Stacker by Sample Magic (XX- - Discontinued - -XX)

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Umm, pretty bad news.

I bought this thing a few months ago from Plugin Boutique, its last sale apparently since the product is no longer shown in their catalog. For 20eur (I think that's what I paid) it works well in Reaper, supports drag and drop (that's a killer feature for me) and sounds nice. My biggest problem with it is that each instance takes at least 10-15 seconds to load, while other plugins take at most 5 seconds.

To be honest I'm sorry about all of this because this plugin suits my use case very nicely, hopefully it works on W10 for a long time.

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Thanks Sharooz for letting us know what happened. :hug:
I'm sad because Stacker is exactly the plugin I was looking for and I was hoping it would live and be updated for a long time. In particular I would have liked to see the interface opening time reduced, a compressor and maybe another synth layer.
I love Stacker's gui and effects, it's all well thought out and musical (the distortion and drive work beautifully). :love:
Let's hope one day it will reappear on the market. :pray:

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Good and detailed update, but you should've definitely sent that out to all the owners of the plug-in (I'm one of them). It's never a good look when you hear about it being discontinued from second-hand sources.

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One of these freelance developers is the man behind Drumspillage.

If anyone has been following Drumspillage, its the same MO: no communication, no bug fixes, no sign of life at all.

I really like DrumSpillage, and had Stacker on my wish list, but there are too many options out there nowadays to let behavior like this slide - and to be clear I'm not necessarily pointing the finger at Sample Magic.

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Thanks Sharooz. Disappointed ... :(
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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Sharooz, can you give any assurance that the same thing will not happen to the rest of your plug-in portfolio?

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imrae wrote:Sharooz, can you give any assurance that the same thing will not happen to the rest of your plug-in portfolio?
I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but if all plugins are outsourced to free lancers who (1) can walk away from a project At will; (2) refuse to allow a new developer to refactor the code for optimization’s and feature additions, then, technically, the possibility for a Plugin to be “stacked” will always exist.

I for one, understand why companies don’t call out these developers - they’ll be blacklisted by the freelance community.

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Hi Imrae

Boost and Boost Pro have been built by Klevgrand and DiPole, both of whom are very active and building other plugins as we speak. DiPole are also working on optimising and updating Magic AB. Klip and Bloq are scripted and coded by a good friend and arguably one of the best Kontakt scripters in the business. Our DSP is licensed from Sinevibes - an incredible team whose components are found in many a leading manufacturer's wares. It's safe to say these guys are going nowhere and are fully committed to future development and updates on the products mentioned.

While more accessible, 'portable' tools like Juce make development and choosing programmers much less of a dark art, no system that I know of exists to ensure those programmers stay on the grid. In my experience, some of the world's most intelligent people are also the most unpredictable and an offer to work for a huge salary within a large corporation is a lure that most of these guys, especially if they're good, will eventually be tempted with or are unable to resist. Sadly that's a constant threat to us, and it's very difficult to compete, especially in a budget marketplace. I have no clarification if that's what happened to the Stacker guys, but it could be a reasonable guess. Some devs may just make a tidy sum from a couple months programming and disappear off to travel the world for a year without a care, and I've also seen that happen in the past too..

In my experience of re-coding projects, it's like asking a graphic designer, even builder or electrician to start work on someone else's foundations. It will almost certainly be criticised and flatly refused on the basis that "everything is wrong" and the only option given is to start from scratch. To start from scratch on Stacker would not work at its current price point (someone on the forum said they bought it for 20 euros). To retail Stacker at a higher price point would clearly not work either.

If anyone on the forum with experience in Juce, could under NDA, repurpose the code and update it to include some of the most common feature requests I would gladly pay that person for their time, see the project through beta and offer that beta for no extra cost to existing customers. I'd like to see Stacker back to life as much as anyone on the board. Hell, I'll even throw in an expanded drum library out of my own personal collection. It was and still is one of my favourite tools for drum processing. My email is below:

sharooz@samplemagic.com
Last edited by Sharooz on Thu May 17, 2018 6:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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^^^ now THIS is an amazing response.

Well done.

And now that you’ve mentioned whose coding your plugins, I’m going to give them another look. Love my KLEVGR and Sinevibes plugins.

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Thank you. @perpetual3

Artemiy Sinevibes does amazing things and his plugins are absolutely brilliant. It's an honour to work with him and every day he picks up detail that the average mind would skim on or miss entirely. It's an honour to distribute his range too. Klevgrand too are a great team whose iOS stuff in particular I love.

To answer your earlier point, developers don't usually simply abandon a project midway (that's why we agree to pay them in milestones). The obvious advantage of working for a corporation vs working for an independent publisher like us, is that you can do the work, quit at any point and not be responsible for what happens in the aftermath or extended life of the project. The rest of your team can take over. We as the publisher have the responsibility to pick reliable contractors who won't do that, however we can't enforce contracts that make it the responsibility of a developer for the perpetual lifecyle of a product to ensure its upkeep. It's just not the 'done' thing in the freelance community as far as I'm aware.

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Sharooz wrote:Hi Imrae

Boost and Boost Pro have been built by Klevgrand and DiPole, both of whom are very active and building other plugins as we speak.
So Boost was built by Klevegrand and Boost Pro by DiPole??? That might explain why I preferred the original Boost when demoing the 2.

Also, it surprises me that you would enter into a contract with a programmer that allows them to stop you from "repurposing" the original code if they decide not to support the plugin. The agreement should be clearly structured so that if the programmer fails to or is unable to adequately support and update the software that they continue to get paid for their code but that they cannot legally stop you from continuing development. That's not just common sense, that's looking out for your customer's interests in addition to your own. Entering into anything short of that is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and is extremely poor judgement on the part of Sample Magic that exposes your customers to significant risk. Which is what appears to have happened here. If you are simply licensing the tech from the programmer there must also be ways to better protect your customers from this. The "Sample Magic is not responsible for these circumstances" excuse is merely an attempt to deflect your liability. If you don't make it right for your customers either through refunds or crediting their accounts for other SM purchases, I suspect you've left yourselves vulnerable to litigation. Fortunately for Sample Magic, you probably didn't sell enough copies of Stacker to make a Class Action suit worth it to a law firm specializing in such cases. Why anyone should want to trust Sample Magic again by buying your products, is whole other kettle of fish. I certainly will not.

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I really hope Stacker gets revived because it's got so much potential. Would pay for an update.

Please don't remove access to existing installers, by the way. My laptop harddrive crashed and I'm in the process of migrating.

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It should never have been released in the first place, due to its problems with CPU spikes (sometimes reaching above 100%, even when playback is not engaged). There was never a serious ambition to fix them.

If it wasn´t for the CPU problems, it would probably be the most useful percussion VST out there IMHO. Such potential.

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Email I sent to support@samplemagic.zendesk.com June 22 2017

Stacker VST 64 Windows 10 Reaper i7 4hgz 64GB Hi there. I purchased Stacker earlier today and have noticed that the source "Velocity" does not work in the mod matrix. By this I mean that Stacker will not adjust it's target's setting depending upon the velocity of the note it receives. No problem using a macro instead to adjust the target's settings but switch the source back from macro to velocity and the target's settings no longer respond to velocity changes.


Reply from Tom Bailey (Sample Magic) June 22 2017

I have tested this issue on my machine (Mac OSX - Logic Pro X) and I too have found that the velocity in the mod matrix does not respond. I have redirected your query to my colleague Matt, who will be best equipped to deal with this issue.


Email I sent to support@samplemagic.zendesk.com June 22 2017

Hi Tom. Me again. The Impulse EQ Gain (appears as RV EQ GAIN in the MOD MATRIX) does not respond to the Macro dials when they are selected as a source. ...................... I then included various ideas as to how to improve this plugin which are not relevant here......


Reply from Matt Fudge (Sample Magic) June 22 2017

Thanks for the replies regarding Stacker!

Glad to hear you are enjoying the plugin and these are certainly all great suggestions which we will consider for a future update. If you have any other questions or comments feel free to let us know :)



No further response back and no further updates :bang: Was I the only one to notice these bugs? Surely others must have noticed velocity doesn't work in the mod matrix and, due to the importance of it, contacted Sample Magic :?
Windows 10. Asus X99-Pro i7 6950X 10 Core 3GHz (Overclocked to 3.5GHz). Corsair DDR4 64GB Vengeance LPX 2400MHz. RME RayDAT. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. UAD2 Quad+Octo. Reaper. A couple of plugins.

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Hello, Stacker developer Stephen here.

None of the developers ‘walked away’ from the Stacker project.

During the course of the Stacker project I had little/no direct contact with Sample Magic. I was paid for Stacker (eventually) by two separate parties. It is my understanding that the code is co-owned by SM and the other party. There is clearly a disconnect between these parties.

The reason Sample Magic can’t just give the code to another development team is because they don’t own the code outright. Not because we encrypted the code and buried it on a remote island.

None of the code is licensed from anyone else. None of the developers disappeared or ran off to giant corporations for 6 figure salaries. The time and effort that went into Stacker was significant to say the least. Perhaps it was too significant given the resources available.

I wouldn’t normally reply but I find some of the discussion here incredibly misleading, manipulative even, so I thought I’d chime in.

Life goes on..

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