crusher-X 8 released!

[freq]

Welcome to the ultimate upgrade, crusher-X 8! crusher-X 8 comes with a set of bold innovations and mind-blowing features!



crusher-X 8 introduces Grain Controlled Oscillators (GCOs)! Wait...what? I thought crusher-X was a live audio processing granular synthesizer, right? What's preventing us from adding an oscillator to each grain to create unique sonic in-prints while processing the live audio? Well, to explain it, think of hundreds of individual Oscillators or Sample-players that enjoy their crazy life "inside" each grain. With the new GCO Grain Modulation you can "color", "enrich", "destroy", "overlay" or "nibble" live drones with any sonic or tuned audio layer you can dream of, as well as can make them appear or disappear depending on the GCO Mix Modulation. Choose free defined Waveforms or even use audio files as a sample source! And more: Not only can you apply GCOs "on-top" - you can let the GCOs interfere with your audio-input via Ring- or FM-Modulation! Switch the modes thru the crusher-X morphing system. Unlimited fun!



Although it's pretty unlikely that you'll get bored by the "classic" crusher-X Modulations, but just in case you do, we have a solution for you: Apply the Speed, GCO Pitch and Filter Cut Modulation with the new Arpeggiator setting! Once selected it will marriage the selected Grain Modulation with the crusher-X micro-tonal scale system (of course, you know that you can use Scala files to fine-tune the grain creation in older versions too, right?):



As well, you can modify the current Scale by selecting the tune on your MIDI-Keyboard - take a look at the new indicators that visualize the pressed (and latched) MIDI-Keys and the resulting modulation:



Wait, wait: An Arpeggiator mode for Filter-Cut? Yes! You can micro-tune the way the Filter-Cut center frequency is modulated by selecting MIDI-Keys or even full scales.

Ok, need more? Take this: Length, Birth, Delay - you know that “standard” Grain Modulators, right? crusher-X 8 has come up with an additional idea to control the Grain Modulations: Offset Modulation - meaning you can now control and modulate the time between the point where grains are created and when their processes execute. With this new function you are under full control of the grain's complete life-cycle! e.g. - if you want to create sonic walls without unwanted "holes":



Ah! And...by the way...what about if you wanted to bind Grain Modulations to Envelope Followers? Let the grains dance on the amplitude of the life input signal! This wonderful feature was requested by the genius crusher-X community and they envisioned this brand new way to create an interactive grain control. And sure, even if that's not fancy enough for you, we now allow setting up the full curve of the new envelope follower, now having the ability to setup strange input-output relationships as you like (you know this technique probably already from the compressor spline):



Need a sample-player or free DCO waveform editing? The "tiny" DCO got some lifting:



Oh - "and there's one more thing" : crusher-X 8 can scale the UI (because you might own a high resolution screen). And it does it in a "smart" way that gives you more and more details on the controls the higher resolution the chosen scale is:



And of course you will get with crusher-X 8 a couple of boring "bug-fixes, embellishments, streamlining, adding, changing, engine optimization, new presets and plug-in parameters" - yada yada yada... (and if you are on Windows - take a second to look at the new MIDI-Thru routing feature for the stand-alone vstwrap version - it might help you to wire up your hardware and gear as it does for us). Read more about the crusher-X 8 features here.




Upgrade / crossgrade: 89,- € (incl. VAT - For outside EU residents VAT will be removed from card)

Full version: 249,- € (incl. VAT - For outside EU residents VAT will be removed from card)

Best
accSone

[SmartCat]

To ask your existing customers to pay €89 everytime you release an update for a single effect plugin is just insane and absolutely greedy.

[freq]

Well, it's not an update (we released 5 free updates 2018 and 3 free updates 2019) but a major feature upgrade. We invested a huge amount of energy and took a risk to invent these new ideas and we're depending on our customers contributions to keep this project running.

But in case you recently had purchased an update and/or feel cheated please contact us and we will find a solution.

Best
accSone

[SmartCat]

14 or 15 months ago I bought the full version x7.
7 months later I upgraded to x7.5 for €49. Now you want another €89 for a major feature update?!
Sorry, but nothing justifies such horrendous prices for again, the same plugin!
I would understand if I upgrade from v.4 or 5 to version 8 would cost €89 or even €99, but not from v7,5 to v8, in such a short period.
I won´t upgrade anymore and I won´t support you further, such upgrade price policy is beyond being fair to existing customers.

This plugin is more expensive than my main DAW with all its upgrades for several years.
You would by far have more customers if your prices were fair.

[simmo75]

14 or 15 months ago I bought the full version x7.
7 months later I upgraded to x7.5 for €49. Now you want another €89 for a major feature update?!
Sorry, but nothing justifies such horrendous prices for again, the same plugin!
I would understand if I upgrade from v.4 or 5 to version 8 would cost €89 or even €99, but not from v7,5 to v8, in such a short period.
I won´t upgrade anymore and I won´t support you further, such upgrade price policy is beyond being fair to existing customers.

This plugin is more expensive than my main DAW with all its upgrades for several years.
You would by far have more customers if your prices were fair.

This is spot on, it’s actually only been 7 months since the last paid update... it’s way too expensive!
Fantastic product but way too expensive and very disrespectful to customers.

[nordickvr]

While I pretty much understand the development of this plugin means a lot of work,
I think that a more graduated update/upgrade fee would be well appreciated from customers.
Especially the one following/supporting you since a while...

[dayjob]

it's a great plug in and more. really is. but for me personally it's a bit too expensive too often. if the updates cost half of what they are then it'd be something I'd have no trouble with. $90 every time just means i'll upgrade half as often.

congrats on the release though. the new features look/sound great

[Kiitwa]

I've had my eye on this product for a long time but unfortunately I can't justify the price. And I agree with those who own previous versions. The upgrade pricing needs to be changed. Too expensive in my opinion.

[freq]

Thanks every customer who invested in the upgrade already ! We reached since yesterday 70% of our seasonal goal and that gives us and the folks associated with crusher-X a lot of visibility for continuing this outstanding crusher-X journey!

Best
accSone

[Neon Breath]

Have to say, that Grain Controlled Oscillators and envelope follower is nuts

[simmo75]

Have to say, that Grain Controlled Oscillators and envelope follower is nuts

I haven’t tested yet but how do the grain controlled oscillators work?

[freq]

I haven’t tested yet but how do the grain controlled oscillators work?

Basically you have two new Grain Modulators: GCO Mix and GCO Pitch. Both can be modulate like the other Modulators. Think of an Oscillator or Sampler that is only alive during a grains lifetime. The GCO Mix modulation determines the balance between the grain's audio and the GCO. The GCO Pitch modulation determines the pitch or tuning of the GCO. You can choose different GCO waveforms or processing modes like Clean / Ring or FM Modulations. Together with the Arppegiator feature GCO can be used to add / interfere with harmonic or sonic layers on top of the live grains.

Find more around this in the crusher-X 8 user manual: https://www.accsone.com/images/accsone/ ... Manual.pdf



Best
accSone

[Teawhyelleare]

Thanks every customer who invested in the upgrade already ! We reached since yesterday 70% of our seasonal goal and that gives us and the folks associated with crusher-X a lot of visibility for continuing this outstanding crusher-X journey!

Best
accSone

Hey, congratulations! I am just learning about this software, and I am planning to demo it shortly. It looks exceptionally awesome, and may just be exactly what I have been searching for. I am happy to hear that you are meeting success.

More visibility would be great, as this would have been an instant buy for me at the intro price. I'll have to put it through it's paces before deciding on whether or not it's worth the list price for me. Anyway, thanks for creating such an amazing looking tool, and thanks for sharing it with us.

With that, did you really just ignore everyone else in the thread? For the record, these are additional factors that I, for one, am certainly taking in to account in my evaluation.

[freq]

Hi,

thanks for reminding us on our duty to reply to the previous comments. In the last weeks we took the input of these and other threads very seriously and discussed it with the development and support teams and the people around us. Here are our observations and thoughts on our pricing approach – to state it crisp and short: We’re no longer willing to contribute to the current price collapse of our industry, happy to explain - find here our rationale:

Two trends:

As the comments confirmed we observed in the last years a strong pricing trend in the plug-in industry: A lot of seasonal discounts flooding the market and come along like a “Black Friday” sales, “Cyber Week”, “Summer Sales”, “X-Max offer”, “February discount” sometimes in the range of “50% off” but also blatant offers like “90% off” popping up nearly daily. Platforms like KVR and other platforms are contributing with specialized newsletters to that trend. Some of these offers are automated generated, driven by specialized reselling services that acting like platforms to the plug-in vendors “to resell” their products (e.g. like the Xchange Market Platform). As this was a general industry trend we also joined these platforms with the goal to increase the visibility and make the product more accessible to more people. And sure, these platforms aim to become a gatekeeper to the reseller market. Currently margins claims of these channels are 40% and higher and until now we didn’t experience that they contributed with any additional value for the customers (e.g. like additional tutorials, product explanation or advanced support). On top of that, today’s possibility to shop across nations creates a challenge to deal with local tax obligations that makes it around 20% more expensive to sell a product in your local market. In the end – even if a vendor sells 10 times more items (more to expect is unreasonable as we’re acting in a niche market) – it makes it very hard to generate a sustainable business from these kinds of reselling channels. Luckily there are some honorable exceptions with local dealers where individual PMs bypasses these channels and are open for direct contracts!

There is another trend in the plug-in industry observable that might not be so obviously for consumers: Development SDKs like JUCE allows developers to rapidly create plug-ins that support a various kind of plug-in formats. These SDKs are very efficient and represent a very low-level entry barrier to start coding a plug-in. With an attractive entry level pricing these kinds of platforms are looking very helpful to start development though they come with the risk to be bound towards a single coding standard, an external driven life-cycle and an external provider has its own product strategy and business model that can easily tear your company dreams down in a long term. As much we like the idea of accessibility for developers to unleash plug-in dreams we can’t ignore that the market is also flooded with a lot of plug-ins of questionable value.

So, we are facing two strong factors that characterizes the today's plug-in market: Aggressive, sometimes automated generated pricing combined with a huge flooding of all kind of plug-ins with a questionable quality or business models behind. On the one hand this creates a competitive environment to the advantage of the customer, but it also comes with the burden of judging on the plug-ins value for the own artistic approach. We feel with our customers assuming to sort out these things are not fun and it probably becomes easily frustrating after a while to stay on top of that ongoing “price lottery” …

Our thoughts:

After intense internal discussion with our business partners and supportive customers we decided to move out of that “underbid circle” from crusher-X 8 on and change our pricing strategy towards a dedicated customer group: professional sound designers, composers and sophisticated musicians.

Why? Let’s explain our background first: We all come from a background of electronic music. Xenakis, Truax, Roads are our “heroes”. Composers like Ulrich Müller or Ludger Brümmer inspired the roots of crusher-X and we felt deeply responsible to carry the idea of granular synthesis to the next century. We are more than happy that more and more musicians and composers are interested to explore the world of sound design and advance, multichannel sound composing. How to support that trend in a serious, sustainable way? Here are some of our findings:

We aim to:

• Provide exceptional fast and personal customer support. Sort out problems interactively on the fly.
• Provide a very long-lasting and consistent product life-cycles and upgrade compatibility to ensure composers investment into the tool and their generated patches, working-time and data. crusher-X is in the market since more than 20 years.
• Delivery rock solid, live proven quality as the tool is often used in live situations
• Provide an extraordinary roadmap and create outstanding product values. We aim to grow together with our customers, their artistic demands and beyond
• Deliver cutting edge experiences, aim for high UX, invent new ways to do things – even beyond classical framework constrains if needed
• Inspire the serious sound design and electronic music industry

How to do that?

• Appreciate and feature our customers compositions, music and products
• Appreciate, keep and foster deep musical and digital signal processing knowledge about advanced audio synthesis in the company
• Provide an exceptionally trained support staff that knows about the customer needs as they are also practically using the tool as musicians or composers
• Provide a long-lasting beta test period before each release. Don’t commit on a release date, just make the product ready and then release
• Concentrate on a core product, named crusher-X
• Provide regular, free updates for release stabilization
• Be a part of the artistic community, inspire the industry, compose music and examples by our self, publish regular
• Provide accessibility for visual impaired / blind composers
• Allow accessibility for everyone by providing a non-time limited demo version that allows to explore the full sonic potential of the tool
• Keep our independents from investors, platforms and 3rd party tools to being able to decide always for the above values
• Take care of our self to stay able to provide the above in the next decades.

Conclusion:

These are our finding and yes, we need to finance them as we are also living in the real world and must secure our health, secure the peoples around us income and provide support for our children. With the experiences from the last years experiments we carefully calculated the current pricing scheme and decided to bet on a pricing strategy that stays in balance to the aimed product value as we stated above. And as we see our current metrics it seems that most of our customers appreciates the above values and ideas and continuously invest in our common progress and product quality. We believe that the decision for a plug-in that should provide core value to your music business and composition ideas is not trivial: It is not only a question of “short term desirability” or “buying impulse” but it is likely based on a carefully applied analysis and validation of investment you are willing to take versus the products value and the way the product will impact your own creativity, your own product or artistic result. We hope the above statements could provide some insights to our thought process and contributes to your understanding of our current pricing strategy.

Hopefully this might help you to find an answer to the question: “What I’m willing to invest to support our today's sound design ecosystem and what I’m gaining for my creativity while purchasing this cutting edge, high sustainable product?” We’re more than happy to discuss and develop our thoughts further with you and our customers.

Best
accSone

[evo2slo]

I appreciate that accSone is not following the recent discounting trends that devalue the hard work of developers.

That said, I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind not offering tiered upgrades for Crusher-X. Why should someone who recently upgraded to 7.5 pay the same amount to upgrade to 8 as a version 5 owner? Doesn't that devalue accSone's supporting customers?