DS Audio joins Plugin Alliance

[Distorted Horizon]

We have some important news to share with you. In the past few months we have been working on migrating DS Audio to Plugin Alliance platform. As you know DS Audio always was a one-man team. Being alone means that DS Audio has limited resources for marketing, download assistance and account management. Together with Plugin Alliance, DS Audio can now provide much better services and concentrate exactly and solely on plugin development. Plugin Alliance certainly will help us a lot to keep on the audio plugin market among all other great companies and competitive products.

Our first step was porting Thorn to Plugin Alliance. It will be exclusively distributed by Plugin Alliance, DS Audio will not be selling and provide download links for Thorn at the website anymore. The downside is that we have to charge for extra fee for the transition to Plugin Alliance platform. We know, you might think it's not fair. It's always a pain to pay for any minor update and there is really no much reasons to do that. Frankly DS Audio as well never thought of any additional charges it could ask for in future. However, we did everything to minimize the fee as much as possible and set it to $19 USD. The fee is needed to cover expenses for allocating storage and bandwidth at Plugin Alliance servers, beta testing and integration work. We hope that the benefits of Plugin Alliance platform could be worth enough for you to upgrade.

As for future plans, DS Audio is intensively working on Diversion 2 now, which will be released at Plugin Alliance this year. After that we start working on Tantra 2. Both Diversion 2 and Tantra 2 will provide much more new features and improvements than their current versions. We hope to port all our existing plugins before 2019 ends. So in 2020 DS Audio products will be exclusively distributed by Plugin Alliance.

We sincerely hope you will understand us, we're now having hard times with the transition, but we believe that we are building future for DS Audio.

Please hit the reply button and let us know what do you think or have any question,
Best wishes,
Dmitry Sches,
DS Audio

Guess this is better than DS just shutting down. Wonder how PU handles the whole thing?

[rasmusklump]

Guess this is better than DS just shutting down.

makes no difference to me. PA = no buy

[Gamma-UT]

I think Dmitry's got screwed on this. PA gets to sell all of his upcoming products and take their cut of that plus access to an expanded customer base as well as the opportunity to sell new Thorn licences. On top of that they want, in effect, a licence transfer from all existing Thorn users because processing those existing licences is "so expensive".

Yeah, uh, no.

The fee isn't huge and I could absorb it with a PA voucher. However, I feel like not doing so because it pretty much looks like Dirk pulling a fast one. I wonder whether Dmitry would have been better off going in with Pluginboutique or VSTbuzz for Thorn if he just needed the storefront problem taken away.

[orbita]

Thorn used to be $119 inc vat, now $199 plus vat.

[martinjuenke]

Thorn used to be $119 inc vat, now $199 plus vat.

That‘s a price increase of 100%

[Gamma-UT]

Thorn used to be $119 inc vat, now $199 plus vat.

That‘s an price increase of 100%

Except when it's on offer every other month (and knowing PA will probably be less expensive than the upgrade once the $19 thing runs out).

[PietW.]

Whats new in Version 1.2?

[teilo]

Whats new in Version 1.2?

• Thorn is distributed by Plugin Alliance now
• Integrated Plugin Alliance framework with toolbar and authorization scheme
• Thorn Essentials, HouseMaster One and Thorn Expansion 2 by Rob Lee are in the factory library now, free of charge
• Modulation depth can be modulated now without issues
• MIDI CC is working now when ARP is turned on
• Thorn now returns text values to be displayed in automation lanes for AAX / VST3 / AU
• Removed Optimize Polyphony option, will be returned later
• Fixed automation smoothing issue
• Fixed a crash when opening AAX page-table
• Fixed minor preset loading issues on Windows

[hivkorn]

$19-$25( voucher ) ....

but i can understand people who feel fooled...update should be free!

[SoundPorn]

Interesting I guess this means I missed out on the last PluginBoutique Tantra sale? That makes me a lil upset. I also wonder if this means Thorn CM will be pulled from Computer Musics stash.

Either way Dmitri is a ridiculously talented developer and hopefully this works out for him. Interesting that other companies are trying to gobble up the independant coders. I wonder how say what Plugin Alliance was offering differs from what Tracktion is doing with they're Tracktion Presents.

[Caine123]

Everybody defending this doesnt understand that this is a step against customers and more to $$$$. Do you think pa is a saviour? Maybe there will be more new customers and more money then yes dimitry is bezter off with pa who would pass on $$$$?
But i dont see thorn as high as tone2 synths etc. And for me it doesnt fit to pa.

Either way i think dimitry gets more $$$$ and only old customers are angry. With thorn v2 80% will forget the pa issue like always.

Pa has enough ppl to piss others off

[plexuss]

Owner of 90% of PA's catalgoue and 100% of DS's catalogue here...

Oh wow, they got us by she short and curlies. DS/PM should be paying for the transfer to the PA platform. It's very bold to ask existing customer to pay for that. But, I am not surprised considering PA is involved. Oh I have all their plugins all right, but I am not a happy customer - seems Dirk lost some of his brains in the last year.

Oh well. Par for the course in this audio software racket. Customers. Money. Doesn't seems to mean anything anymore - it's more about how can they squeeze more money out of us than anything else. There are fewer and fewer vituous software companies out there now.

[Razzia]

Guess this is better than DS just shutting down.

makes no difference to me. PA = no buy

Same. I detest their price gouging and their license transfer fees. I have to think long and hard about whether I really want to keep Thorn. Even if it's just a $20 it really feels like I'm being bent over.

Here's the worst part. Check this section from an e-mail I got.

As an EXISTING OWNER OF THORN V1 you can get the new Plugin Alliance V1.2 release for just $19!

Your personal code:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Copy/paste this during checkout!
This code is valid until March 5, 2019.

If I don't pay the PA their "protection money" by March 5, I have to pay full price again for Thorn. Fuuuuuuck that.

That's a real nice synth you got there. Would be a real shame if something were to... happen to it.

[Gamma-UT]

Interesting I guess this means I missed out on the last PluginBoutique Tantra sale? That makes me a lil upset. I also wonder if this means Thorn CM will be pulled from Computer Musics stash.

Either way Dmitri is a ridiculously talented developer and hopefully this works out for him. Interesting that other companies are trying to gobble up the independant coders. I wonder how say what Plugin Alliance was offering differs from what Tracktion is doing with they're Tracktion Presents.

I doubt that companies are trying to gobble up developers, more that the hassle of running websites, storefronts, customer lists and QA is more than what some developers want to do and there just happen to be more options to get away from that than there used to be.

[Gamma-UT]

If I don't pay the PA their "protection money" by March 5, I have to pay full price again for Thorn. Fuuuuuuck that.

That's a real nice synth you got there. Would be a real shame if something were to... happen to it.

This is the thing that's making me hold out. There's no way I'm rewarding that kind of sharp practice.

However, I think the discount might prove to be more permanent than it looks now - unless Dirk has finally taken leave of his senses.