Kjaerhus Synth coming up

[liars&ashes]

----Compared to free, anything seems expensive, and on the other end of the spectrum if you will, anything truly new and unique, especially these days, is most likely worth more than it costs.

Jeff

[Torben]

----Compared to free, anything seems expensive, and on the other end of the spectrum if you will, anything truly new and unique, especially these days, is most likely worth more than it costs.

Jeff

I would place Spectra in category 2 without an eye blink; no place else will you get that much power in such an easy usable product.

Torben

[Frippertronix]

Torben,

If you think you are loosing a lot of money off of cracks, can't you go to challenge/response copy protection? It's a pain, but it's not the kind of disaster that PACE is or the hassle of dongles.

Maybe it can be cracked, too, but it can't be true that everyone barely makes any money off of software or it would have dried up as an industry long ago. I'm talking all software, not just plugins. I understand a lot of it gets cracked, but someone is getting rich off of consumer software and they've found a way to make major profits. Bill Gates is certainly not poor.

And major companies do have profitable product lines, like Cubase, Sonar, etc. Tascam is a major hardware company and decided to get into native software (Gigastudio), as did Mackie (Tracktion, FinalMix). To my knowledge, all of these use challenge response or dongles.

If you don't sell that many plugins, maybe some of it has to do with marketing. All the major companies sell through retailers and ship things in boxes.

You market through things like KVR (from what I've seen), where there is immense competition for attention from relatively poor (non-pro) musicians who also have loads of decent freeware to rely on, so they are picky about what they pay for. And look at how many soft synthesizers there already are.

I trust that, among developers like yourself who have to market directly over the internet and don't rely on retailers and physical distribution chains, magazine advertising, and pro sponsorship, the profit margins are probably pretty thin, but the person who mentioned the NI plugin was talking about a different kind of company.

Do you have it on authority that NI barely makes any money?

[ugo]

If you think you are loosing a lot of money off of cracks, can't you go to challenge/response copy protection?

C/R protection doesnt stop software from getting cracked. (and neither do dongles.) it just adds more of a hassle for the dev and the users.

-ugo

[Frippertronix]

I'll keep my JX-3P thank you very much! Can't compare the sounds at all, these two synths just aren't the same thing. ("Steamed up analog junkie" here!)

Yup, it was $1300 in 1983.

That's nothing---the Sequential Six Trak went for about $1200 in 1984 and had one Curtis osc for each of its six voices, a scant two digit LED, and not even a scroll wheel. You have to type in values from a 10 key, even to call up presets.

[Frippertronix]

If you think you are loosing a lot of money off of cracks, can't you go to challenge/response copy protection?

C/R protection doesnt stop software from getting cracked. (and neither do dongles.) it just adds more of a hassle for the dev and the users.

-ugo

So have we concluded that the major box companies make no money? Does anyone have any direct evidence or information that supports this?

I understand there is no uncrackable copy protection scheme for native s/w, I'm just addressing Torben's position that developers barely make any money and it's due to cracks. Can this be truthfully said of the whole undustry? What of game developers, office app developers, Microsoft, Corel, etc. etc.?

Can't all of their software be cracked?

[Frippertronix]

Actually, I just realized we're coming dangerously close to one of the forbidden "Warez threads" so I hope I'm not forcing this thread to be blasted out of space.

[egbert]

Yeah look - nothing to see here people - lets move it on

C'mon - this is a new synth with plenty of interesting things about it - lets not drag it down into the warez/CP mire and get its pristine white GUI all gooey.

For a start, I think the fact that it can produce 250 partials and sound as bright and clear as it does at the level of CPU that it consumes is remarkable. I think some serious smarts went into this thing.

[ugo]

Yeah look - nothing to see here people - lets move it on

C'mon - this is a new synth with plenty of interesting things about it - lets not drag it down into the warez/CP mire and get its pristine white GUI all gooey.

For a start, I think the fact that it can produce 250 partials and sound as bright and clear as it does at the level of CPU that it consumes is remarkable. I think some serious smarts went into this thing.

agreed on all points.

-ugo

[munchkin]

There is no way of knowing whether cracks affect sales. It's all hypothesis. What we do know is that businesses keep accounts so it's possible to find out whether software is profitable or not. We don't even have to look at the books because it's obvious that many software companies are thriving inspite of cracks.

If cracks were such a problem then I doubt whether Microsoft could have become one of the richest companies in the world. Consequently, it always confounds me when the crack arguement is used to defend pricing. Software is now one of the most profitable industries on the planet.

Think about it, after initial investment of time and money the product no longer needs to be manufactured like material goods. After the initial development has been paid for it's largely all profit. There is the cost of advertising, the transaction process, support and possibly distribution of hard copies. But this is peanuts compared to shifting material goods.

I'm sure someone will try to prove how wrong my opinion is. So it'll be interesting to see the evidence.

[AdmiralQuality]

I appreciate your POV Torben, and again I didn't mean to suggest that your product in particular is overpriced, but rather the industry as a whole seems to overprice software. This is just my opinion of course, you're welcome to yours.

I know you're just the little guy, and aren't moving the amount of product that the big boys are, and I didn't mean to suggest that I actually believed you were getting rich off of it (s'why I made the winky face )

But I do think that we should all consider, that maybe if we cut our prices in half, we'd suddenly find we had 5 times more paying customers.

I understand your frustration with cracks too, but I really don't feel a lot of professional users use them. Yes, people who would have never bought your product are stealing it, but so what, they'd have never bought it anyway. If you're lucky maybe they'll talk kindly about it and convince someone else that it's worth buying... at least it turned into advertising.

I think (most) everyone doing music professionally wants legit software though and you lose relatively few of those potential sales to cracks. Again, you main even gain some due to the free advertising aspect.

Anyway, it's something to discuss and think about (for me anyway.) I'll be finding out a lot of this first hand shortly... ::shudders::

Thanks! I LOVE your free phaser by the way, one of the best phaser VSTs I've heard anywhere, free or pay! Its the first phaser I reach for now.

Take care and good luck with your products!

[AdmiralQuality]

That's nothing---the Sequential Six Trak went for about $1200 in 1984 and had one Curtis osc for each of its six voices, a scant two digit LED, and not even a scroll wheel. You have to type in values from a 10 key, even to call up presets.

"Heck yeah, it's hot!!!"

(Nobody's gonna get that quote. )

[Sascha Franck]

No worries, Frippertronix, nobody's defending warez or blaming copy protection yet.

What would really be interesting to know (but unfortunately we will *never* know) is whether a company such as, say, NI would make less money if they went for the serial number approach. Or if they went for a dongle (which would be kinda like the opposite approach). The same goes for Steinberg. How well would they sell if their products didn't use a dongle? Apparently not so good, considering that they went from serial-only to dongle-only with HALion. But IMO HALion 1-2 was just shit, so IMO it hasn't been the availability of cracks that put people away from buying it.
As said, we will never know. Interesting though.

Personally, I don't think "better" C/P will necessarily give you more sales.

The boxed version point is quite another thing worth thinking about. It seems that a lot of (comparable) boxed products are indeed selling better than their "internet only" contenders.

[Torben]

I do not expect people who are not in this business to understand the real threats in wares so I don’t think we should discuss them here.

Yeah look - nothing to see here people - lets move it on

C'mon - this is a new synth with plenty of interesting things about it - lets not drag it down into the warez/CP mire and get its pristine white GUI all gooey.

For a start, I think the fact that it can produce 250 partials and sound as bright and clear as it does at the level of CPU that it consumes is remarkable. I think some serious smarts went into this thing.

Thank you for your comment and you are quite right, lets discuss Spectra instead.

[munchkin]

No worries, Frippertronix, nobody's defending warez or blaming copy protection yet.

What would really be interesting to know (but unfortunately we will *never* know) is whether a company such as, say, NI would make less money if they went for the serial number approach. Or if they went for a dongle (which would be kinda like the opposite approach). The same goes for Steinberg. How well would they sell if their products didn't use a dongle? Apparently not so good, considering that they went from serial-only to dongle-only with HALion. But IMO HALion 1-2 was just shit, so IMO it hasn't been the availability of cracks that put people away from buying it.
As said, we will never know. Interesting though.

Personally, I don't think "better" C/P will necessarily give you more sales.

The boxed version point is quite another thing worth thinking about. It seems that a lot of (comparable) boxed products are indeed selling better than their "internet only" contenders.

I think the fact that NI brought out the highly successful Kontakt had more to do with the demise of Halion. NI was also very successful at licensing it's sampler to third parties unlike Steinberg. The industry doesn't like to admit that internal competition is very much a reason for the failure or success of a piece of software.

It's like coke never talks about pepsi and visa versa. Instead they talk about cheap imports or counterfeit goods affecting sales.