KVR Audio

flugel45 · Post by **flugel45** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:59 am

Well, Roland finally releases their own D-50 soft synth, however....

https://www.rolandcloud.com/

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:05 am

And sampled instead of hybrid VA+samples... 3.8 GB for a synth whose samples were under half a megabyte!

AnX · Post by **AnX** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:06 am

Site is not mobile friendly

sprnva · Post by **sprnva** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:06 am

Can't see a price anywhere. Guess it must be free!

Caine123 · Post by **Caine123** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:09 am

looks like it's only some samplecollection... no synthesis?

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:11 am

sprnva wrote:Can't see a price anywhere. Guess it must be free!

Subscription is the new catchword.

Buckster · Post by **Buckster** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:02 am

subscription yes - but can't see anywhere where it says how much it costs ?

egbert101 · Post by **egbert101** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:06 am

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:39 am

They so phoned that one in. Roland is full of themselves these days.

kingtubby · Post by **kingtubby** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:50 am

Buckster wrote:subscription yes - but can't see anywhere where it says how much it costs ?

RolandCloud wrote:EARLY ACCESS BETA SUBSCRIPTION
$19.95/mo
Unlimted access to every instrument in the Roland Cloud catalog.
Thousands of dollars of value for a very affordable, low monthly price!

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:57 am

I really hope customers give them the finger. I don't want to rent my plugins in future.

rod_zero · Post by **rod_zero** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:07 am

The price shows up when you sign up, 19 per month.

I won't consider subscribing in the long term but from time to time paying a month to get access to all the plug ins and make some project seems like a good deal. Less than you will loss if you bought and resell some plugs

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:38 am

rod_zero wrote:The price shows up when you sign up, 19 per month.

I won't consider subscribing in the long term but from time to time paying a month to get access to all the plug ins and make some project seems like a good deal. Less than you will loss if you bought and resell some plugs

Yeah, I don't disagree. This is why I think that in the long term, this is going to bite devs in the ass. Here's why. Once you get a certain amount of experience, synths aren't all that different. A month is plenty of time to dial in a few sounds on an SH101, record it and done. You can do all of your "sound prototyping" on any number of cheap/free synths, or even the expensive synth that you happen to own but isn't quite right, then rent for a month, dial in, record, stop renting.

Subscription works for things like photoshop because many people use it to earn a living and it dominates the industry, and, it's complex. This is not true for synths, for any synth there are, literally, thousands of substitute products. With photoshop, what I mock up in Gimp isn't going to help me get to the finish line quickly. I may have some general skills, but I really need to understand Photoshop in order to get the job done, so there is genuine benefit in having the subscription long term. This is not true for the vast majority of plugins. Only tools like, say Reaktor, or Kontact are really significantly different and closer to something like Photoshop in the relationship between skill building and usage of that particular product.

Subscription works for television content and even music content to some extent because the variety is vast and everchanging. And SH101 is an SH101 this month, last month, last year, forever. What I leaned on it 20 years ago will apply today, there won't be a lot of surprises.

Thinking about software this way, that is, as a tool, changes demand for it. We have come to accept virtual products as products. We think of the purchase process as getting some THING new for our studio, for our hobby. It's a new toy, we own it now, we even use that language to describe it. Nobody thinks of HBO that way, it's not something that we own, it's not a THING that we are excited to explore, it is simply an avenue to ever changing content that we want to consume. Lose the avenue, lose the access to new content. Software that isn't complex doesn't have this recurring need to be consumed.

When we rent software, we are acutely aware that we don't own it and it changes our feelings about it. Since it's a recurring cost, you think of it like you do your other bills, you judge it in terms of its cost effectiveness and value to your life. This is very different from the emotional high we get from buying something. How many times have you bought something on impulse and then thought better of it later. Well, now when you change your mind, you just stop the subscription. The change in thinking is important. We don't often even think about how much money overall we spend on our hobbies, but if all of a sudden we're spending $100 a month on various subscriptions, it makes us acutely aware of the cost and we start doing that strange accounting in our heads to decide whether or not it's justified.

Renting changes how you feel in terms of loyalty. When you go to home depot to rent a generator or a hedge trimmer, how much do you really care about brand? I don't, it's just a tool to get the job done, it's not something that I'm happy to own for an hour. To get "pride in ownership", consumers have to actually own, or at least believe that they own the product. Perpetual licensing is close enough to that, renting isn't.

Synth excitement has a short shelf life. We might be excited for a month or two, but then that excitement wanes and we move on to the next thing. When we've purchased it at full price, well, ok, we have it, the vendor has his money, so it's no big deal, maybe we explore it more later and get re-excited about it. But, when we rent it, once the excitement wanes we will see that stream of outflow as an opportunity to purchase excitement from someone else. Since to make your rental rate compelling, you pretty much have to offer it all to get anyone to bite, you've assured yourself that people will be able to test everything significantly for a fairly small amount of money and, most likely, get bored with all of it at once.

In other words, yes, I would consider short term rentals of really powerful tools, or less powerful tools for a project, but it changes more than just the cost in the eyes of the consumer, it actually changes how they think about consuming your product.