Are Ohmforce plugins abandonware? (No customer service)

[Wolf305]

Rant what you will, ask what you will, I'll tell you what I know and help how I can.

Hey @Red_Force

Any plans on Ohmicide M1 update or a replacement?

TY.

[JerGoertz]

Hey Red_Force, I'm a long-time Ohm user too, from the early 00's. Appreciate the gesture in releasing your old plugins for free (which was nice for me b/c although I owned licenses to all of them, I didn't have the 64-bit versions of some).

Genuinely hoping you guys at Ohmforce can get it together and make a legit go of things which restores your reputation to its former good graces. I am guardedly optimistic.

[Red_Force]

Rant what you will, ask what you will, I'll tell you what I know and help how I can.

Hey @Red_Force

Any plans on Ohmicide M1 update or a replacement?

TY.

Current Ohmicide works on M1 on recent MacOS if you use the manual (now free) installer. Always has (except on Big Sur which is why many ppl assumed it wouldn't after).
Intel CPU will get the corrupted UI.

A new Ohmicide is in the making, yes. But some other audio, non plugin project took precedence ^^

[machinesworking]

Well it's quite the thing to come back to KvR see what's been discussed and learn that you're dead.

I deserve that for sure. I ran into some personal health leading to you know... issues. The company had. Ohmstudio demise was a general burn out. We started to lag on maintenance of our internal tools, while remote work damaged our inner process in ways that we failed to immediately (or even... reasonably quickly) measure. Resulting in people having been let down.
For which we felt bad, which didn't make it easier to go back and fix it. Maybe you've experienced that. Being overwhelmed in your own failures. That was me in the last years.

That being said, the picture given here seems a bit exaggerated. While it's true one important dev and funder (Laurent, aka Plum Force) has left the company, most others have not. And Simon replaced Laurent, and it was a challenge especially considering we kept having working on our B2B ventures that kept the company running.

Still Simon loves plugins, I do as you'll see very soon with indeed Frohmager. We've been doing stuff. And not only plugin btw.

Similarly, some support suffered, and as I said in the Infinity thread we're very sorry for that and again, if you paid and didn't use, we will find ways to refund you no matter how late. But some support was dealt with at all points and it has to be said Infinity doesn't generate that much support vs its sales (or say mac stuff) so clearly it works out of the box for a lot of people.

As I mentioned it turns our our early access buyers were especially punished bc some alpha they had didn't clean up properly which means subsequent "clean" build would not work.

I've decided that the "hiding behind the scene" didn't work for me and draged me down mentally. I'd be much more at ease with a very direct conversation. Rant what you will, ask what you will, I'll tell you what I know and help how I can.

I'm sorry to hear about your health issues. That said you had a whole team, somehow this affected that? IMO it sounds more like B2B (business to business?) became your focus. So, how as consumers are we supposed to develop trust here? I own the All All collection, I bough it years ago, it's now free, it will never work natively on Apple Silicon, I will be asked to pay for the next round of plug ins you make, probably with no loyalty discount of any kind. The new plug ins will likely be as if they were version 2 of the All All plug ins.

I just see no loyalty to your customers here, b2b overrides customer support, older plug ins are replaced with new versions that are sold as new products, websites are left in disarray. The one disadvantage of plug ins VS hardware is incompatibility with the latest hardware, OS or version of your DAW. So active development of the plug ins is important to me and I would guess quite a few people.

So the question is what is the plan now and how are you and your team going to prevent a similar incident in the future? because personally it's almost impossible for me to imagine wanting to support a company that just abandons a product without any sort of notice, then gives it away for free years later, then plans to replace it with version 2, that might end up with the same fate. Think the consistency of Arturia and U-He, that's what I as a customer want to see.

[Red_Force]

He, lots to unpack here.

First clearing out some misconceptions

1) Ohmboyz owner still get a discount on Ohmboyz Infinity. (so you do too. About 30% I think, cost is calculated via a complex formula, check on your ohmforce account.)

2) it's not really B2B that prevented customer support IMO. It's just that we've (I have) leaned too much into supporting those plugs for as long as possible and didn't realize how the end of life of an app shall happen. We should have pull the plug long ago. But in my defense, they work great on PC, they work on some Mac, so you can see how painful it was to cut that. At least now everyone can have them for free.

Now to your issue.

Trust has to be earned. Not a lot more to add. I could say we supported our older plugins way longer than anyone in the biz but truth is this isn't how the reliability you legitimately want from devs work. Reliability from a buyer's perspective is the economy of said product times company health/ethic.

Fortunately, we provide plugins that you can test for free. (well just the one for now). No trust is required, you like what it does, it works on your rig, you can buy it. To some, it's enough. Others value like you do long-term support of a plugin before buying it. The way this work is that if there are enough from the former, it cements the basis to provide the guarantees to the latter.

I am not going to pretend Ohm Force has deep pocket to guarantee anything no matter what. But neither do the other companies you buy from, not even the ones you mentioned. It's a buildup. At least, we're still here and clearly, B2B has been funding B2C as of late.

[machinesworking]

He, lots to unpack here.

Mostly I want to be able to use a plug in with a modern OS 5 years from now. I can use the CS80 V from 15 years ago on Apple Silicon, and I'm certain that when/if Windows goes Arm, Arturia will port it. NI jettison a lot of things, but Kontakt and Reaktor remain. U-He have even revived their first effect MFM for Apple Silicon with a great new skin.

It's the only thing I really miss about hardware, changes in computers, OS's, developers losing interest and all of a sudden you no longer have a tool you used for years.

[briefcasemanx]

Which is the guy that worked on Serum? I think he wrote a white paper about analog emulation too. Is he still at the company?

[stuman]

Which is the guy that worked on Serum? I think he wrote a white paper about analog emulation too. Is he still at the company?

Steve Duda from xferrecords.com

[pastador59]

Which is the guy that worked on Serum? I think he wrote a white paper about analog emulation too. Is he still at the company?

Steve Duda from xferrecords.com

No, that was Laurent de Soras / Plum Force, who left the company. He is in the Serum credits.

[Red_Force]

He, lots to unpack here.

Mostly I want to be able to use a plug in with a modern OS 5 years from now. I can use the CS80 V from 15 years ago on Apple Silicon, and I'm certain that when/if Windows goes Arm, Arturia will port it. NI jettison a lot of things, but Kontakt and Reaktor remain. U-He have even revived their first effect MFM for Apple Silicon with a great new skin.

It's the only thing I really miss about hardware, changes in computers, OS's, developers losing interest and all of a sudden you no longer have a tool you used for years.

Fair point. Although in fairness this is a strictly mac related issue. I can run "made in a weekend 15 years ago" cohmpost on Windows 11.

But I am not ditching Mac here nor dodging the expectation. Mac is built on this paradigm, always has been. If we can go native we will.

[Red_Force]

Which is the guy that worked on Serum? I think he wrote a white paper about analog emulation too. Is he still at the company?

Steve Duda from xferrecords.com

No, that was Laurent de Soras / Plum Force, who left the company. He is in the Serum credits.

If you guys are curious here's a band with him, me and Alice (who is not Ohm Force related). We did that what, two years ago?
https://thisissoundofthevoid.bandcamp.c ... channel-up

And if you're into DIY pedale boad, that thing he used there is siiiiick.
http://ldesoras.free.fr/doc/articles/pe ... -vite.html

[VitaminD]

He, lots to unpack here.

Mostly I want to be able to use a plug in with a modern OS 5 years from now. I can use the CS80 V from 15 years ago on Apple Silicon, and I'm certain that when/if Windows goes Arm, Arturia will port it. NI jettison a lot of things, but Kontakt and Reaktor remain. U-He have even revived their first effect MFM for Apple Silicon with a great new skin.

It's the only thing I really miss about hardware, changes in computers, OS's, developers losing interest and all of a sudden you no longer have a tool you used for years.

Fair point. Although in fairness this is a strictly mac related issue. I can run "made in a weekend 15 years ago" cohmpost on Windows 11.

But I am not ditching Mac here nor dodging the expectation. Mac is built on this paradigm, always has been. If we can go native we will.

Ohmicide crashed Cubase 12 to the desktop here in Windows 10 almost instantly on first go. I've since abandoned use of it and haven't experienced another crash.

It is a really kind gesture to release the old plugins for free, but their stability makes me question their functionality which is a bit unfortunate.

[Red_Force]

It's not a support complaint I have had from other sources AFAICR Here it works like a charm on most DAWs, including Cubase.
Ohmicide is by far our best seller and it has been used by a lot of people on all DAWs. But of course DAWs update and some new combination of circumstances can create issues for some users that we wouldn't have here. Hard to track.

[pough]

Ohmicide is working fine in Waveform on Windows 10, which might be a miracle considering how many people believe that DAW to be the King of Crashing. So I appreciate that.

But I will take this opportunity to complain about something that always frustrates me when I come across it: bad preset loading. Plugins that just use the system file load dialog are awful. Your software knows where it saved the presets. I don't. Why do you make me search for them? Use the computer's power of performing tedious tasks for good.

For anyone else who doesn't feel like trawling through every possible place that presets might exist...
C:\Program Files\VSTPlugins\Ohm Force\Ohmicide VST2

Oh, and glad to see x_Force people here again on KvR. My gripes are much smaller than my appreciation.

[VitaminD]

It's not a support complaint I have had from other sources AFAICR Here it works like a charm on most DAWs, including Cubase.
Ohmicide is by far our best seller and it has been used by a lot of people on all DAWs. But of course DAWs update and some new combination of circumstances can create issues for some users that we wouldn't have here. Hard to track.

It's like you're saying it works for me so it should work for you.

I own the old OhmBoyz outright and was fascinated with your company's plugin lineup when they were fresh. They sounded great and were very creative tools.

But it seems like the company has taken an apathetic approach these days which doesn't instill any confidence in me. I hope there is improvement back to the original Ohmforce in the future. You're sitting on a goldmine.