Is the Market Finally Saturated?

[HunterKiller]

Is the Market Finally Saturated

I think it is, but now it needs to be phased and tape delayed for that cosmic Jarre effect, which'll finally take it into the next century.

[BONES]

First you say that a comment a person makes says something about them, and then you say an idiotic post does not necessarily reflect on the person who made it. Don't you see the contradiction there? Maybe it is not so obvious after all.

Well, I don't think I made it as black and white as that. After all "something" isn't "everything" or even "everything you need to know" about someone. i.e. One stupid post does not an idiot make. However, if someone were to post enough times and on each occasion make themselves look an idiot, then it is reasonable that conclusions could be drawn, don't you think? Most people manage to show some sense on occasion so, overall, I'm sure there aren't as many idiots around as it may at first appear, just people who don't think before they start typing. Most manage to redeem themselves when prompted, as exmatproton did earlier.

[courtjestr]

First you say that a comment a person makes says something about them, and then you say an idiotic post does not necessarily reflect on the person who made it. Don't you see the contradiction there? Maybe it is not so obvious after all.

Well, I don't think I made it as black and white as that. After all "something" isn't "everything" or even "everything you need to know" about someone. i.e. One stupid post does not an idiot make. However, if someone were to post enough times and on each occasion make themselves look an idiot, then it is reasonable that conclusions could be drawn, don't you think? Most people manage to show some sense on occasion so, overall, I'm sure there aren't as many idiots around as it may at first appear, just people who don't think before they start typing. Most manage to redeem themselves when prompted, as exmatproton did earlier.

Well, maybe I did paraphrase you a bit. Point is, I think for many people, it is hard not to take comments personally. On top of that, different cultures have different approaches to broaching the truth. Some have no problems with being forthright and blunt. Others have more subtle ways of exposing the fallacies of one's statements. Two different weapons, the bludgeon and the stiletto, but they get the job done.

I also have to disagree with you on the number of idiots around. I think there are far more around than first appear. But unlike you, they probably don't want to be told when they say something idiotic.

[BONES]

Not really. For some strange reason it is difficult to get any useful information from most people. They seem reluctant to explain themselves and expect everything they say to be taken at face value, even if it conflicts with someone else's experience. The best illustration of that is when I recently took someone to task over torturing themselves with Windows 7 instead of using Windows 10. Their initial response was to simply say that Win7 was better but, after several rounds of bludgeoning, it turned out that the individual involved had some things that didn't work reliably on Win10. Why he couldn't have said that up-front is beyond me.

[acYm]

to be fair, I said it was better to me, which it is.
in spades.
I read about a recent W10 update. apparently, there are "dpc optimizations" taking place. boy am I missing out.

[exmatproton]

why these kind of personal attacks? I just don't get it...and it is uncalled for, really. Listen to some of my music and decide then if i am so bad you think i am.

When you make a comment it says something about you. I simply drew a conclusion based on what you said because someone who knew what they were doing wouldn't say something like that. Pretty simple, really. Doing it has had the desired result, in that you have explained yourself a little more fully. If you'd done that in the first place, I wouldn't have had to draw it out of you.

You drew a conclusion indeed. And a bad one. As in; it is incorrect.
It has nothing to do with being bad/good at something. I "+1" Recursive's post, because i (and i still do) agree with what he said. The usual OSC shapes are good. WT's are thát + more, which for me, is better. No need to draw conclusions from that really.

I certainly still use the usual suspects (i.c.w. PWM, PM, FM, C.MOD, FX, Filters, etc...) and i still love to do that. However, with WT's there is so much more possible. I love to use WT's with (e.g.) 8 drum sounds and fade between those single cycle waveforms. It is just really fun.

So why not say that in the first place, instead of suggesting that if you only had basic waveforms, you couldn't do much? That said, how is a "drum sound" a single cycle waveform"?

Because i didn't have to say/explain that in the first place. I wanted to strengthen the case for WT's. That's what i did. It is because you drew a wrong conclusion i had to explain it to you. That is on you, really. Not me. And you don't have to go negative to get an extra explanation really. All this talk about "welcome to the internet", "grow a thicker skin"...just bollocks. People can have a "thick skin" and still being offended by the way people treat other people. It just isn't necessary, it really isn't.

And indeed, a single cycle waveform is a bad description of what i meant. Or, at least, when talking about a waveform in the classical sense. What i meant was; 1 waveform in the wavetable register being 1 sound adjacent to another waveform being another waveform and fading between those. In that sense waveform 1 = cycle 1 and waveform 2 = cycle 2. But yeah,,you're right; a drum sound isn't a single cycle waveform.

[foosnark]

I don't know about the market as a whole, and I'm guessing it's not all that useful to attempt to predict these things based on frequency of sales or comments on forums.

But I'm personally saturated. The last few software synths I tried, no doubt had a ton of development work behind them, and (aside from interface quibbles with Massive X) were really slick and sounded pretty great. And I have no need for them, or even much interest. I've already got more than I need in both software and hardware (I'm going through a phase of tightening up the focus in my modular, and shrinking it a bit.)

For a couple of years, I was still fishing for software effects pretty heavily. I've gotten to where an effect has to be really special to break through now.

[Sinisterbr]

As I stated before, I still see room for quality improvement in soft synths, but it's clear I'm the minority here. Most people are really satisfied with what they already got, and that's what counts. The market seems to be in a big changing point right now.

[pdxindy]

I don't know about the market as a whole, and I'm guessing it's not all that useful to attempt to predict these things based on frequency of sales or comments on forums.

But I'm personally saturated. The last few software synths I tried, no doubt had a ton of development work behind them, and (aside from interface quibbles with Massive X) were really slick and sounded pretty great. And I have no need for them, or even much interest. I've already got more than I need in both software and hardware (I'm going through a phase of tightening up the focus in my modular, and shrinking it a bit.)

For a couple of years, I was still fishing for software effects pretty heavily. I've gotten to where an effect has to be really special to break through now.

Pretty similar for me for software... I don't need anything new at all... I still demo new stuff that interests me, but that is just out of a general interest in synthesis, not because any new synth gives me some sound I don't already have.

[zerocrossing]

As I stated before, I still see room for quality improvement in soft synths, but it's clear I'm the minority here. Most people are really satisfied with what they already got, and that's what counts. The market seems to be in a big changing point right now.

Sure, people are also happy with doing their grocery shopping at Walmart and eating whatever crap has enough salt fat and sugar in it to make it “tasty.” Not that the state of plugins are that, but there’s a reason beyond workflow that people are excited about hardware instruments. It’s the sound. There are some things that even the best emulations just aren’t that great at. You could choose to ignore those sounds, or put up with it, or you could turn to hardware synths and hope that plugins improve... and they will. I currently think that the shortcomings I perceive aren’t due to lack of knowledge or laziness of developers, but more because shortcuts are taken because to oversample enough to get things like distortions correct takes a ton of CPU usage and people want lots of voices in their plugins. I think we’re going to see a lot more plugins like Massive X who require modern CPUs as people naturally replace their aging computers. Not everyone will be happy with having to upgrade, but that’s the way of the computer world.

[Razzia]

I've seen unrelenting negativity about TRK-01, Trueno, Uno and a bunch other perfectly good instruments that I wouldn't be without.

Well, I just found out about Trueno. That's a really cool idea. Cheap too, for what it is.

I was once like that but lately I find I get bored with the things I have and new things provide inspiration, so I like to turn my stuff over regularly. Hardly any of the instruments we used on our last album are used on our new one and the next one will use a completely different set of instruments and effects again. New host, too. It's what keeps me firing on all cylinders, although it can also be a distraction while I am getting my head around new things.

That's fair. I'm a little from column A, a little from column B. I've found that the amount of time it takes me to really get in depth with a synth is roughly equal to the amount of time it takes me to get bored with a new synth and just go back to Avenger/Zebra/Diva/Omnisphere.

On the other hand, I try on compressors like hats. I recently got an Apollo, and UAD surprised me with a free Analog Classics Pro bundle so I've got more great mixing plugins than I know what to do with at the moment.

I reckon I'd be closer to half-a-dozen

Hahaha very true. I think you might be more honest than me, in this instance

[BONES]

I don't normally feel like I need to get "in depth", or maybe I tend to avoid synths that might require that. To me they are all pretty much theme and variation - if you can use one you can use any of them.

I think the reason you try so many different compressors is because their value is way overstated and you are probably looking for something that honestly isn't there. I use compression on my kicks, always Pumper, on vocals (usually the first one I come to) and when I am mastering. That's it. I never use a compressor on a synth sound, unless it's a side-effect of a distortion effect or something, and if a synth has a compressor on board, I usually turn it off and increase the volume instead. If I want to play with the dynamics of a synth, I do it with the envelopes. That's what they are for. Compressors are for real-world sounds you can't fix any other way. I do use side-chain compression creatively on occasion but not all that often.

[mrdoghead]

No, the market is not saturated.

[tony10000]

No, the market is not saturated.

I would love to hear that from a developer.

[martinjuenke]

Interesting post from developer AccSone:

As the comments confirmed we observed in the last years a strong pricing trend in the plug-in industry: A lot of seasonal discounts flooding the market and come along like a “Black Friday” sales, “Cyber Week”, “Summer Sales”, “X-Max offer”, “February discount” sometimes in the range of “50% off” but also blatant offers like “90% off” popping up nearly daily. Platforms like KVR and other platforms are contributing with specialized newsletters to that trend. Some of these offers are automated generated, driven by specialized reselling services that acting like platforms to the plug-in vendors “to resell” their products (e.g. like the Xchange Market Platform). As this was a general industry trend we also joined these platforms with the goal to increase the visibility and make the product more accessible to more people. And sure, these platforms aim to become a gatekeeper to the reseller market. Currently margins claims of these channels are 40% and higher and until now we didn’t experience that they contributed with any additional value for the customers (e.g. like additional tutorials, product explanation or advanced support). On top of that, today’s possibility to shop across nations creates a challenge to deal with local tax obligations that makes it around 20% more expensive to sell a product in your local market. In the end – even if a vendor sells 10 times more items (more to expect is unreasonable as we’re acting in a niche market) – it makes it very hard to generate a sustainable business from these kinds of reselling channels. Luckily there are some honorable exceptions with local dealers where individual PMs bypasses these channels and are open for direct contracts!

There is another trend in the plug-in industry observable that might not be so obviously for consumers: Development SDKs like JUCE allows developers to rapidly create plug-ins that support a various kind of plug-in formats. These SDKs are very efficient and represent a very low-level entry barrier to start coding a plug-in. With an attractive entry level pricing these kinds of platforms are looking very helpful to start development though they come with the risk to be bound towards a single coding standard, an external driven life-cycle and an external provider has its own product strategy and business model that can easily tear your company dreams down in a long term. As much we like the idea of accessibility for developers to unleash plug-in dreams we can’t ignore that the market is also flooded with a lot of plug-ins of questionable value.

So, we are facing two strong factors that characterizes the today's plug-in market: Aggressive, sometimes automated generated pricing combined with a huge flooding of all kind of plug-ins with a questionable quality or business models behind. On the one hand this creates a competitive environment to the advantage of the customer, but it also comes with the burden of judging on the plug-ins value for the own artistic approach. We feel with our customers assuming to sort out these things are not fun and it probably becomes easily frustrating after a while to stay on top of that ongoing “price lottery” …