Why Do Plugin Designers Not Put Audio Samples On Their Sites?

[BertKoor]

To me an audio demo of a compressor or EQ is meaningless. Because it depends too much of what goes in and how the knobs are set. Too many variables. These are not "preset machines". So let the user demo it himself. Period.

[Guillaume Piolat]

I always provide sound demos, but it's easy to see why some companies do not:

- most likely the listener won't like the style of the demo song, because (say) he's really into EDM and the developer is 15 years older and made an oldschool goa trance track

- demo songs with few processing may sound too simple/unimpressive, and fully mastered demo song with myriads of effects may render the contribution of a plugin harder to decipher

- demos song are just enough information to make a quick decision not to test your product, because the intuitive mind will produce an opinion no matter how scarce the information.

[10bd01]

To me an audio demo of a compressor or EQ is meaningless. Because it depends too much of what goes in and how the knobs are set. Too many variables. These are not "preset machines". So let the user demo it himself. Period.

In that case I'd love to see a video - something else which is not entirely difficult to do in this day and age. I don't want to download, install, open up, spend a half hour figuring it out, use it, need to uninstall it, delete it, etc. - that's time, as a consumer, I don't want to invest in the first place if it's not necessary, and I don't feel in this day and age it is necessary to install software to understand whether or not it's for you.

We are completely equipped with video and audio communication now, there's no need in most cases to install someone's software (or even worse, the software installer you first need to install to install their software) to understand whether or not a product is for you. I'm sure if you had a full 15-minute video with sound and a walkthrough of the feature set you could get enough information to know whether a demo of an EQ is even warranted in the first place.

Still not buying it. But I do agree that an EQ would benefit from a combination of feature description/video and audio rather than just an audio sample alone.

BTW this is not even about "presets" necessarily, but just sound - hearing the plugin in action.

[10bd01]

I always provide sound demos, but it's easy to see why some companies do not:

- most likely the listener won't like the style of the demo song, because (say) he's really into EDM and the developer is 15 years older and made an oldschool goa trance track

- demo songs with few processing may sound too simple/unimpressive, and fully mastered demo song with myriads of effects may render the contribution of a plugin harder to decipher

- demos song are just enough information to make a quick decision not to test your product, because the intuitive mind will produce an opinion no matter how scarce the information.

Thanks for that perspective, Guillaume! Speaking for myself, the demos are just enough information to make the decision to test the product or not, either way.

I find these arguments (and others like them) the most convincing out of any I've seen thus far - that the developers are scared that if someone is not into a specific genre that that will be enough in itself to find somewhere else to go, or that the demo will somehow "short" the plugin. But again, I'm still not really that convinced. If someone makes EDM and wants a kick-ass reverb and goes to check out a reverb plug and all the samples are in classical, or the samples are sparse and don't give enough information, if they are looking for a reverb I imagine their attention will be on the reverb, not the genre or the type of sample. If there are any questions about it after hearing the sample, or if they think they might like it but would need to try it out with EDM first, then they can then download the demo. Or if they are like BertKoor they can just skip on the audio and dive straight for the demo.

But if a sample posted of a reverb already has artifacts or has a particular flavor to it that doesn't seem to intuitively jive with you, then I think it's better to save the person time and let them go on their way, rather than attempt to chain them into the whole process of installing, testing, assessing, uninstalling process for a plugin they may wish they never installed in the first place. In the first scenario they just move on, in the second scenario you have participated in wasting a bunch of their time for something they never even wanted, and now they will not only go elsewhere but will likely avoid you.

Thanks, Guillaume, for further clarifying the "what are they afraid of?" portion of the question.