Samplitude Pro X9?

[lfm]

So I'm a gonner on Samp and will uninstall as soon as I have the computer up again.
No better than €165 for being current on ProX8.

[jens]

Looking at the "onboarding" offer from BorisFX, we can conclude they have no idea what the current prices and upgrade discounts of other DAWs are!

No, evil company is evil.


They apparently try to force ALL current license owners into upgrading at the price they dictate; once the offer is expired there seems to be no way to ever upgrade in the future.

Someone over at Gearspace mentioned that their license states that this always happens after 36months (from the time of purchase) and it seems that decided that the 36 months are over for any Magix customer in September.

Why would I ever want to do any business with a company like this?

They may get lost.

[telecharge]

They may get lost.

I hope they do. I immediately unsubscribed after clicking through their email.

They can stuff their CrumplePop too.

[scatman84]

Looking at the "onboarding" offer from BorisFX, we can conclude they have no idea what the current prices and upgrade discounts of other DAWs are!

No, evil company is evil.


They apparently try to force ALL current license owners into upgrading at the price they dictate; once the offer is expired there seems to be no way to ever upgrade in the future.

Someone over at Gearspace mentioned that their license states that this always happens after 36months (from the time of purchase) and it seems that decided that the 36 months are over for any Magix customer in September.

Why would I ever want to do any business with a company like this?

They may get lost.

I really hope they read all these threads and comments so they get an idea how their loyal users feel!!

[lfm]

They apparently try to force ALL current license owners into upgrading at the price they dictate; once the offer is expired there seems to be no way to ever upgrade in the future.

I don't believe that is the final upgrade offer, just an ordinary way sales campaigns work.
- limited time offer to make everybody jump at it now and not later

Avid tried that stunt with ProTools saying either you reenter annually or you have to buy new license.
- and their position was much stronger on the market
- yet they had to fold on that

10 years ago I paid €300 for ProX2, and tried for couple of months to use it.
- crashed silly with Waves stuff, even scanning plugins
- after multiple remote sessions with Waves they gave up too
- and Waves removed Samp supporting Waves VST3, and revert to VST only

Running Reaper before I felt Samp could be a low threshold swap in that Reaper support EDL format for projects and Samp do EDL import.
- a mistake

A year ago I felt €100 to upgrade to ProX8, to have a look.
- all stable and fine and liked most of it
- but a couple of showstoppers, I would not start any new projects in Samp

So Magix lost at least 8 upgrades from me due to bugs.

So no way after €400 and not been able to use
- I would not pay another €165 to await possible fixes of things that stop me using it.
- I would not enjoy working in Samp as it is now

After Magix put one discount period after another for 18 months or so on ProX8
- BorisFX turns up and think they suddenly will have Samp selling full price, just about.
- seriously higher price than Magix did last year at any time????
- and being all rigid on the pricing model ???

Samp is dead in the water, nothing you invest more into.


That a software does not sell does not mean it's bad
- Cakewalk/Sonar is another example of the opposite, it's really good
- and yet Roland and Gibson got rid of it

Bad management of some sort, I think....one tip, don't beat up your existing user base....

[jens]

A year ago I felt €100 to upgrade to ProX8, to have a look.
- all stable and fine and liked most of it
- but a couple of showstoppers, I would not start any new projects in Samp

It's almost the same for me. I came from X4 and paid more (Suite) but other than that it's
exactly my situation. There's a whole lot to like about X8 but some showstoppers make it
in the long run (with somewhat more developed projects) unpleasant to work with.

So BorisFX would need to earn my trust and willingness to support them with money (and also with good word) first and I'd have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and hand over some reasonable sum to them but they started this off completely the wrong way and already killed off what good will I had.

And they certainly need us more than we need them.

[scatman84]

I'll try one more thing then, I'll create a ticket and provide them links of KVR & Gearspace threads about this.

I'll sincerely ask them to go through them carefully. Let's hope they realize how they should apporach ahead! Fingers crossed!

[jens]

The more I think about it the more I am convinced that this change of ownership was really a bad move by Magix:


1) Music Maker is based on Samplitude tech. Obviously they must have made some kind of deal with BorisFX, but just keeping Samplitude would certainly have kept things easier for them; both from a business and coding perspective.

2) part of how they got into trouble in the first place was them buying the Sonic Foundry stuff from Sony. And while they have a good thing going with Vegas, they obviously have no real idea what to do with Sound Forge and even less with Acid (which they put some effort into bringing it up to date at some point but apparently have stopped development altogether in the meantime). These two they however kept. (Okay, maybe nobody wanted them, because the code-base is just too ancient, who knows.)

3) They obviously had/have the right to bundle new version of Spectralayers with their own software, which was (from some point on) always a part of Samplitude Suite/Sequoia, but that doesn't apply to BorisFX, who now saw the requirement to replace Sepctralayers with Acustica Premium, which mosts probably causes increased costs for BorisFX which again they have to pass on to the customer, which again a) makes the product a whole lot less attractive but b) also means the loyal customer either looses access to the newest version of the tool they're used to or they have to pay - in addition - for the Spectralayers update i.e. the customer pays more twice; again making the product harder to sell for BorisFX.

4) BorisFX comes from the pro-video market, which is wholly different thing. They have zero expertise yet when it comes to the audio market. This again is an additional hurdle in fight for survival of the Samplitude development.

[Danilo Villanova]

The pricing shows they don't have any confidence the software will manage to attract new users and they just want to milk the existing user base to the last penny.

[Danilo Villanova]

The pricing shows they don't have any confidence the software will manage to attract new users and they just want to milk the existing user base to the last penny. That's what they paid for and that's what they're getting.

[jens]

I just had a look at the demo now. Samplitude 2025 is a really great maintenance update. They fixed a lot of stuff and improved the performance, so that Samplitude now doesn't take ages to load anymore and doesn't use too much memory anymore either.

Dolby Atmos aside (which is only in the Suite anyway, extremely limited scope aside) there's really not that much at all that I'd seriously consider a new feature - mainly just lots and lots of direly needed improvements. If they should ask any money at all for this is pretty debatable, I would say.

But then again that was a free update for X8 that was rather generous and developers don't work for free either way, so I understand, but:

how do you make people stick with you? How do you attract new customers, improve your reputation? How do you get the loyalty of your customers? By having a huuuuge list of bug-fixes and a rather small list of new features and then asking BIG money for it? Certainly not.

I should really let this go at this point, but then again I have been patiently waiting a looooong time for this update and was really positive, optimistic and supportive throughout. So this totally rubs me the wrong way.

[lfm]

how do you make people stick with you? How do you attract new customers, improve your reputation? How do you get the loyalty of your customers?

That's the million dollar question probably!

How much is Branding to do with it?
- that's the job of management together with marketing

If you come in the low price category it's hard to sell to professionals or those that can afford more expensive products.

I come think how Tesla seem to be exclusive
- but not that it has a history or rally or racing or other events that would make it withstand durability in what they learned for standard series cars in production
- it's just expensive due to technology used and a battery that cost big part of product

Is a Tesla any good with protecting driver and passengers in a crash?
- I don't know, they just appeal to some since expensive and some think they save the planet or something
- are they doing tests with dummies in developing protection for passengers?

To me Tesla is not a premium brand to me at all, but for some it is.
- no comparison with the experience and duration like BMW or Merc IMO

Volvo made their name and Branded on security as a big part.
- crash dummies and security belts and whatnot

Even Avid management and marketing thought as "industry standard" they can charge anything
- and were they wrong!!!

By having a huuuuge list of bug-fixes and a rather small list of new features and then asking BIG money for it? Certainly not.

Why not bugfixes?
- quite a lot of users complain that long time reported bugs are still there!!!

New features - how much is there we really still need?
- ask 100 people and you get more than 100 suggestions
- so hard for management to decide what features to add unless communicating with user base
- to optimize a single feature in each post and let people vote
- at least you optimize on the information you got

Cakewalk during Gibson years had this fenomenal update frequency every month with list of bug fixes and something improved in between as well.
- if this does not work, what would?
- for some reason it did not work, so Gibson ditched them

I think Cake did a tremendous job, with as many fixes a month that Cubase had for a year update they charged more for.
- something like 20-50 fixes listed every month
- and it was $99 a year for my Artist version.

It's beyond me why it didn't work well for them?

Roland helped spread Sonar in their distribution channels the years they had it under their wing. So more widely spread.
- in purchasing various software they ask what daw you used
- before Roland you had to enter Sonar under "other"
- Sonar became an option by itself in quite a few more places
- more widely recognized as a major daw

So maybe it's about marketing and a big wallet to do that.

About BorisFX looking at post production and Sequoia could make sense, and then rest with Samp and MusicStudio comes with the territory.
- getting Magix people they can make audio plugins for NLE software like Premiere
- maybe there are synergy effects getting Magix audio stuff
- and probably adapt some video effects into Sequoia to sell more

So does not look that far fetched BorisFX did a good deal.

I'm not sure what makes post production features so much more expensive looking at Sequoia and Nuendo, but must be something.

But I am detached from the idea to upgrade Samp further. BorisFX are probably happy to get the core user base over and will run with that.
- it will take years until my concerns are addressed anyway
- so no way I pay €165 a couple of times hoping for that

I stopped updates on Windows 11 and my Sonar runs fine as is, and I can live with oddities there. Nothing major.
- biggest risk of getting in trouble seem to be windows updates themselves
- I can't believe the last things I heard that SSDs are trashed under some circumstances
- was is 24H2 that had audio issues over usb or something

As they say, if it works - don't fix it.

[scatman84]

As a final try, I created a ticket on BorisFX and gave them links to this thread and the thread on Gearspace! I requested them to go through these threads so they get an idea of how loyal users are feeling and how they would get on board, given good upgrade prices.

Let's see, fingers crossed! Hope for the best!

[scatman84]

As a final try, I created a ticket on BorisFX and gave them links to this thread and the thread on Gearspace! I requested them to go through these threads so they get an idea of how loyal users are feeling and how they would get on board, given good upgrade prices.

Let's see, fingers crossed! Hope for the best!

Update -
Despite giving them the links of these threads on KVR & Gearspace, they're not budging!

Following is their response -
"Dear Customer,

Thank you for your interest and loyalty. Since this is a recently released version with many new features, functions, and content, we cannot currently offer you a special price. You can use your old serial number from the previous version to receive the regular upgrade price.

With kind regards
Lukas Jonscher
Boris FX Support"

[Seaside Music]

the bad:

Boris seems inflexible on pricing at this point and it is a steep jump especially for the crew using Pro X8 Suite.
CD burning in Samplitude was removed for license reasons. A well liked/used feature by the base.
Only 1 license available now instead of the previous 2.
Boris to this point has not dispatched any reps or developers into the Samplitude forum to meet the base and field questions. does not inspire much hope in regular, hands-on support from them.
Forced updates..kinda. If you miss an update period, you'll likely pay more the next time, and a 36 month limit that will revert you to new customer pricing status if you don't keep up.

the good:

Samplitude 2025 is running great. faster, cleaner, most stable feeling release ever, and I go back 3 decades with it.
Bundled Acon Acoustica is an excellent addition and includes the premium version rather the the basic kit.
BorisFX communicates that they are super committed to fast and solid development for the platform. Promise regular, solid bugfix and feature updates.

Can they offer a level of support and loyalty perks that will satisfy the base?
Can they successfully price and market this to attract new users and build more brand awareness?

going to be hard the way they are starting out.