Samplitude 9 announced !!!

[terry]

Two things I don't like about Magix and Samplitude:
1. Their upgrade pricing policy - the way they shit on faithful existing clients, but give a better deal to new customers or cross-graders.
2. The Samplitude dev team at Magix are painfully slow to address even small bugs - the Samp dev team spend most of their time working on all Magix' much cheaper apps- video/photo/music etc. at the expense of Samplitude/Sequoia.

I am not giving any more money to Magix.

Cheers

[siriusbliss]

seeya...

Good luck.

Greg

[sascha]

Two things I don't like about Magix and Samplitude:
1. Their upgrade pricing policy - the way they shit on faithful existing clients, but give a better deal to new customers or cross-graders.
2. The Samplitude dev team at Magix are painfully slow to address even small bugs - the Samp dev team spend most of their time working on all Magix' much cheaper apps- video/photo/music etc. at the expense of Samplitude/Sequoia.

I am not giving any more money to Magix.

Cheers

Terry, of course it's your choice to whom you give your money or not. You spread the word amongst various forums so I guess the world already knows your point of view... well then, it's a free world...

Let me just ask: how does our pricing policy differ from other hosts in the market? And I don't mean free stuff or semi-pro software. We have thousands of faithful and happy custumers that actually make a living of Sam & Sequoia. Even the latter is a product you encounter at various broadcast stations and mastering facilities and those people don't complain since they get what they want and always gave us productive feedback over the past 10 years. And they always gave us hell when something didn't work and we listened... see when a Sequoia client jumps off, it's quite a bunch of money and reputation we'd lose since the broadcast market is highly based on reputation and long-term decisions.

The fact that most people at kvr are more into music as hobbyists doesn't fit seemlessly to a product such as Sequoia. Hardly anyone knows it here, actually. We both know Samplitude is a stripped-down version of Seq, development always takes place on the Seq platform (as software engineering is modular). Many functions in Samplitude therefore might still serve the broadcast /postpro market better than a hobby musician (including me), but a lot of production techniques are interchangeable and a musician can benefit from features that are pretty pricy elsewhere.
Summing up, Samplitude's got tons of features that actually justify the price tag. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about
If you've got Sam 8 pro and buy an upgrade to V9, I seriously doubt that 249,- is way too high for what we've put into it. But as said, it's your choice.

A word on development speed: we don't have a policy to spawn daily or weekly updates. We compile updates when the time is right. Perhaps not every annoying bug can be addressed directly without ripping code apart elsewhere. It might be easy to fix bugs on a lean sample editor but Samplitude & Sequoia are huge beasts as of today.

It was perhaps me on the Sam forum saying we've still got other tasks to do as well. But you're mixing something up. None of us in the team is involved in photo or video products (which would be ridiculous by the way). The entire pro audio development staff (which is basically Volker, Frank (the midi guy), Jörg, Tom, 3 dsp guys & me) is only working on Sam, Sequoia, MusicMaker and MusicStudio. As you surely know, all these products are based on the same code. So even the work for MusicMaker directly serves Sequoia and vice versa. Imagine, sometimes cheap customer products can teach something as everyday life easily shows ... just because one considers himself as 'pro' doesn't necessarily mean things should be complicated...

We've just made the huge step and developed the hybrid engine for V9. It was a logical and necessary thing for us to rewrite parts of the interiour to keep up with current demands and today's production standards. Luckily, a lot of old issues could be buried along way. Our beta testers put the stability in question at first but even the most sceptical ones are happy now (as far as I know). V9 willl be the most stable and reliable Sam/Seq ever.
But even more important: we've now got a platform that is much easier to expand and maintain than in the past. This also reduces response time, of course.

We do take user feedback for serious. Especially Volker, Frank & Jörg worked their bottoms off the past months and they really came up with great results. Again, those results are only possible if we get constructive feedback from customers, their demands and whatever. You are still invited to take part.

Cheers,
Sascha

[5.1]

And they always gave us hell when something didn't work and we listened... see when a Sequoia client jumps off, it's quite a bunch of money and reputation we'd lose since the broadcast market is highly based on reputation and long-term decisions.

Hi Sascha,

A little constructive feedback from a Samplitude 8 owner who won't be upgrading to v9.

There are two things I think Magix could do immediately to raise the profile of Samplitude:

1. Open up the User Forum.

The fact that the User Forum is only open to registered owners of Samplitude (and then only owners of v7 or above, I believe) implies that Magix are not comfortable having open discussions about their products. There is a lot of discussion in the User Forum that the general public never get to see, and a lot of new user questions would probably be willingly answered by the experienced users who frequent the forum.

2. Improve the Documentation.

When I bought Samplitude I would have benefited GREATLY from a published list of hardware that was guaranteed to work with Samplitude. To the best of my knowledge this list still isn't available, either inside the forum or outside. I believe the Manuals are in the process of being updated, so it would be great if Magix could publish a list of supported hardware at the same time.

I bought Samplitude because I believed at the time that it was the absolute best audio editing program for PC outside of a dedicated DAW. I still believe it is a great piece of software, and, based on your Digital Fish Phones work I'm sure your contributions will be outstanding.

I won't be upgrading to v9 because I had a bad experience with Magix support (via email and the forum) after I bought v9. I was constantly told that I had a "hardware problem", so I ended up spending a lot of money buying new hardware to try and resolve a problem that turned out to be the software (the problem was fixed in 8.3). Maybe I didn't get listened to because I had bought Samplitude and not Sequoia

This experience forced me to look elsewhere, and I ended up getting heavily involved with the development of REAPER. In 9 short months REAPER has undergone an incredibly fast development process, largely based on the fact that the developers are willing to listen to user feedback. Their forum, their software bugs and successes are open for all to see. It's a great environment, and one that Magix could learn something from.

Cheers,

Malcolm.

[sascha]

Hi Malcolm,

1. Open up the User Forum.

That's why we run the 'newcomer' forum. It's open for everyone, be it a registered customer or someone with pure interest. I can't comment on the decision to run the regular forums for a closed audience only, but to my knowledge it already costed the people in command more than a few hours of talking... but that's not up to me. We developers jump into the newcomer forum from time to time, at least we try to. The new forum software made access easier for everyone, especially the newcomer forum. It's now accessible to search engines and more comfortable to use. In the past, it was pretty neglected, got a different URL and so it took us us extra efforts. We are currently putting resources together such as forum software where we ran different servers at different physical locations before (whith different people involved). This messed things up big time.
Just be assured we devs don't care whether a question comes up in the newcomer forum or in the regular one.

2. Improve the Documentation.

That's where we all feel the same. We've done a lot in the past year to improve this. Michael (the guy who takes care about the new Sam website) has also become the chief technical editor and he's been working day & night to re-write the whole thing. Surely there are others involved as well and we've got new staff for that. Good technical writers are a godsend, especially when it comes to translations and different sources & sketches. I think the new doc is way better than the one from V8. Not only language-wise, but also in terms of structure.

I won't be upgrading to v9 because I had a bad experience with Magix support (via email and the forum) after I bought v9. I was constantly told that I had a "hardware problem", so I ended up spending a lot of money buying new hardware to try and resolve a problem that turned out to be the software (the problem was fixed in 8.3). Maybe I didn't get listened to because I had bought Samplitude and not Sequoia

I really feel sad to hear you apparently wasted money. Bummer. All I can say is we won't ever make a difference whether a user bought Sam Master or Sequoia in terms of support (we get paid anyway ). Most of the time we don't even want to know what the user's bought (again: the same code base...), often the version no. is sufficient to sort things out.
Sometimes things might be hard to track or even reproduce. It's natural that bugs can be addressed earlier if more users encounter them and we can reproduce them reliably. But some things just pop up under rare occasions or conditions beyond our immediate control.
I'm not into the new engine that much but I suppose it will be less prone to HW issues. At least it should make error tracking easier.

In my opinion, the reaper story doesn't compare. I'm sure when Titus spawned Sam v1 in '93, the dev speed was quite compareable. Okay, the internet wasn't there to spread the word... When you start with a new software project, the first feature sets / versions always appear pretty fast. But at some point things get saturated and devs takes on much slowlier. The app gets more complicated, you've got more internal links to think of, more dependencies etc. Think of popular open-source projects... suddenly a lot of people shout into different directions, curious things happen, people jump off, others come along etc....

It's a great environment, and one that Magix could learn something from.

Actually, the reaper dev learned from Samplitude, Saw, ProTools etc., not vice versa! Look at the concepts Okay, the guy avoided making mistakes the 'pioneers' once made, but that's pretty natural... when you're not the first, you can always claim to make things better. See VST vs. AU. Everybody disses VST, but where was Apple in '96?

I really appreciate the programmer's effort and attitude and always read the improvements with great interest, but I tell you, there comes the day when the guy wants his life back
And please - while you're into it - someone give 'em a talented interface guy. People, learn from us, don't let the devs do the GUI design...

[terry]

And please - while you're into it - someone give 'em a talented interface guy. People, learn from us, don't let the devs do the GUI design...

Regarding the Reaper GUI, I couldn't agree more. So at least one thing we agree upon then.


Regards,

Terry

[terry]

You spread the word amongst various forums so I guess the world already knows your point of view... well then, it's a free world...

Sascha,

I wouldn't characterise a total of two posts - one on Reaper plus one post here - as a strong effort to "spread the word"

Let me just ask: how does our pricing policy differ from other hosts in the market? And I don't mean free stuff or semi-pro software.

Why do you ask?

Are you actually saying that Magix' pricing policy must be OK, because some other companies have a similar policy?
Does the fact that some people do 'bad things', make it OK for others to do the same?

Let's look at some examples of Magix pricing policy.
Regarding the upgrade costs for Samplitude pro:

upgrade from v.7 to v.8 costs 249 Euros, upgrade from v.8 to v.9 costs 249 Euros, Total= 498 Euros.
BUT upgrade v.7 to v.9 costs 599 Euros, Magix is charging an extra 100 Euros for nothing! That's why I said Magix is "shitting on thier faithful clients"

Same thing regarding v.8 SE. People who got a free copy of Samp v.8 SE, (or purchased from Magix for 48 Euros) could then upgrade to the full Pro version at a huge $400 discount, but Magix continued to charge the full price to any unsuspecting new customer. This is not fair to people who have just paid the full price.

A word on development speed: we don't have a policy to spawn daily or weekly updates. We compile updates when the time is right.

When the time is right for whom? The time for fixing bugs is never too soon... But you seem to be saying that it's OK to be slow, because that's Magix' policy.

In other words: " It's our policy to NOT FIX BUGS until it suits us "

It was perhaps me on the Sam forum saying we've still got other tasks to do as well. But you're mixing something up. None of us in the team is involved in photo or video products (which would be ridiculous by the way).

I'm not mixing things up, I'm just repeating what you told me in the Samp forum.

Your exact words: " We are everything that defines a large IT company and we have different ways, strategies and user bases to place our products (off- & online). We do not only serve the musicians market.
And we do not develop a single application. In fact, we have several hundreds meanwhile (literally), so each of us has to focus on several things at once... We do this for a living, many of us have families and *deserve* a steady income ..."

So, that's what you told me on the Samplitude forum, Sascha.

I love the last bit about "deserve a steady income..."
I think it says a lot.



Regards,

Terry

[bmanic]

All I can say is, touché.

- bManic

[Pipelineaudio]

Actually, the reaper dev learned from Samplitude, Saw, ProTools etc., not vice versa! Look at the concepts

I would say Vegas, errrr look at the concepts

Dont be too quick to pat yourself on the back there

[sascha]

upgrade from v.7 to v.8 costs 249 Euros, upgrade from v.8 to v.9 costs 249 Euros, Total= 498 Euros.
BUT upgrade v.7 to v.9 costs 599 Euros, Magix is charging an extra 100 Euros for nothing! That's why I said Magix is "shitting on thier faithful clients"

Between v7 and v8 lies 2 years. The same period between v8 and v9 currently. so that's 599 for 4 years. Maybe Sam for rent is a better choice, don't know. I don't make the prices.

Same thing regarding v.8 SE. People who got a free copy of Samp v.8 SE, (or purchased from Magix for 48 Euros) could then upgrade to the full Pro version at a huge $400 discount, but Magix continued to charge the full price to any unsuspecting new customer. This is not fair to people who have just paid the full price.

I agree on that to some point. Just keep in mind that it's *us* actually paying the users for SE. We don't earn much from that since we won't expect to sell as many copies as e.g. MuiscMaker or MusiStudio to justify the low price. It's just to gain more users (and I suppose that's a legitimate affair).

A word on development speed: we don't have a policy to spawn daily or weekly updates. We compile updates when the time is right.

When the time is right for whom? The time for fixing bugs is never too soon... But you seem to be saying that it's OK to be slow, because that's Magix' policy.

In other words: " It's our policy to NOT FIX BUGS until it suits us "

No. I was trying to say, we don't see much use to spread a new version whenever small fixes take place. Sam & Seq consist of a complex folder & file structure so that installers are needed, including quite a bunch of additional logistics. The majority of our long-term customers agree on the decision to place update when as many fixes are included. You may point to Reaper here but I point to Sequoia: it's a multi-user DAW that's often not installed by administrators and quite often users of broadcast facilities aren't allowed to install any software on their own.
But as said, the best thing is to avoid bugs in the first place and that's what we are currently concentrating on with the new engine.

I love the last bit about "deserve a steady income..."
I think it says a lot.

I can't think of anything wrong about it. I know how it feels not to have a steady income. And it's been a few times I bought products from companies that suddenly went out of business because of naive/aggressive product pricing or burning their money elsewhere. Believe me, it all comes back to the user in some way. You are invited to read the stock brochures or our stock reports. It's on the web site. You'll see we invest quite a bunch in R&D currently. We don't buy houses, hotels, pools, Ferraris, prostitutes or whatever... my god.

[terry]

upgrade from v.7 to v.8 costs 249 Euros, upgrade from v.8 to v.9 costs 249 Euros, Total= 498 Euros.
BUT upgrade v.7 to v.9 costs 599 Euros, Magix is charging an extra 100 Euros for nothing! That's why I said Magix is "shitting on thier faithful clients"

Between v7 and v8 lies 2 years. The same period between v8 and v9 currently. so that's 599 for 4 years...

Sascha,
You are either missing the point or avoiding the question which it poses.
Why does Magix charge an 'extra' 100 Euros on top of the upgrade price from v.7 to v.9 ?
i.e. 599 Euros instead of 498 Euros?

I personally think it's unfair.
If you don't know why Magix has this policy, maybe you should ask your boss, and let us know...

Regards,

Terry

[5.1]

That's why we run the 'newcomer' forum. It's open for everyone, be it a registered customer or someone with pure interest.

Yeah, I know. The Newcomer Forum and the email tech support from Magix was great - right up until I made a purchase. It was only after I'd parted with my money that support stopped. I don't know if things have changed recently in the Registered Users forum, but the devs were rarely seen when I was having trouble (about a year ago).

The new forum software made access easier for everyone, especially the newcomer forum. It's now accessible to search engines and more comfortable to use.

I take it that it's only the Newcomer Forum that's now accessible to search engines?

That's where we all feel the same. We've done a lot in the past year to improve this. Michael (the guy who takes care about the new Sam website) has also become the chief technical editor and he's been working day & night to re-write the whole thing. Surely there are others involved as well and we've got new staff for that. Good technical writers are a godsend, especially when it comes to translations and different sources & sketches. I think the new doc is way better than the one from V8. Not only language-wise, but also in terms of structure.

Great news, and my condolences to "Michael". He has a big job ahead of him! Is the "new doc" available anywhere on the Magix website?

I really feel sad to hear you apparently wasted money.

Since v8.3 I have a working Samplitude, so I have no problems with the software any more. Where I got ripped off (in my opinion/experience) was paying a "Pro" price and not getting "Pro" after-sales support. Part of the extra cost of Samplitude "Professional" should have been better support.

Sometimes things might be hard to track or even reproduce. It's natural that bugs can be addressed earlier if more users encounter them and we can reproduce them reliably. But some things just pop up under rare occasions or conditions beyond our immediate control.

I know, but at the time I would have been happy with a simple acknowledgement that "Yes, the problem you are having may be caused by our software" and "this is the list of Hardware that we can guarantee will work with Samplitude". What I got was, "It's a problem with your Hardware". I know this is outside of the devs control and I feel sorry that Magix don't provide better backup support for the guys who have worked so hard on the coding. At the end of the day though it's Magix who took my money, so they won't be getting any more of it.

It's a great environment, and one that Magix could learn something from.

Actually, the reaper dev learned from Samplitude, Saw, ProTools etc., not vice versa!

LOL! The "environment" I was referring to was the REAPER Forum, not the software environment. The "open for everyone to see" environment. It makes a huge difference as an end-user to be able to actively communicate with the devs.

And please - while you're into it - someone give 'em a talented interface guy. People, learn from us, don't let the devs do the GUI design...

Ha, I agree 100% There are more complaints about the GUI than anything else. They are listening to people's input, but for some crazy reason they think that getting the programming side of things perfect is more important at this stage.

Thanks for taking the time to respond Sascha. You're a good representative for Magix. I hope they don't lock you away from the public when you start on the next stage of development.

Cheers,

Malcolm.

[sascha]

Sascha,
You are either missing the point or avoiding the question which it poses.
Why does Magix charge an 'extra' 100 Euros on top of the upgrade price from v.7 to v.9 ?
i.e. 599 Euros instead of 498 Euros?

I personally think it's unfair.
If you don't know why Magix has this policy, maybe you should ask your boss, and let us know...

Regards,

Terry

okay, I'll ask when I'm back in the office.

[sascha]

Yeah, I know. The Newcomer Forum and the email tech support from Magix was great - right up until I made a purchase. It was only after I'd parted with my money that support stopped. I don't know if things have changed recently in the Registered Users forum, but the devs were rarely seen when I was having trouble (about a year ago).

We had resource problem and needed to solve them. If you knew Sebastian (our former Sequoia specialist) you know how worthy it is to have the right people in the right place at the right time. When he followed his girl to Vienna, he left a gap and it took us pretty long to find Oliver, who is now taking care of the broadcast clients. The same applies to people like Michael or André (from the support). André is not only one of the nicest around, he also takes client correspondence very seriously and - as said - doesn't make any difference around the people. He also coordinates the betas and testers, so from time to time, there might have been be a resource problem as he gathers input from various channels.
We are aware that more users mean more questions, demands, problems and more contact in general to keep up, so it's a pretty tough task. Again, I can only assure that we care.

I take it that it's only the Newcomer Forum that's now accessible to search engines?

Yes. Like I said, we devs try to compensate for it and try to be active everywhere.

Great news, and my condolences to "Michael". He has a big job ahead of him!

Oh yeah... he was sort of physically exhausted afterwards... but he's done a great job although he already said not everything could be addressed as it should to his opinion. But his changes made it much easier to act as a new doc platform.

Is the "new doc" available anywhere on the Magix website?

Not yet, but maybe as part of the demo download. I'll keep my ears open.

I know, but at the time I would have been happy with a simple acknowledgement that "Yes, the problem you are having may be caused by our software" and "this is the list of Hardware that we can guarantee will work with Samplitude". What I got was, "It's a problem with your Hardware". I know this is outside of the devs control and I feel sorry that Magix don't provide better backup support for the guys who have worked so hard on the coding. At the end of the day though it's Magix who took my money, so they won't be getting any more of it.

Hm, maybe someone had a bad day or the like. We urge ourselves to be honest, there is no need to tell bulls***t as we've got a professional engineers' work lying underneath.
We've got friendly and close relations to a lot of our customers, sometimes meet, some suddenly ring at our door etc. so it migt have been sort of a human thing that it didn't work out in your case. But I can only speculate on that.

[One curious thing as an example for things that fail to work: I bought a Gina24 for at home for AD/DA. I need the ADAT channel for my digital mixer, but there are problems with Sam under ASIO: I've got crackles on the digital outs, but only with Sam and only under ASIO. So I sat with Volker over the problem, he double checked the source code but no error could be found. We assumed it's got something to do with Steinis ASIO SDK. We couldn't precisely tell the faulty place without screwing things totally up. Other devices we hooked up worked perfectly (and seem to do in the wild). Maybe it's my unit (bought it used), but as long as I don't hear from other Echo users (anyone here?) we can only speculate. That's one of these occasions where open systems like these drive you nuts and it's hard to blame anyone without knowing every detail... ]

Cheers,
Sascha

[GreyLion]

Since I don't use Samplitude, I don't have a dog in this hunt, as we say down in Texas. But -- I'd like to compliment Sascha for his professionalism, grace, and thoroughness in responding to some pretty pointed feedback.

A lot of folks here (including me!) could learn a lot from the way he's been been so patient and polite. Don't see that too consistently here.