why are most soft synths and effects so expensive?

[nuisance sonore]

There's no single solution, but people reading KVR can help.

If you use it, pay for it. If you can't justify paying for it then you don't need it, so live without it. I know that most people on KVR already do this, but a few don't.

If someone you know uses warez, encourage them to pay for it, I found this worked with a friend of mine who I discovered was using cracks, I pointed out that he was getting benefit from the work of people like myself, and despite the fact that he doesn't make much money and has two kids to support he managed to come up with a setup which he could afford, and paid for it.. unfortunately this didn't include an impOSCar!

If you encounter a commercial studio that uses warez, don't tolerate it.

I see you managed to evade my last comment/question.

The music and film theft got so bad here in my little province that all the recording artist and small studio were really hurting because of it.

Did they invent some new and petty copy protection schemes?

No. They got together and launched a major information and publicity campaign. Talked about it and placed adds on the radio, on TV and the newspaper; presented artist to the public who commented on how they were hurt by this.

And it's working. Peoples on the street are talking about this, and the view of the public is changing. As before peoples would brag on how they obtained such a movie or music CD from the net, now nobody would dare mention something like that as it is very badly regarded. Now it's more of a bragging right to say that you've bought such ands such CD or movie.

And people do buy their entertainment now. I'm sure they are still peoples who won't, there always will be, but it's not the majority anymore.

Peoples like to think of themselves as being honest, and when they are presented with the fact that they are not, through education, they will change their behavior. Add to that that now they can put a face on the peoples they are hurting by stealing their music/film whatever, it's a very potent recipe.

Until I see something similar in the software world, I'm gonna have to assume that the problem is not that big since it doesn't warrant any action from the main players.

[HanafiH]

"The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys."

Quote, reputedly engraved on the side of Liberace's swimming pool.

[dover666]

I think i'm going to throw up.... that picture reminds me of the people that go out to the porn arcade at work.... and the quote just makes it worse... sorry... it's the first thing into my head ... AAAHH!!!

Q:What's the difference between a box full of champaigne glasses and Liberace's dildo?
A:One says "Handle With Care," the other's a candle with hair. (from my girlfriend)

[Meffy]

... erm. A different phrasing might be, ah, safer?

[HanafiH]

This discussion is so deeply entrenched in the subjective theory of value, it’s almost impossible to move the debate into any meaningful area.

I rarely use soft synths, I use hardware, and those few soft synths I do have are mostly quite old. I might get a few quid for some of it on eBay, one certainly wouldn’t get anything at all for Steinberg Model E. Not only is Model E a dreadfully poor emulation, there are a whole slew of freeware products that are very much better than it. The purchase cost is entirely lost. I can recover substantial value on the hardware I own, however old it gets. I suspect that once we get five years down the Vista envelope, pretty much everything I currently run on my machine now will have absolutely no residual value whatsoever.

This is the essential feature of software value. You don’t buy a thing, you buy a right to use a thing within a meaningful timeframe. Once the timeframe of utility has passed, the value of the product has passed. Think of all those sites where you can download ten and twenty year old abandonware games. There is no timeframe of utility remaining for any of those software products, people want them to reminisce, no way does Ultima Underworld compete with GTA3. The developer had to make profit over margin within a period of time, after that it’s freeware or it’s forgotten, much as the Model E is now universally forgotten in any debate about Minimoog emus.

The next issue is the chain of utility. I occasionally get pulled in by my neighbours to help their teen sort out some kind of technical issue with audio, cause I’m known to be knowledgeable, many here will have the same experience. You inevitably encounter some kind of glowing PC heaving with warez, ten Eqs, fifteen compressors, twenty-five reverbs and half a dozen apps none of which the ‘owner’ knows how to use. The music is always awful, always badly made, and they dump the lot two years later and move on to something else, usually girls. Nobody sane buys a halfway decent digital mix desk unless there is some halfway sensible prospect of leveraging a return on the outlay. The same with big synths. Sure, there is a hard core of fanatical hobbyists but these are inconsequential in volume to bands, musos and wannabe producers who are trying seriously to do something that gets a return.

That’s the key issue here. Is SnarkoSynth being sold as a form of computer entertainment or is it being sold as a product in a chain of utility? Even the loathed Steinberg has divested itself of its low-grade mall-ware to concentrate on the margin of the Pro market. If you’re attempting to be a pro, you need to invest in the supplier of your tools. If you have SnarkoSynth and it does something hideous just when you don’t need it, you want the problem fixing. If you’re selling VST or VSTi as a cute form of home entertainment, your margin of utility is very, very much lower than if you’re selling it as an element in a chain of production. Mall-ware audio is competing with GTA3 in the $30 price point. Serious sequencers are an attempt at a professional solution at thousands of dollars a pop.

The people who warez audiosofts mostly value the utility of the software quite differently from the people who make it. Fold that back into the fact that value has a fixed life span, one is drawn inevitably to conclude that audio developers must value their outputs not by balancing supply and demand – too many synths and the price goes down – too few and it goes up – but as a function of the time-utilty of the product to users. Price is determined by the immediate value professional and semi-professional users place on the use of the product now, not by the scale of the user base. Warez is such a huge problem because audio vendors have historically done nothing at all to invest in the chain of music production. That forces marginal amateur users to value $2000 sequencers as $10 games. Not only that, but like rabbits dazzled by headlights, they are fixated on the notion that that is how their industry should be.

It’s the price of the toy.

[JonHodgson]

There's no single solution, but people reading KVR can help.

If you use it, pay for it. If you can't justify paying for it then you don't need it, so live without it. I know that most people on KVR already do this, but a few don't.

If someone you know uses warez, encourage them to pay for it, I found this worked with a friend of mine who I discovered was using cracks, I pointed out that he was getting benefit from the work of people like myself, and despite the fact that he doesn't make much money and has two kids to support he managed to come up with a setup which he could afford, and paid for it.. unfortunately this didn't include an impOSCar!

If you encounter a commercial studio that uses warez, don't tolerate it.

I see you managed to evade my last comment/question.

The music and film theft got so bad here in my little province that all the recording artist and small studio were really hurting because of it.

Did they invent some new and petty copy protection schemes?

No. They got together and launched a major information and publicity campaign. Talked about it and placed adds on the radio, on TV and the newspaper; presented artist to the public who commented on how they were hurt by this.

And it's working. Peoples on the street are talking about this, and the view of the public is changing. As before peoples would brag on how they obtained such a movie or music CD from the net, now nobody would dare mention something like that as it is very badly regarded. Now it's more of a bragging right to say that you've bought such ands such CD or movie.

And people do buy their entertainment now. I'm sure they are still peoples who won't, there always will be, but it's not the majority anymore.

Peoples like to think of themselves as being honest, and when they are presented with the fact that they are not, through education, they will change their behavior. Add to that that now they can put a face on the peoples they are hurting by stealing their music/film whatever, it's a very potent recipe.

Until I see something similar in the software world, I'm gonna have to assume that the problem is not that big since it doesn't warrant any action from the main players.

Sorry, I didn't mean to evade you, was typing on borrowed time before leaving the office!

The problem isn't just big, it's huge, the problem isn't lack of need, but lack of decisiveness.

I think part of the problem with industry reaction has been a combination of despondency and also fear. On the one hand some people think you can't make a difference, on the other some have felt worried about upsetting what customers they do have, looking like they are whiny or greedy, or even just getting more attention from the cracker teams.

But I think the approach you talk about should definately be part of the approach, I've already had it work on a smaller level with my friend, I don't think he really saw a problem with using cracks until I pointed out that what he was doing was taking advantage of and hurting people like me.

Taking advantage of somebody else's work and trust in developing a plugin that you use and not paying for it isn't just theft, it's also bad manners.

[Muff Wiggler]

i didn't think there was such a thing as good manners anymore. i mean KVR is generally regarded as an almost piracy-free zone, and just about everyone here treats everyone else like a total asshole. manners?? really?

[Sascha Franck]

(Maybe we should start a campaign that length doesn't really count. This might bring piracy down a lot!)

It doesn't count?
Oh shit!

[dover666]

har - try and pirate my synths - ya scurvy dog!

[JackDark]

HanafiH made a lot of good points. I don't like the last sentence much though.

One of the points I do agree with heartily is that more stuff leads to less quality material. The people I know who have gobs and gobs of wares are just like HanafiH described. They don't know how to utilize any of it, never learn any of it inside out, and generally make vapid boring drivel filled with presets and stock loops... in other words, they never stand a chance of making any money off of what they stole.

What I'm about to say is entirely of personal opinion but I feel it has merit:

From what I've observed over the last two years, the sheer amount of quality freeware has lead to a decrease in the amount of ambition towards finding pirated warez. I've seen more and more people I know find themselves content with what they can find for free, and in turn, they don't bother to pirate the "big synths". Now, this might mean they end up with gobs and gobs of freeware instead of crackware, and they end up in the same boat as the earlier situation, but at least they haven't stole anything to get to that point.

So in that aspect, I feel that quality freeware is in its own way a fight against piracy. Maybe that sounds ludicrous, but it makes sense to me and I've seen it many times with my own eyes with people I know personally.

Now whether quality freeware will lead to developers lowering their prices more and more remains to be scene. It could have the opposite effect, causing a severe rift between cheap VSTs and really, really expensive VSTs, with the middleground increasingly nonexistent. Guess we'll see?

I know that the only VSTs I've ever bought have cost between $10-30. XOXOS (was), HG Fortune, Prodyon, etc. are great examples of this bracket. So I try to keep what I offer in the same vein for people of the same mindset as me.

For the record, the most I ever spent on any piece of music software was for FL Studio, and I feel I've gotten that investment back out of it (despite not having upgraded to 6 yet... scared).

[soulata]

add.:

I've demoed every synth available, and though I like some of them, no dice...

A little less so for creative fx but (as I see it) - clients (in my little home studio) rarely go for extremely novelty sounds or anything that tickles my fancy...most of the time it's better to stick with what they know - live drums, live bass, piano, rhodes...synths come in rarely, and so I really have almost no need for them, with the possible exception of minimoog that everybody knows (looks more than sounds)...

it's a different game with hosts and fx.

songwritting: piano, thank you

k

(had too much to drink, sorry)

[eduardo_b]

i didn't think there was such a thing as good manners anymore. i mean KVR is generally regarded as an almost piracy-free zone, and just about everyone here treats everyone else like a total asshole. manners?? really?

Really, there are people with good manners, but they apparently don't spend time here.

[HanafiH]

...whether quality freeware will lead to developers lowering their prices more and more remains to be scene. It could have the opposite effect, causing a severe rift between cheap VSTs and really, really expensive VSTs, with the middleground increasingly nonexistent. Guess we'll see?

There's a third way: what if the refresh cycle of audio software upgrades is faster than the developmental curve of musicians?

A very big part of my choice to return to hardware was the fact that machines I used twenty years ago are exactly the same today. Nothing, but nothing, in the native platform is stable. Going all software is like jumping on a conveyor belt that drives you forward towards another conveyor belt. The Yamaha TX81Z is an atrocious little fart box of a twenty year old bass synth, but I can program one completely intuitvely. That intimacy just does not ever happen with audiosofts unless you chose (as I have) to nail down a platform and go with it, come what may. No upgrades, no new toys.

The creeping alopecia of the audiosoftware market is the inexorable adaptation of the platform to provide 'tools' where inspiration and experience used to be, in which musical style becomes a formula to be persued to a vanishing point of theoretical perfection.

Why has all this wonderful stuff produced no significant genre of its own? We've had VSTi for nine years - that's longer than it took the TB303 to go from a joke to the centrepiece of an entire canon of musical styles. This whole notion that you can blend the computer market dogma of continual innovation with the human experience of musicianship is a myth.

Here's a guess as to what will happen: the freeware/cheapware end of it will collapse, a couple of big vendors will go to the wall, and the main drag of development will retrench back into the pro markets and IP-on-silicon it all original descended from. And just like the teens who inherited the TB303s and 808s the progs, punks and new wave generations turfed out, actually explored those machines for something new and found it, it's the kiddies who get the cast-off Win2000 boxes who will really make this media sit up and deliver. And it will all be free for them, however much it cost us.

[eduardo_b]

...I feel that quality freeware is in its own way a fight against piracy. Maybe that sounds ludicrous, but it makes sense to me and I've seen it many times with my own eyes with people I know personally.

I think there's real merit to what you say. But its effect is probably marginal for commercial developers.

I've long believed that many warez users simply don't have the personal interest to invest in software. They don't really have enough commitment to creating music to spend money on it, or certainly to spend more than $20 or $30 for a synth or effect. It's more about opportunity. So freeware is a readily available alternative that makes finding and downloading warez less attractive.

But what help does that offer developers? After all, they aren't likely to end up most warez users as customers anyway.

/edit: I must have been paying attention to something else when I wrote the original. So much for multitasking today.

[JackDark]

What if the refresh cycle of audio software upgrades is faster than the developmental curve of musicians?

I know what you're going at with this comment, and at first I wanted to cry "Nay, filthy naysayer!"... but then I remembered the Video Game Crash of the early 80's due to oversaturation in a nascent market.

It could theoretically happen with VST, and music software in general. I agree it is already nearly overwhelming... if I hadn't started at this (using it at least) five years ago, I would be completely at a loss as to where to even start today. I mean think from that vantage point, anybody, what it must be like to come to KVR for the first time and just look through the Instruments, Effects, Hosts, etc. archives... perhaps frightening to the point of numbness... to the point of "what's the use" back to my piano and guitar...

That's possible. And honestly, the over saturation will only get worse thanks to an increasing interest in highlevel development kits. Just look at how much stuff SynthEdit has spawned alone. And SynthMaker is next... yes, I can see indeed where you're coming from with this point. And as a VST designer it's kind of scary, but that is why I'm always looking for a unique angle.

Going all software is like jumping on a conveyor belt that drives you forward towards another conveyor belt.

That is true. But some people like the ride. And it doesn't mean we don't keep pieces from the past along the way. I still love PiWarp, and it's from 1999, and that might as well be a thousand years ago in the world of software.

No upgrades, no new toys.

And I can see the merit of your thought here as well. But does not an artist yearn for new hues once they finish their "blue" period? I think relying on only a few certian instruments for too long is a form of solipsism... you paint yourself in a corner. IMHO.

And also factor in the fact that no hardware is free. Someone wanting to create electronic music but having zero cash will be extremely excited by the concept of freeware. I know I was. I don't want this to turn into a hardware versus software debate, but lets keep them on equal terms in that measure (creativity factor). Now, as far as resale value goes, you definitely win on that one.

in which musical style becomes a formula to be persued to a vanishing point of theoretical perfection.

That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is, if the genre becomes easily creatable, indeed, nearly automatically creatable, then the genre faces only one of two options; evolve beyond convention, or saturate and die... leaving the next genre that much more noticeable. That's a good thing, IMHO.

And as far as "specialized" tools go, you can pound a nail in wood with a rock, but personally I'd rather have a nailgun.

Why has all this wonderful stuff produced no significant genre of its own?

It has... there's tons of music which could only exist with the aid of software advancement. The first thing that comes to mind is Aphex Twin's Window Licker, anything by Venetian Snares... Kid 606, hell, there's tons of artists out there that use software, indeed VST as well, as the core of their sound. Music software has taken IDM (for example) to places it couldn't of dreamed of going with conventional hardware. Is there a hardware version of an image synthesizer for example? A buffer corrupter? An 88 combfilter array unit? Etc. Software allows any concept to become a reality.

Here's a guess as to what will happen.

I am going to have to vie against your soothing, because of various factors that are entirely personal and subjective. And I'm biased, I went plastic years ago.