Some serious good points PRO SMALL VENDORS - thank you for that.masterhiggins wrote: True. That's a good point. LOL. I never even heard of them (Kjaerhus).
The only caveat to that logic though is that usually one spends a relatively small amount of money on those other companies, buying 1 or 2 plugins out of the lot. With Waves, on the other hand, people usually buy huge bundles of plugins, of which they only actually use 1 or 2. In addition to that, there's the WUP to continue receiving updates, etc. In the event that the smaller company folds, there's only a small amount of investment lost.
On the other hand, even big companies discontinue products. NI is fracking huge and they've discontinued quite a lot of software over the years (Pro-53, Vokator, Spektral Delay, B4, etc). The Pro-53 was particularly popular, which confuses me a bit why they would choose to discontinue that one. Oh well. But I do see your point. They will probably be around for a very long time.
When I'm choosing a company to support (by purchasing their stuff), I usually take a few things into consideration:
1) They listen to feedback and reply - Companies like Fabfilter, PSP, u-he, ValhallaDSP, and Cytomic aren't super huge. Each of those companies have pretty small teams (Cytomic is pretty much just Andy and his wife), but they are very active in the forums and interact with customers on a regular basis. Antoni of PSP usually responds directly and I've never communicated with a nicer guy.These are the kind of things that most people find pretty important.
2) They are open about the products they're developing - They give you updates on things they have on the burner, and sometimes even tell you when some projects have to be shelved to fix an important issue on a current product. This transparency lets you know they're actively working on their stuff rather than just sitting back and collecting money, doing the bare minimum to keep a product working and praying to God that Apple or Windows doesn't implement a change that requires code maintenance to pass validation checks.
3) Frequent updates - Sure, this is closely related to reason 1, but in addition to fixing problems or implementing feature requests, they take it upon themselves to set the bar even higher. (Think new digital oscillators in u-he Diva)
4) Their products are reasonably priced - Okay, this one is pretty hard to judge, I'll admit. The prices jump all over the place, but once a purchase is made, they don't nickel and dime you to death with paid updates every 6 months. They base their business model on the fact that NEW users actually will actually pay for their software rather than trying to stick it to the current customers by making them buy new versions because of the smallest functional changes.
5) No bullsh*t copy protection schemes. All of the companies listed above have very generous licensing terms. They don't assume everyone is a criminal user posting their serial numbers on torrent sites. If you disagree with this assessment, I understand. I don't want to argue about it here.
6) They allow license transfers, even for a fee. I completely absolutely wholeheartedly agree that they deserve compensation for their efforts, even for a license transfer. Having the option to transfer licenses is important to me. Very important. If I can't, I don't buy. Simple as that. I have made one exception to that rule, though. Cytomic's plugins are so awesome I would never resell them, and they're dirt cheap for their level of awesomeness. However, Andy has informed me via e-mail that his policy will change once he's implemented his own copy-protection scheme. Awesome.
That's pretty much all I can think of at this point. It's 1am here and I'm no longer thinking straight. Good night, folks.
-Sam
I agree that small vendors are often passionate about what they do. I read about Valhalla and how it came about.
I looked at Glue, and Cytomic have a good licensing thingy with serial burned into your file or installer or whatever. You can still use it if they go bust.
But even $100(when I looked last) is high for a single plugin these days. Look at Waves CLA Classic Compressors for $199 a couple of month a year - CLA-76, CLA-2A and CLA-3A, all legendary stuff - or the Glue.
Maintenance might be a weak spot then - if they don't exist anymore. But if they have x64 versions today - I would think there is a long while until x128 is around.
Kjaerhus Classic series were a very popular, and still is actually, free plugin bundle. Pretty good. He had this Gold series which were full price stuff - and he left the users high and dry when it didn't sell enough. I never looked for piracy stuff - if they were there and nobody bought because of it - or other reason. I think Cakewalk bundled some of his stuff like VX64 or something - made an OEM kind of. Torben is really respected for his work - but maybe not for quiting, some have had trouble reinstalling on new computers.
I have this exiting idea(for me) to reduce my dayjob to one day a week for a couple of years and try make music the rest - it's starting to get serious kind of. So I really look for reliable solutions that won't let me down. So far I ditched NI and Arturia in the process of getting rid of unreliable folks - if things does not work they better darn well fix it or they are out.
