KVR Audio

Aloysius · Post by **Aloysius** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 6:30 am

Austerity is certainly having an impact.

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 6:56 am

VitaminD wrote:
pdxindy wrote:
VitaminD wrote:As mentioned.. the market is saturated.. there is much competition. It is a buyer's market today. Expect lower prices!

Further, freeware and magazineware combined can create a itb 'studio' that rivals some of the top of the line from 5-7 years ago. The quality has improved at the same time competition has improved.

The same issue occurs in photography software. 3 years ago Lightroom was around 300 dollars. Today you can find it for roughly one third of the original price. Why? There are so many lower priced competitors that they HAD to lower their price. Lightroom wasn't the defacto software at the time.. there were true competitors (that look verrrry similar and do essentially the same task).

Now, if only camera prices would drop in the same manner.
Anything you would pick over Lightroom that is available on the Mac?
Hmmmm.. I'm a pretty big fan of lightroom.. especially the latest one (4.2)

But most of these applications are available for both Mac or PC.. well, outside of Apple's Aperture.

You might want to look at DxO Optics Pro, Phase One Capture One, Corel Aftershot Pro (formerly Bibble Pro), or perhaps even Picturecode Photo Ninja as well as Adobe's Lightroom.

I'm using Lightroom 4 and Photoshop Elements 11 with a few Photog plugins. See, even in photoland we have plugins for our host software.

I totally love Lightroom... I wouldn't even look at something else unless you had said something else was radically better. I have 4.2 and Photoshop...

johnnyvn · Post by **johnnyvn** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 7:36 am

Hmmmm. Some interesting replies, and in most cases, not really what I expected. I hope the majority here are right...that these drastically lower prices have more do with holiday sales, increased competition and being forced to lower price in order to compete, rather than kracks and piracy simply decimating the market.

One of the things that I'm most happy about with nearly every plug that I've bought over the last 18 months is the removal of terribly restrictive licensing policy. I really do NOT like dongles of any kind, and I REALLY like the many companies who don't seem to be stressing about how many computers one can put their plugs on to. I've bought every single plug-in that I own, and I have never even considered "sharing" a single one of them with "friends", etc. But I have two studio computers and a laptop. On top of that, with ProTools 10 coming out, I have separate partitions on each of my two studio computers, one for PT8 and another for PT10, so for those (many) plugs that do not use dongles, I end up having to install plugs in five places. I'm really heartened that the vast majority of companies don't seem to have a problem with this. It's all legitimate, and again, I'd never consider giving anyone my registration/serial number info so that they could also install my plugs on to their computers, too.

I'm hopeful that good plug developers can continue to make at least some sort of living developing, and I'm happy to support them in every way that I can.

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 8:43 am

johnnyvn wrote:Hmmmm. Some interesting replies, and in most cases, not really what I expected. I hope the majority here are right...that these drastically lower prices have more do with holiday sales, increased competition and being forced to lower price in order to compete, rather than kracks and piracy simply decimating the market.

I think the evidence is in... we have more high quality plug-ins to choose from than ever...

robotmonkey · Post by **robotmonkey** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 8:57 am

It's hardly the cracks or piracy killing the industry. All the academic research (not paid by the industry itself) I've seen has not found any correlation in this. Actually, if you think about it, pirates are the most potential customers - you just have to get them to come over. Why? Because those who use a certain product do invest their time into learning the product and they become dependent on it. They just need an incentive to do so. And campaigns like Christmas sales or year end sales are a great way to bring over those people. Most of the hobbyist who are not making a dime out of their music would probably not buy Waves Mercury for 16K, but they are very likely to buy Silver or Gold bundle, when it's discounted from 400$ to 200$. It's much better strategy than coming up with intricate DRM schemes that punish only those who did buy the product anyway.

If anything, it's probably the increased competition in marketplace that is the problem. There are so many good stuff out there that does exactly the same thing, and due to internet it's very visible to everyone. Most of the people do not need 10 EQ's, 15 Compressors etc. In hardware days most of the people did not have 200 synths in their homes or studios, like you now have with softsynths. There weren't even so many makers around those days. There were only a handful of makers with specific lines of (expensive) hardware. It's very different now when everyone can make a VST in SE and sell it. So it's obvious that the money is going to be distributed among many smaller players and that means smaller share for everyone.

robotmonkey · Post by **robotmonkey** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:06 am

johnnyvn wrote:
One of the things that I'm most happy about with nearly every plug that I've bought over the last 18 months is the removal of terribly restrictive licensing policy.

This. It's often not price that stops me buying something, but stupid DRM.

Uncle E · Post by **Uncle E** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:09 am

Waves was hit hard when the original iLok got cracked. They laid off a big portion of their staff. The iLok crack happened around the time when the US recession was at its worst (not that we're through it, people are just more comfortable with it now) and I'm sure it was the culmination of the two things that really made them hurt.

However, Waves has done a great job of recovering. They used to be known as one of the most Draconian plug-in companies around, now they're known as one of the friendliest. Most people don't even notice the WUP thing now that the initial prices are often so low. And their plug-ins are better than ever these days!

As for Lexicon, the plug-ins were priced too high when they were released. They may have over-corrected now, or at least corrected more than necessary, but I'm sure they're going to gain a lot of new fans this way.

electro · Post by **electro** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:21 am

Yes, the era of the $300.00+ plug is just about over. Its getting to the point where one already has all the mixing tools and synths one will ever need, and each company seems to be trying to copy everything the other company is doing. Company A releases Tape, then company B and C follow suit. Company B releases 1176 compressor plug, then company B, C, and D follw suit within months. There are at least 4 major AMP sims and everybody today trying to copy the vintage EQ / Comp plugs that used to be exclusive to UAD.

VitaminD wrote:As mentioned.. the market is saturated.. there is much competition. It is a buyer's market today. Expect lower prices!

Uncle E · Post by **Uncle E** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:29 am

electro wrote:There are at least 4 major AMP sims

That's still the one last area we're missing. I'm guessing we'll see a Kemper TI before too long, then a few years of Virus-style "how do I get that sound?" threads. I'll start selling my tube amps now.

electro · Post by **electro** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:41 am

The IK Orange and Copper AMPS for AT3 sound very good and so does the Overloud TH-2 Lunchbox and Cab section. I've also been hearing lots of positive reports on the new Scuffham sim.

kv331 · Post by **kv331** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:44 am

cryophonik wrote:I don't think we're seeing the end of the plugin industry, but I do think that we're starting to see the end of outrageous prices, as the margin of quality is decreasing between free/cheap plugins and expensive/boutique plugins.

+1

guitartom · Post by **guitartom** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 10:27 am

johnnyvn wrote:Current deep discounts on Lexicon. Current deep discounts on Waves software. Ongoing sales by a wide variety of software manufacturers.

Are Kracks killing the industry?

Are the software developers trying to fight piracy with lower (and lower) prices?

Anyone have thoughts about what's happening out there?

I mean, I love the lower (and lower) prices, but I hope this isn't pointing to major difficulties that software developers are having with kracks and piracy. That would totally suck.

I know that one of Lexicon's main software programmers left early this year...is this due to the challenging nature of that industry?

I guess we shouldn't forget that the production of software plugins might have changed a lot over the years. It's impressive what you get as freeware or low-budget ware these days. This stuff has been developed by single persons or very small teams: Variety of Sound, Tonebooster, Klanghelm, Molot etc.

Maybe the higher prices in the past also reflected the size of the development teams. I would really like to know how many people worked at Steinberg to produce their 64to32bit bridging. At least we know the result of their work: a bridge that never really worked, wheras jbridge seems to be the work of just one guy, who sold a lot of copies worldwide for 14$ I guess.

Another example is the sonicouture stuff: Two guys are designing superb sounding instruments (better than most Steinberg instruments for my ears). But they didn't bother with developing the 10001th sample engine, they are using kontakt / kontakt player as a base.

So I would guess that we will see a process of concentration within the next years which will result in a reduced number of larger companies who will set the defacto standards and a large number of small companies or even single persons who will continue to develop high quality software plugins in a very efficient way.

And an open word about Lexicon: I love the sound of their reverbs, but: I own a MX400 hardware unit that is still beeing sold today. When I wanted to use it as a hardware plugin in my DAW I had to learn that the software support from Lexicon is really subpar: nothing really works with respect to the MX400 drivers etc (I think they still deliver drivers form 2008/2009). So maybe in this case the decline is well deserved. Not because Lexicon produces bad reverbs but because they seem to be unable to adopt to the development of their target market.

Numanoid · Post by **Numanoid** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 11:31 am

johnnyvn wrote:Current deep discounts on Lexicon. Current deep discounts on Waves software. Ongoing sales by a wide variety of software manufacturers.

Are Kracks killing the industry?

You mean cracks?

I think we are going from a sellers to a buyers market, prices have been outrageously high, now getting more normalized.

300 bucks for this plug from UAD. Too me it's just crazy, $200 probably just goes to cover to have the UAD name on it

osiris · Post by **osiris** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 1:19 pm

Blame Apple and the 99 cent app ......

mellotronaut · Post by **mellotronaut** » Sat Dec 08, 2012 1:56 pm

johnnyvn wrote: Are Kracks killing the industry?

Are the software developers trying to fight piracy with lower (and lower) prices?

Anyone have thoughts about what's happening out there?

cracks don't kill the industry. the industry has to live with it and they do. why lower prices? Waves and Lexicon want to get money from the hobbyists now, no longer only from the pros and from the studios. btw., WUP is going up from January, 2013 on.
when you do a software business, you know, there is piracy. anyway there are enough honest customers to do a business with too, but you have to enchant them with love, low prices and good support.

Are we seeing the decline of the plug-in industry?