why are most soft synths and effects so expensive?

[Rangtangtang]

I think some are because mainly its due to the fact they belonged to the first group of developers who had lots of money and time invested in their money making ventures.

For example, Steinburg who were there right from the beggining. And if you have noticed, Steinburg has changed hands a number of times, and they would certaintly fall into the trap of not being able to drop their prices that easy.

Whith the appearance of Synthedit for example, many others are able to make their own synths and effects, and there are a lot about. To charge a high price for something these days I think, it would have to be something special and unique that you probably could not do whithout.

I think you have to be pretty good these days to earn a good income from software. Its a buisness and you need besides the products to be set up very well.
Tracktion for example, its under on going devlopement and priced well, it gives support and has a workable web-page, they take pride in maintaing a loyal customer base, and you can purchase easily and quickly.

I remember recently watching a documentary on TV about pirated video movies. And their answer was to drop the price of a movie DVD that much that it would be not be feesable for the pirates to make it. Like it is easier for you to purchase the DVD at your local shopping centre than take a journey out to the pirate's and buy a substandard copy.

[FaX]

If i could steal my neighbours Mercedes, park it in my garage and use it everyday, knowing that there would *never* be any negative consequences for it, of course i'd f**king steal it. And when the bitch baught another Mercedes to replace the first one, given that i could steal it as easy as downloading a file from the internet, with just as many repercussions, i'd steal that f**ker too. Given these circumstances, i'd steal anything from anyone!

Weird , even if I could under those circumstances I still wouldn't steal.
Just because I'm on a very low subsidual income does not IMHO justify or give me any right too warez use.
The legit software I own is all reg'd and paid for.
The VST effects (bar those bundled with the appropriate host's I use etc) are 100% freeware in my VST folder.
I see no need for warez myself.
Still cannot see any justification for it either.
Maybe I'm just a stupid old shit who was raised to believe that theft wasn't on.
Or to be more precise I was raised to believe it just wasn't and isn't the done thing.
I don't even have any illegal mp3 downloads of artist material either and would rather save for a CD.
Starting too think I'm either tragic or a dying breed .
It sounds snobby but I wasn't raised to engage in that sort of behaviour.
And at the end of the day I have to be able to live with myself.
Maybe that strict upbringing paid of in some way. .

[Urs]

But hardware stuff is a much more complicated process to get a new product developed. But on the other hand it is much better secondhand value due to this fact.

Well, I wouldn't actually agree too much here. Fifteen years ago you could buy a full studioload of analog synths for a 3-digit number of bucks, at 1-5% of their original value. That was before some machines became cult. Nowadays you hardly get certain drum machines for that price, but you get the 80ies digital synths for a fraction of what they cost back then. If I wanted to sell one of my 80ies hardware boxes, I'd have to face a loss of $2000 each. Agreed, there's software that I couldn't sell anymore at all, but the absolute loss is much lower.

Also, "build hardware is more complex than building software" is a myth. There's a lot of people out there who buy some Curtis chips, glue them together with a microcontroller, add some knobs etc. The actual process of designing hardware is different, as you rather draw and debug circuit board layouts (unless you use ready-to-use prototyping boards), but it's not necessarily more complicated than creating software with a user interface. But instead of sending the raw data to a CD manufacturer, you send the specs to companies who are specialized on building hardware on demand. The actual costs of creating hardware are higher, but not as much as one might think. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual manufacturing costs of a contemporary digital hardware synth were way below 300 bucks. One must not forget that in software development, the user interface oftenly takes 50-80% of the development time. This factor is considerably lower in hardware design.

Cheers,

Urs

[HanafiH]

Serious sequencers are an attempt at a professional solution at thousands of dollars a pop.

That is just your perception but, as an example, I know for a fact that Richard Hoffman's goal with ORION was to make a virtual studio of professional studio quality and I believe wholeheartedly that he has done precisely that for just a few hundreds of dollars. He never envisioned doing it for hobbyists, despite his pricing. Th eunfortunate fact, however, is that no-on ewill take it seriously unless it does cost thousands, which is kind of what rankles me with this market.

I've never used Orion, and I have to admit I don't even know what its current feature set is, but I take the point you're making. The flaw in your point, to my mind, is that nobody at all ever knows what technology was used in a final recording. Many people here could probably tell an end-to-end analog production from a digital, I can defintely tell when Reason has been used, but it's impossible for the average music enjoying punter to discern what host has been used, whatever the genre of music. The sheer volume of music in production dictates that Orion users should on the basis of your argument, have produced an equal number of successes, proportionate to thier numbers, and the fact of that success, at a lower cost, would not be lost on producers. Orion should be at worst, the best kept secret in the industry, and at best, be championed by its builder for the hits created on it. That hasn't happened to my knowledge.

What's stopping you? The last new synth I got hold of was probably JunoX2 which would be about what, 3 or 4 years ago now? Nobody forces you onto the treadmill and I've not had any problem being totally objective about what a new instrument has to offer over what I already own. Its completely and utterly up to you. In fact I have been using ORION for much longer than any hardware sequencer I ever owned. I think the average useful life of any of my hardware was around 3 years with the longest serving being my O1R/W which I used for maybe 5 years, about the same time as I have been using ORION, but I only used it as a sequencer for maybe half that time.

The point I raised was specifically about synths, and not hardware sequencers which I've never used, but I think it still applies. My oldest synth is 28 years old this summer. I don't have my TEAC tape unit anymore, but that lasted fifteen years or so. What did you do with your old gear, sell it on, or write it off as a capital loss and throw it in the nearest skip?

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

Because, by and large, it is only emulating what has already existed for many years. I don't see where it has presented any opportunity for this at all.

Agreed. Another curious factor of softsynths which is distinctly different from most hardsynths, and certainly all synths from before 1992, is that most commercial softsynths can be and are built for an existing demand, because the development cycle is cheaper.

Most 'legendary' synths were all designed, developed and built over many years on a build-it-and-they-will-come basis, and history is littered with those that didn't make it. Developers of softsynths are definitely marketeering into existing buzz requirements - alias-free analog, terabyte sample banks, phys mod, attempting to fulfill more perfectly what people already know.

[HanafiH]

Actually the M1 sold about 250,000 units.

And almost every single one of them still exists.

The market for VSTi is only in the millions if the market for recordings made with them is in the trillions.

[soulata]

I know many in defense to piracy say that one that get's to know the product from a cracked version, later buys it if he likes it. I don't fully believe that.

ehem, raised on not so legal Cubase 3.7, bought SL when money came. and lots of other goodies.

I'm not defending piracy though.

[lfm]

But hardware stuff is a much more complicated process to get a new product developed. But on the other hand it is much better secondhand value due to this fact.

Well, I wouldn't actually agree too much here. Fifteen years ago you could buy a full studioload of analog synths for a 3-digit number of bucks, at 1-5% of their original value. That was before some machines became cult. Nowadays you hardly get certain drum machines for that price, but you get the 80ies digital synths for a fraction of what they cost back then. If I wanted to sell one of my 80ies hardware boxes, I'd have to face a loss of $2000 each. Agreed, there's software that I couldn't sell anymore at all, but the absolute loss is much lower.

Also, "build hardware is more complex than building software" is a myth. There's a lot of people out there who buy some Curtis chips, glue them together with a microcontroller, add some knobs etc. The actual process of designing hardware is different, as you rather draw and debug circuit board layouts (unless you use ready-to-use prototyping boards), but it's not necessarily more complicated than creating software with a user interface. But instead of sending the raw data to a CD manufacturer, you send the specs to companies who are specialized on building hardware on demand. The actual costs of creating hardware are higher, but not as much as one might think. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual manufacturing costs of a contemporary digital hardware synth were way below 300 bucks. One must not forget that in software development, the user interface oftenly takes 50-80% of the development time. This factor is considerably lower in hardware design.

Cheers,

Urs

Well, I just said that hardware secondhand value is better, not that it last forever or increases in value like an investment.

I was the starting years of my business(1985) with doing memory cartridges to some synths and drummachines from Roland and Casio.

Just simple thing like that took:

1. Doing a prototype in your own lab
2. Find whatever standard component of electronics and the physical stuff at the best possible price and decide which volume you are going for as a starter batch.
3. Fit the actual components onto circuit boards and the box, and decide on the final design.
4. Get offers from maybe 4-5 factories that is to do different things of the production line. This for circuit board stuff and for surface stuff like paint and printing on surface. Printing manuals etc.
5. Send manufacturers drawings and specs to make the circuit boards and mount components and solder and so on. As a starter you might do it locally and not i china, because it takes a lot of traveling to see to that everything you expect is there. So revenue on each sold item will be lower, but risk and other costs lower as well.

It's easy to make a mistake like putting a diod the wrong way, because you missed that you look at a mirrored drawing. Heeewh...things I did. Just to sit down and resolder 500 circuit boards yourself turning this component around.

Some plates for the box were sent to laquer-shop. After that was done, it was sent to another shop to get the logos and GUI printed on the plates/panels.

I first got the best offer from a guy that later proved not to do the printing correctly. The paint never dried and it was not straight and I had to remove the job they did and go to another shop which did it right finally.

6. Assemble everything into the final product and make some description and manual of some kind.

Since production cost are high of hardware compared to software, you spend a lot of money before getting anything back. Always a hard decision how much to invest to get the best prices, and see whether you can lower price on market and get better sales.

Here I did not have to mold anything plastic parts which are huge costs doing the tools for that. I used standard stuff all the way.

So I found that doing electronics were quite a difficult scene unless you were already established with all the capital you needed to do these things.

So last 15 years I made my living purely on software development in my own business(not audio stuff). So I know a little bit about that too.

It cannot be compared the complexity of doing hardware stuff versa software. It's not just buying some circuits and pick up your solder iron and put together. It's so many things you don't know about until you actually try to do it.

If you seen the simple stuff like stomp boxes for guitar and such are fairly simple, and they also look pretty amateur what I have seen. Knobs usually look a little out of place etc. Not like the big guys Boss and Roland and Yamaha brands. They can do it on a professional level and make all the tools to mold plastics parts for everything that's in a synth.

Todo software stuff all you need is knowledge basically. Not hiring a dozen different factories to get the parts you need.

Well, I'm talking synth plugins etc now. When it comes to computer games etc there is a huge crowd of people needed to do that. So it's a large investment when it comes to such productlines.

At first you do everything yourself. Graphic design of GUI, manuals and development itself. As the company grows you get specialists in different fields. First hiring and later maybe employing your own staff to build the knowledge withing the company.

Well, that was just i short insight into the fields of my short career in hardware.

But it might be easier today in some ways with ordering stuff on demand. But I think you really need to go for rather high volumes in production to be able to make a profit selling it. Especially if you don't do it all yourself.

If you do a mistake in your software you get fix it and get users a new version in just hours. Mistakes in hardware are very much another story. Doing straps and cutting connections on circuit boards. Just to change it in production line is close to a disaster.

Anyway, good talking to you.

[videzyrah]

developers need (lots of) beer money

[JonHodgson]

Actually the M1 sold about 250,000 units.

And almost every single one of them still exists.

The market for VSTi is only in the millions if the market for recordings made with them is in the trillions.

I don't get those maths, there's only a market for a plugin if on average everyone who buys a copy can sell a million songs made with it?

[lfm]

I know many in defense to piracy say that one that get's to know the product from a cracked version, later buys it if he likes it. I don't fully believe that.

ehem, raised on not so legal Cubase 3.7, bought SL when money came. and lots of other goodies.

I'm not defending piracy though.

The liberals towards piracy usually put it like I did earlier in that statement. They often claim that's the way to go, let it all be free and then eventually they will buy it.

The companies would be out of business before that happends.

Looking much to much on Bill Gates and what he has done. He can take a blow or two, with people copying Word and Excel etc. And they transfer this idea to the small and medium companies which will suffer hard from this.

Bill Gates in one of a kind. You cannot compare anybody with that. Some skill and a big portion of luck with timing his stuff with IBM before it took off in the larger scale of today. Not even IBM thought PCs would be anything that would matter seriously in future.

So we must address moral and ethics, whether piracy is something to embrace or not. I think everybody knows in their heart that it's wrong to do it, but are so tempted because they get away with it(like someone already mentioned in this thread).

So we must make everybody see that feeling good about yourself is doing the right thing, even when it is hard to do. Well, you cannot get that top software right now, but would have to do with something you can afford for while first.

That's the way I see it.

[puffer]

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

I suppose I see your point; I wouldn't give my money to a commercial studio that was built on warez... et cetera...

Let's try to put this in perspective,

we all recognize that many, possibly most of the people who download warez plugins would not buy a single plugin if warez were not available.

we also recognize that of those who would buy something, they'd buy far fewer than they download.

So I'm not saying that every warez download is a lost sale (though I still think it's immoral, you want to benefit from my work, you pay me, I'd pay you)

But the warez numbers are so huge, and the sales numbers so small even compared to the number of people who found ten times the money to buy hardware, that if we could get even 1 in 100 warez users to do what most kvr members do anyway, then the industry could be transformed. Not only could developers stop living hand to mouth, but they could start investing, doing research into new synthesis methods and psychoacoustics.

So please, at least carry on doing what you are doing and try to explain to people, a few will respond.

I'm in full agreement with you, Jon.

And I certainly won't be the one that will to make the argument that warez and "borrowed" copies don't impact software sales. I've seen it myself: a semi-pro studio, packed with hardware and one of the owners boasting to me about his stolen software/samples stash; musicians who have offered to "lend" me copies of software they've come across, or tell me that they've just installed Logic Pro when I know they do most of their work in Ableton/Cubase. I choose not to do it, and I try to stay away from that culture as much as possible, but it's there; and it's not going away.

Hell, there's some f*ckin' dickweed who stands on a corner of North 6th and Bedford in Williamsburg, Brooklyn every weekend with a blanket full of cracked software he sells. How that guy isn't in jail is beyond me. (Why didn't I turn him in? you may well ask. I haven't lived there in there in 5 years, so I couldn't tell you if this wanker is still there, and this was before I got sucked into digital audio production, and only related to software development in terms of Adobe/MacroMedia/Apple/Microsoft. Though even then I knew this guy had the moral compass of a pedophilic priest.)

...
This is a bit of taboo, but I gotta say it: you also need to buy your competition products, to analyze those carefully and be really competitive. If you hear a dev who says she didn't analyze her competition, she's lieing.

Of course, you'll see a full crew of 'companies' developing products using warezed compilers, photoshops , cracked hosts and competition instruments, so they don't get exposed. But I won't cover about that for now.
...
-René

If the independent design/web industry is any sort of bellwether then this sort of practice is rampant. Most designers and programmers I've have built their career on rigs full of "acquired" software, a lot of it warez passed along the food chain via friends/co-workers. And, yes, I am including myself. (I haven't stolen software in what must be a decade, for the record.) I find it unbelievable that all developers and companies have no "acquired" software. The outlay for software is huge cost I'd imagine. And we live in a world where this sort of thing is unavoidable.

So, yeah, education. That and figuring out new economic models in which to build a business.

[Angus_FX]

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.

That's part of it -- one of the side-effects of the market being under-sized is that those companies that are able to establish themselves have a tendency to become hyper-competitive - the "feature arms race" between manufacturers has led to software developing new features far more rapidly than most potential users can learn them.

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.

It's an interesting question -- OK, there is glitch and IDM, but the explosion of complexity is such that it will take many years for the true masters to emerge.

After the invention of the pianoforte -- a relatively simple machine -- how long did it take people to stop re-hashing old harpsichord, clavichord and organ pieces and really get to grips with the new instrument?

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.

It already happened once with DX and VST audio effects plug-ins -- the market exploded in '97 or so, and rapidly became super-saturated so that by 2001, few could make a living from it. Of the original effects plug-in companies, only Waves and PSP are still going. A lot of good stuff (TC Native Bundle, Ultrafunk) as well as a lot of not so good stuff has fallen by the wayside.

Why not? Should we all just accept whatever everyone decides they want to do? That's stupid. I'm all for supporting the guy who tries to do the right thing by everyone, guys just like Jorgen and Richard Hoffman who seem to have no problem creating great software and supporting a large customer base with comparatively little income. Those are the guys I want to give my money to, not the guy who deliberately prices his products to keep the number of users manageable.

You make that sound like a greedy or unethical thing to do. Those of us who aren't just catering to the figure-it-out-for-themselves brigade have a responsibility to the users. If we sold BFD for $50, even if we did have ten times as many users, we'd have to hire a lot more support staff and I don't know how we'd pay them.

Yes, the userbases for eXT and Orion are quite large, but they're very much self-selecting towards "computer users that make music" rather than "musicians that use a computer". There just isn't anything like the same level of support needed.

Well I'm just in the market for good instruments and I paid less for my Alesis Micron than you charge for GURU and it has drums, sequencing and a great synth engine. Then there's all the metal and plastic and LCD and triple-boxing and transport all over the world of a bulky, physical product.

Indeed.. on the other hand, hardware manufacturers get better margins through retailers; the Micron retails for $399 and, I would guess, required minimal R&D, being a spin-off from the Ion. It also has the financial might of the Numark group behind it -- they're a large and powerful company (owners of Akai, Alesis, Ion Audio and Wavefront Semi).

it's another thread, but having multiple people contributing to a development, plus a comittee of marketing people and managers etc. etc. making design decisions - it's a recipe for shitty software most time.

Having worked on both solo and group projects, I disagree 100%. Yes, there is a danger of considerations other than engineering (sales? marketing?) taking over, but in today's mature VSTi market, several coders with different skill sets -- plus skilled GUI designers, patch designers, and administrative support to hold the whole mess together -- has to be the best way to make software. Few of the $100+ VSTis are really solo efforts.

I don't think it's unfair to estimate that 10 years ago there were at least 500,000 people worldwide who had enough desire to make music to find the means to spend over £1000 pounds on it (and bear in mind that they probably had to buy other stuff, at similarly high prices).

That's true.. however, of those 500,000 people, how many really have the computer literacy and the inclination to get the most out of VSTis (or indeed computers at all)? There are a lot of musicians (even keyboardists) that still won't go near a computer for sounds, and a surprising number of people using entry-level DAWs (Pro Tools LE, Cubase SE, GarageBand) that don't own or use a single third party plug-in.

So the total potential market for VSTis and effects should be in the millions - but it seems that we're actually sharing a market with, if we're lucky, a few tens of thousands.

OK, but think about those millions of users for a second, how much they really care about the software side, what they're actually trying to do.. if they go out and buy Logic Pro or Cubase SX, or indeed Orion, they've actually got as much synthesis power in the box as most of them are likely to care about. Freeware can add to their pallettes further -- and evidently is, with NS Kit having 250,000 downloads.

As VSTi developers, we should remember that much of the time what we're selling is, to many of the userbase, on the same level of importance as their guitar tuner or a spare mic, it's not their Minimoog or '59 Les Paul. I think of someone like my father -- he's a weekend-warrior jazz guitarist for a 1930s-style band. Yes, he could stand to benefit from quite a few plug-ins out there (obvious examples being Guitar Rig, Amplitube, BFD, Groove Agent etc.) and he has the disposable income to buy one or two if need be. But it's never there to be more than "that thing on the computer".

[Borogove]

I'm one of three guys who registered Tiny God's Murmur Pro

...

i knew it was bad but...... three???

Nine, now, actually. I may have said three in pure sarcasm at some point, or just after it was first made available. But, again, I don't advertise. It makes a difference.

[puffer]

The analogies to companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Apple also fall apart at some point. These companies are far more concerned with their corporate licenses than what amounts to petty thievery. (Again, not defending this practice.) A lot of the companies we're talking about here and that are weighing in have neither the resources nor the user base to pursue that sort of corporate structure. The semi-pro/professional audio industry is not even close to the corporate money that keeps those companies afloat.

[HanafiH]

Actually the M1 sold about 250,000 units.

And almost every single one of them still exists.

The market for VSTi is only in the millions if the market for recordings made with them is in the trillions.

I don't get those maths, there's only a market for a plugin if on average everyone who buys a copy can sell a million songs made with it?

The point is this: the subjective value a professional classical musician places on, say, a Steinway grand is different from the subjective value a non-musical bricklayer places on it. To the bricklayer the piano is a big piece of furniture, to the classical pianist, it's the center of a musical career. The classical musician will invest a royal price for the it, the bricklayer will pay a tenner it. What is the true value of a Steinway grand?

Now plenty of my mates in the 70's bought analog synths. Moog went bust. Sequential went bust. Arp went bust. The list is endless. Even with non-pro's buying the machines, even the synth legends couldn't shift enough product to keep their companies afloat. Why? The market just ain't there and it never has been.

So just because a bricklayer steals a piano and tries to learn how to play it doesn't it make it worth to him what the maker needs to be paid to keep his business running. Steinway depends absolutely and exclusively on the flow of money from the chain of musical trade. Without that trade, too few people will be able to pay the bottom line price.

So in order for *all* the people who use warez to value the products at their professional prices and voluntarily pay that, the scale of the entire musical trade will have to grow to the point where labels are selling trillions of units and the trade trickles down through the megastars down to the bottom of the market.

Either that, or the whole enterprise is just a kind of glorified computer game industry, in which case the price of the product is grossly overstated. You can't have it both ways, you cant sell a unit at a pro prices into an amateurs market. Moog couldn't do it. Arp couldn't do it. And neither can any developer here.