Virtual Instrument Price Increases

[dougrogers]

From the 16th, all dealers (including stores and online stores) will increase the price of all EW Virtual Instruments by 10%. So you have between now and Saturday at midnight (PST) to get these at 20% off (excluding EWQLSO Platinum which is 10% off).

For a complete list of these products go to - www..com (\"http://www..com\") and select VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS from the pop-down format menu on the home page.

The price is good for in stock items only - so hurry!!

[Ned Bouhalassa]

Why the increase, Doug? Gas prices? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[cascade]

Post deleted by cascade

[andyt]

Not that I\'m considering buying any of your products at the moment but I think your statement needs a bit of clarification ...

.. most products are currently enjoying a 20% discount off the normal price
.. the increase of 10% ... will this take the products back to the normal price, or 10% above the normal price.

Can\'t understand why you\'re doing this. I\'m sure there is sound business logic behind it. Either your P&L must be in a bad way if you are having to increase your prices .... or so good that you think the market will be insensitive to this increase. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[fitch]

[ QUOTE ]
Is that to pay for re-printing the boxes to say:
Warning, doesn\'t work on dual processor Macs?

[/ QUOTE ]

it\'s talk like this that has frightened me off buying any of the EW/NI stuff..

i\'ll wait till the talk is a bit more on the positive side.. whether there\'s a price increase or not /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[dougrogers]

[ QUOTE ]
Not that I\'m considering buying any of your products at the moment but I think your statement needs a bit of clarification ...

.. most products are currently enjoying a 20% discount off the normal price
.. the increase of 10% ... will this take the products back to the normal price, or 10% above the normal price.

Can\'t understand why you\'re doing this. I\'m sure there is sound business logic behind it. Either your P&L must be in a bad way if you are having to increase your prices .... or so good that you think the market will be insensitive to this increase. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

Andy,

To clarify, the list prices are not increasing, only the MAP (minimum advertised price) that all dealers have to adhere to, so effectively it will be an increase as most dealers discount the products. There will be a 10% increase from Sunday.

Cascade,

The dual processor issue has been fixed already in Kontakt 1.5.2 which many MAC customers use, and next week we will release updates for the 40 Kompakt players as well.

Fitch,

What software do you use that doesn\'t have some problem? Software developers are constantly battling with a changing landscape. OS modifications and standards (or lack of them in the case of Apple), third party updates (which impact any software that uses it as a host) etc. etc. I bet in 10 years we\'ll still be talking about problems with software you are using. However, the great majority of our users are pumping out a lot of really cool music using these VIs today - just take a listen to the demos online.

Ned,

Yes, our gas prices have doubled in the last year!!

Seriously, we do whatever we can to hold back price increases, and this is more of a \'street\' price increase that was requested from EW dealers and distributors.

- Doug

[thesoundsmith]

[ QUOTE ]
the MAP (minimum advertised price) that all dealers have to adhere to,

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, Doug, there is no law that requires dealers to adhere to the MAP, this is simply arrogant manufacturers and distributors bullying dealers to keep the deep discounters from taking the sales away from you larger houses- if you won\'t play my way, I\'ll take my ball and go home.

Apple has used this technique for years, and it works-for them, the biggest discount on Apple products is less than $5-some places sell 2G G5s for $2999.95, others for $2995.00.

But as a consumer, I consider it a pure rip-off, and am insulted by the industry market manipulation and price-gouging. If a reseller is willing to sell for 10% over cost, and you\'re not, why should he and I be penalized? The concept of MAP is a conspiracy on the part of the large manufacturers, distributors and resellers to keep their profits up, and could actually hurt overall sales of a product - if I ever had to pay suggested retail for a Shure mike, for example, I would buy EV or Rode. The same with these VSTi\'s, and other such attempts at forcing creators to play by bean-counter rules.

MAP means I wind up having to spend four or five times as much time, because I will NEVER simply say - oh, I\'ll just buy here - the price is the same. I simply do not have the luxury of throwing money at something, I have to find the lowest price - if I save $10 on a $500 item, my wife is happy, If I can save $150, she\'s much happier. I feel better and have more money to put toward the next purchase. But if I have to spend eight hours on the phone to save that $10, you\'ve cost me valuable creative time - and I do not forgive you for that. Time is all we have, that and quality of life, this practice steals both from us.

Regardless of what you say, or do, or advertise, there will always be dealers who will lower their margin to make the sale, so it doesn\'t garner more sales for you-it means less. I have eight computers in my studio - and because I have used Digital Performer for years and don\'t like the PC sequencers I have tested, one of them is an Apple. But because of Apple\'s overprotective policies, the rest of my machines are PCs - I can get two or three fast PCs for the price of one G5, and configure with a much larger variety of peripherals, programs, etc.

If control over the product is so tight nobody dares to discount, I just pass on it. There will be another equivalent in a month or two, and if not, I\'ll hire the players live. But Gigastudio, even in 16-bit format, offers me the control I need, and the flexibility to build MY orchestra from individual elements, with no wasted space on mujltiple instances - 64 instruments is enough for most projects; I would have to run 8 instances of Kontact-player based samplers for the same total output, and then I would be restricted to only those pre-programmed sounds with whatever tweaking is allowed, no serious editing and no miing and matching-if i want eight sounds from eight separate libraries, I have to run eight instances, in Giga it\'s just a matter of loading the 8 .GIG files.

So raise your prices as high as you wish - I just spend less, and use the savings to hire real musicians, or buy from the deep discounters who don\'t play by the bullies\' rules.

And while I personally will not do this, I know that price increases mean an increase in piracy...

Oh, well. I have always had good service from Sounds OnLine, and will probably continue to purchase from you. But if I find a better price, you better believe I\'ll take it. And MAP be damned...

Dasher

[dougrogers]

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, well. I have always had good service from Sounds OnLine, and will probably continue to purchase from you. But if I find a better price, you better believe I\'ll take it. And MAP be damned...

Dasher

[/ QUOTE ]

Dasher,

MAP pricing is for advertising purposes only, any dealer can sell the product for less, so if you have a good relationship with a dealer you will certainly get a better deal than MAP. However, it is important to have some discipline in the marketplace. Some dealers do a great job and spend money on displays, demo stations etc. Some do very little but like to undercut these dealers with their advertised prices (particularly on the net, because they have lower overheads) so it\'s important for us to look after the good dealers and make sure they can make a decent margin otherwise there is no interest for them to stock the products which ultimately reduces the purchasing choices for customers.

I hope that explains it better, we certainly appreciate your business with Sounds Online.

- Doug

[P de Caumette]

What\'s up with the rapper look, Ned, you gangstta ? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Hudson]

Brilliant strategy...gas prices are through the roof, inflation is jacking up prices on food and all other items, people have less and less money to spend as a result. Great time to increase sample prices to put these libraries even further out of our grasp.

The pros bought this stuff already. The only ones you\'re squeezing for $$$ now are the more casual composers who are *not* making the big bucks to justify that kind of expense, especially in our current economy. Jeesh...I hope you have good balance seeing as how you just shot yourself in the foot.
-Hudson

[cascade]

Today I apologized to Doug for this crappy post ... I was possessed by Satanic demons who made me kill my dog ... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

Fitch, these libraries really sound great. although we\'re still waiting for the NI software to work smoothly on dual processor Macs. One of their many benefits is that they show you how other sample libraries SHOULD sound so that you can tinker with them until they meet the standard set by EWQL.

[sbenno]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
the MAP (minimum advertised price) that all dealers have to adhere to,

[/ QUOTE ]


If control over the product is so tight nobody dares to discount, I just pass on it. There will be another equivalent in a month or two, and if not, I\'ll hire the players live. But Gigastudio, even in 16-bit format, offers me the control I need, and the flexibility to build MY orchestra from individual elements, with no wasted space on mujltiple instances - 64 instruments is enough for most projects; I would have to run 8 instances of Kontact-player based samplers for the same total output, and then I would be restricted to only those pre-programmed sounds with whatever tweaking is allowed, no serious editing and no miing and matching-if i want eight sounds from eight separate libraries, I have to run eight instances, in Giga it\'s just a matter of loading the 8 .GIG files.

Dasher

[/ QUOTE ]

sorry for going a bit off topic but while these selfcontained VSTi instruments seems advantageous because they do not require a sample player etc, it\'s a bit a mess to deal with multiple instances of these virtual instruments (even more problematic if you use N virtual instruments of N different brands).
I\'m speaking about RAM usage.
Let\'s talk only about virtual instruments that stream from disk.
As we know samplers that stream from disk not only require lots of RAM for the preload part of the sample but a streaming buffer for each active voice.
So if your virtual instrument or software sampler can stream eg. max 64 voices.
usually a few hundred KB multiplied with the number of voices is required.
Let\'s take a reasonable value of 256KB.
64 voices * 256KB = 16MByte, open 8 instances and you end up wasting 128MB of memory.
With a single sampler application (let\'s say you set the voice limit to 128 voices), you
get 128 * 256 KB = 32MB RAM usage for the streaming buffers.
so basically almost 100MB of precious RAM saved.

Ok in some cases, certain virtual instruments can be loaded into some samplers (made by the same software house that licenses the player engine for the virtual instuments) but the general trend (I think mainly for CP purposes) is not to allow it.
But as we see here, users don\'t seem to like the concept of virtual instruments too much, perhaps over the short term they look attractive or if you use only one single instrument then the virtual instrument has no disadvantages compared to a general purpose software sampler but as soon as you start using 4-5 or even more of these virtual instruments problems get bigger and bigger.

Ah I forgot: the disk streaming engines of multiple instances of virtual instruments.
While a single software sampler has \"the disk under his control\" it can use the best streaming strategies to keep the disk busy and allow for maximum throughput,
in the case of N virtual instrument running in parallel usually run N separate streaming engines which all are fighting for the same disk.
This means that in high polyphony situations the harddisk head will jump crazy and will make suboptimal movements thus lowering the overall throughput which will limit polyphony and forces the user using bigger streaming buffers to avoid voice dropouts, pops and clicks.

Even linux which has fairly good operating system level disk schedulers (the algorithms that govern the movement of the harddisk head when several applications are reading/writing data from disk) achieves lower performance when multiple applications are streaming from disk than in the case where a single application read lots of streams from disk.
On windows it\'s even worse.
Virtual instruments owners can easily prove the stuff I said.

Virtual Instrument vendors won\'t tell you these details and probably claim that there is not disadvantage of using N selfcontained virtual instruments over using N equivalent samples that you load into a single software sampler.

Feel free to prove me wrong /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

cheers,
Benno
http://www.linuxsampler.org (\"http://www.linuxsampler.org\")

[thesoundsmith]

[ QUOTE ]
MAP pricing is for advertising purposes only, any dealer can sell the product for less, so if you have a good relationship with a dealer you will certainly get a better deal than MAP. However, it is important to have some discipline in the marketplace.

[/ QUOTE ]

Doug, I understand that line of reasoning, but as a consumer, it just slows down my purchasing, I have found that in general, companies that have a MAP also have a policy of not supporting customers who purchase from those that sell at the deep discount level, or refuse to ship to those dealers (again, Apple policy.)

I don\'t have time to go on these major phone chases, that\'s why I have DSL. But if the prices all look the same, I can\'t spend the time, so I just do without. And as prices get higher, I do without even more...

Sorry for the rant, it\'s very frustrating watching the market go in a direction that is driven by profit for the dealer rather than serving the customers\' needs. VSTi\'s and dongles are perfect examples, they make it more difficult for the customer, but insure greater profit for the vendor. I can\'t access my samples in a VSTi library, so if I need to tweak a bad loop, or radically alter the sound, I\'m SOL. And when my computer goes south with a stack of dongles dongling off the end, there is no place to turn for support that doesn\'t begin a round of finger-pointing.

The day the manufacturer of dongle-based products agress to come TO MY STUDIO to fix problems with his dongles, I will consider using products that require them.

The day that VSTi software lets us add and remove samples from any source, i will consider using them. Until then, I will restrict myself to the very few that it makes sense to release this way - for example, NI B4 - samplers can\'t handle pulling drawbars - and GPO, which seems to do a few things I\'ve been unable to get Giga to do. By the way, just noticed - Benno, that\'s anpther thread, but it\'s a significant issue-and one reason I have to have eight computers!

The day a dealer says he will allow us to return product that doesn\'t fit our needs, I will support that dealer whenever I can (thanks, Worra!)

When Giga3 is finally released, and stable, I hope developers will continue to supply us, as I can work within the restraints of that system. The war should be between the developers, users and dealers as a community vs. the pirates, not between the developers and their customers. And MAP is one small piece of the puzzle, a place where dealer interests and customer interests are at odds.

But Doug, just to be clear, this is not at all a personal attack on you or your company, it\'s an attack on what I perceive as a set of business practices that will, ultimately, be to the legitimate users\' detriment.

Dasher

[damoy]

[ QUOTE ]
What\'s up with the rapper look, Ned, you gangstta ?

[/ QUOTE ]

Okay Patrick, this just about made me pee my pants. Thanks for the laugh! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[P de Caumette]

Any time Damoy, I\'d rather spread joy than pain... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif