data like they were nuts, making it possible in realtime with a complex multithreading model, handling high latencies and issues in most of hosts and sequencers. Everything is aimed to a complete good recreation of the target device. Our frequency respense (expecially the PHASE!!), and harmonic response, and NOW, even sampled envelope followers handled in realtime at frequency rate speeds. Now even complex models based on program dependent envelope followers, which are JUST sampled and they work. I think it is amazing. You need a strong engineering degree to create it for the first time in the world, don't be fooled because I appear a "simple" guy sometimes or explain things in a simple way. There is a lot of math and skills, guys.

7. Moreover, the legality of sampling hardware for the purpose
of selling clones that will naturally eliminate some of the hardware sales

now if someone else does it in hidden ways - uh, how many companies ? - sampling than converting to an iir filter, and telling you it is a 1176what or a 8200that or a GGGGG, a 116 (lol posting even comparison samples for ages on all forums) or a 1073that
IT IS FAIR? where is the legal in all that?
just because they told you they were INSPIRED lol.

And about hardware sales: do you have an idea about how many people told us they DISCOVERED hardware from nebula and they bought an avalon or a manley labs device later?
It is a difficoult time for hardware developers, but it is not just because the emulations. People just is moving to an hardware model to a software model, like it happend in other fields.
Kodak was not killed by Instagram.