If it was just music journalism I would be ok with it. But all over the world, newspapers belong to the same people who own the companies that advertise on them.

 

I agree with the argument that media outlets, forums and the likes are companies that have their set of rules that you should abide by as a user, and that if you don't, you bear some consequences. This is especially valid for a general code of conduct to avoid people harassing other people etc...

However, I do have a problem with such companies that on the outside are cultivating an image of being objective and informative,while in reality actively steering the narrative to fit a (mostly commercial) agenda. Which could be perfectly fine, but then one should advertise oneself as - for example - A Friendly Media Platform for Opinions That Agree with Ours. Then it's clear for all and everyone that there is somewhat of a bias to one or another school of thought. Otherwise it's just a bit misleading.

 

Yes @triggerflipper, you spoke the sad truth.

After all, we are not (yet) forced to read them. Our football stadium was called Uwe Seeler Arena, a well-known footballer that everyone liked, and everyone was happy with the name. Then came a new management and the new sponsor was Barkley credit cards, from now on the stadium was called "Barkley Arena" and nobody thought that was great, but the people were already so jaded that nobody did anything against it.

There was once a funny film about the advertising craze, there was "The Pyramids of Giza" sponsored by Visa and there was a sign on the moon, sponsored by Microsoft.

 

To an extent. And differing by legislation.
In Germany for instance, the company that operates the Internet platform must provide generally valid terms of use that comply with the local legislation and define there what is beyond the permissible. Open criticism of a product or a third party cannot be generally excluded. The platform operator's domiciliary rights are quite restricted. Restricting freedom of speech on the other hand is therefore relatively difficult if it is not clearly off topic or against the law.

 

I hate KVRAudio with a passion. The mods are bunch of wankers, idiots like 'vurt' and 'Bones' get to post abusive comments time after time, and have tens of thousands of useless posts (normally pathetic attempts by them to be 'funny'.) As soon as you start asking difficult questions about anything, you are banned. KVRAudio is so obviously only about selling VST advertising and nothing else. The tossers who post hundreds of times a week on there, year in, year out, clearly aren't making much music, and ruin it for anybody new who dares to come along and disagree with their 'party line'.
I had to laugh after I got banned for simply bringing up an old post from a few years ago, where I had suggested the idea of paying for software in instalments, and all the usual assholes chimed in with what a stupid idea it was, it would never work, you have to be a bank to offer 'credit', and so on and so forth. I answered all of their questions politely and proved them all wrong over and over again, but of course, none of them (they were all 'regulars') could admit they were wrong, and I was banned. Then I went back a year or so ago and asked if, now that Splice exists, and you can even buy Avenger 2 on 'rent to own', did any of the original posters who said 'the original poster' (which was actually me) was wrong, have anything to say? None of them replied, and I was banned! It's hilarious.

This forum is like a godsend - intelligent people who don't lose their rag if you dare to disagree with them.

"The grown of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement." Karl Popper

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 18, 2023

Another example of KVR being assholes is when I was debating whether it was okay to use Hypersonic 2, since it was no longer available to buy, and is NEVER going to be available to buy again, so therefore no company/individual could possibly be losing any money if you used a cracked version, because it was THEIR fault that you couldn't buy the software. Of course, the usual tossers (regulars) went apeshit and made arguments about 'intellectual property', I said 'nobody owns the intellectual property any more, so nobody can sue me, and nobody is losing anything.'

They would rather that 'old' VSTs vanished from the face of the Earth, and nobody ever used them again, than allow people to discuss them, and use them - because they are terrified that one of their advertisers' crappy new and amazing VSTs will lose a sale because somebody has decided Hypersonic 2, or Emulator X3, is good enough for them.

 

That's fascinating. Do you have a link of the discussion? I'd love to read their stupidity and laugh

 

What I don't like about places like KVR or GS is that people go extra lengths to justify their addiction, defend their purchases, developers, some of them could argue for days and than just cave in when they are proved wrong. Both places just don't gel with critical thinking and chances you get flammed and banned for stepping on unpopular opinion are very high. Usual suspects will try to derail the discussion as much as they can so the thread get's locked and one banned.

It's really toxic collective mind, I feel sorry for any beginner that fall for any of it, it's like hanging out with bunch of addicts that go extra length to justify their addiction and pretty much go after anyone that isn't in their clique, so if you make yourself comfortable there and want to be among cool guys, you are in for a treat.

 

By agreeing to the terms of use of a site with advertising, you may also be consenting to some level of censorship on its forum. Consider this before participating in forum discussions.

 

I find KVR, GS and the like to be great sources of information as and when I seek it. Otherwise I find them all very easy to ignore.

But yes, there are some extremely unpleasant souls on GS. One could get into a flame war very readily if not careful and guarded.

This place seems nice though, I am pretty new here but so far the signal to noise ratio is relatively high

That's the internet for you though. In real life you tolerate idiots that you necessarily have to interact with and cherish the minds of your friends. With the Internet you get a vertical slice of all humanity and sadly, on average, it's a horror. Not helped by the fact that it's patrons are altered by the medium.

 

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=433086

Such a bunch of idiots on there. You'll notice that not one of them admitted they were wrong... in spite of the fact that you can now buy so many top synths as 'rent to own', exactly what I was suggesting.

 

Well said, you've summed it up perfectly. It's like a cult over there. Especially the way they will try to get a thread locked by 'upping the ante' when anybody dares to disagree with them, then the wanker mods lock the thread (they often delete them too), which is just what the 'regulars' want.

 

Here's an anti-KVR website I made, with some of my even earlier posts- with the head of Spectrasonics getting all paranoid about people selling Omnisphere...

http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/

I saved Eric Persing's posts and the entire thread, before the wanker mods at KVR deleted it...

http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/KVR Can Spectrasonics instruments be resold.htm
http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/KVR Can Spectrasonics instruments be resold 2.htm
http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/KVR Can Spectrasonics instruments be resold 3.htm
http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/KVR Can Spectrasonics instruments be resold 4.htm

Absolute paranoia on Persing's part. I went through the KVR marketplace to find out how many copies of Omnisphere had been sold in the last year - it was either ONE or TWO copies, in the entire year! Yet Persing plead poverty and made out that if he allowed 'endless' reselling of Omnisphere (which you should be allowed to do by law - i.e. if you buy it third hand, you can still sell it, and if you buy it fourth hand, you can still sell it) then his poor little company wouldn't be able to cope... LOL.

This is even funnier, the Omnisphere 'licensing' palava:
http://kvrsucks.freevar.com/Beg Spectrasonics for SFX licensing.php

Won't somebody think of the poor, starving developers at Spectrasonics?

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2023

What really sucks about KVR is that any discussion of UNAVAILABLE VSTs is not allowed, i.e. VSTs that are no longer sold by whoever made them, so therefore the developers themselves took the VST off the market, so nobody can buy it, so therefore nobody can be 'stealing' from the developer by using a cracked version, because you can't pay the developer even if you wanted to!
So all 'old' VSTs are therefore 'non-existent' if you go to KVR. Nobody on the forum can talk about them, because inevitably somebody will want to USE one of them, and will ask how to get hold of a working version, and since most VSTs were only available as digital downloads, you can't get a legal version.

Unlike with computer game 'abandonware', where there are whole websites with thousands of old games for all sorts of platforms available, and (I presume) nobody really minds, because nobody would buy these games if they were available now (and the ones that are available, such as on GOG or Steam, are simply listed on abandonware sites as 'download at GOG.com' or 'download at Steampowered.com' ), which is obviously completely fine, as at least you can still buy the game if you want it.

But with VSTs it's as if there is a 'moving time cliff edge' over which any VST older than ten years, or fifteen years, or whatever, is pushed, and can no longer be bought, and apparently, according to the wankers at KVR (that includes the posters and the owners) should no longer be USED BY ANYONE. And we all know why - because new VSTs aren't any better than many old VSTs. Because KVR relies on newbies spending money on new VSTs, and depends on their ADVERTISERS - and is therefore AGAINST the users themselves. Because a website that was there for the USERS, rather than the advertisers, would be advocating using free and abandoned VSTs, as well as new ones.

Something else I decided about five years ago, after spending maybe £800 over a five year period on various VSTs, was that I was no longer going to buy a single new VST ever again - I would always use cracks. I had several VSTs that the developers simply stopped supporting, and you could no longer download them, nor register the damn things, and the developers didn't care.

For example, Synthmaster 1 (I think it was called that) came out before what most people believe is the 'first' Synthmaster (I can't remember what it was called now). I bought 'Synthmaster 1' as part of a deal that you would get a free upgrade to the next model of Synthmaster - but they stopped the registration of Synthmaster 1 working, so I couldn't reinstall it on my PC, and couldn't get my old tracks to play it, and they took FIVE months to reply to my numerous questions about this, and it was a great synth. Yet you can't find hide nor hair of it on the internet now, as if it never existed. Does anybody else remember that?

Found it - it was simply called 'Synthmaster':
http://web.archive.org/web/20060319110114/http://www.kv331audio.com/synthmaster.aspx

Well I'm buggered - you can even download the full manual from the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061215...nthmaster/downloads/synthmasterusermanual.pdf

So after buying that synth, KV331 simply destroyed it - they couldn't be arsed to remove the copy protection, they couldn't be arsed to maintain their OWN registration server, they just killed the synth I had just bought from them - along with many other people, no doubt.
Just try to find any other information about the original Synthmaster anywhere - on Youtube, KVR, anywhere. It's all been scrubbed from the internet. It was a great little synth.

I've been looking back through the emails I sent to them in 2011 - I told them that the registration code I had wouldn't work any more, so I couldn't reinstall Synthmaster (the original version), and they said they would send me a new reg. code, and if that didn't work, they would send me a "a simple utility to generate your authorization code". Of course, they never did....

So from then on, I only used cracks. I'd paid out enough money to enough companies, and had several whose VSTs stopped working because they'd gone bust, etc. and couldn't be arsed to release a free version with no copy protection. Now I never have to worry about that, my VSTs will always work.

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2023

The other thing that pisses me off about old, unpurchasable VSTs no longer being available, and no discussion allowed anywhere, is that all that work has now been wasted. All the thousands of hours of programming and development for each VST, all wasted, all destroyed, as if it never happened, and we have endless new (and not necessarily better) VSTs coming out every month, sucking newbies into buying more stuff that they don't need, and on it goes.

 

Kickbacks, payoffs, graft, one-hand-washes-the-other, "contributions", Payola, it's all a recipe for corruption, greed, and capitalism... Dev's (most of them anyway) do not give 2 craps about end users. It's all about the cashy money anymore.. When a "product" stops making $$ it's discarded for something that will. Doesn't really matter whether it's useful or not. Which is why there is such an abundance of pure garbage plugins these days with no end in sight. Junk plugins and redundant "sample packs" filled with the same ol same ol over and over at 10$, 20$ a pop. It's a suckers market and they have it cornered. If it wasn't for the scene I wouldn't mess with any of it.

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2023

Meanwhile, it would ve so easy to stop all the ads crap (ok, we get free content, free email services, etc etc, all paid by ads).

Let's take Google, and their ads.
For those who don't know, anytime a person uses Google to search for a product, etc, if that person clicks on the first results, often sponsored/commercial links, that person is redirected to some website/ store, where she becomes a potential buyer, and Google receives 50cts...80cts... $1..$2... $5... etc etc, depending on the product, value, etc.

Some guy selling, eg, eggs, will want his ad campaign to only be shown to people that fulfill some criteria - eg: female, between 20 and 45yo, xx income, from the country...state...town... and they might have a budget of 500 or $1000 per month, to buy 'clics'.

Meanwhile, a company like cocacola will want the entire planet to find them and visit their website, and probably spend several millions per week.

Now, imagine if tomorrow, 100'000.... 500'000... 2 million or even 20 million internet users, they:
1- search google, eg "nike shoes new models 2024
2- google returns many results, the first on are paid/green color. The person clicks on that link
3- google sends that user to nike .com. nike just paid google 50 cts.... $1.20... etc etc for that click and redirection
4- the person goes to the nike website, and buys absolutely nothing.


Now, let's imagine there are 1 million people around the world, doing the exact same thing, at random times (to avoid being detected as a ddos attack, etc).
Those 1 million people will do the search and click the link, will go to nike website, spend 1 minute visiting some models (to mimic a real customer), buys nothing, and leaves. Nike has to pay well over 1 million dollars, to Google, for all those clicks.

Now, replace nike by any other big company.
The company will suddenly find itself spending tens of millions on ads, for no extra sales.
They will ask Google 'hey, wtf, we are receiving huge amounts of visitors, but nobody is buying merch, nobody is creating a customer account, etc. This is a serious problem "
At the beginning, Google will be happy: they will be making extra tens/hundreds of millions.
But the 1 milllion fake visitors keep on doing it... and companies are quickly depleting their 'ads monthly budget", are losing tons of cash, and are getting no new sales from those visitors.
After a few weeks, thousands, tens of thousands of companies start canceling their ads business with google, and the big companies will drastically reduce their ads budget, from, eg, $10 millions a month, to 1 million or less.

Now, Google is losing hundreds of millions, if not billions. All those companies are spending +10 times less money, and many simply paused the ads campaigns.

So there you have it. If anyone wanted to hit a company where it hurts, it's very easy:
Having 100k... 1 million..or even 10 million people, from the US (to target US based companies), from europe (to target europe), or from all over the world, ( to reach all the big global companies), slowly devouring all those delicious sponsored/paid clicks.

For example.
Tomorrow, 20 million americans, could seach google for 'planned parenthood' ... and they all click on the top, paid, sponsored links.
In one day, the website has 1000 times more visitors, and spends hundreds of thousands of $, in just 1 day.
Next day, the same. And the next day. And the next. And the next.
After 1 week, planned parenthood had to spend 1 to 5 millions on google ads. After 1 month, they keep having a lot of 'success' and visitors, and they spent 15 millions on Google ads alone. After 2 months and 40 millions wasted, they pause the ads campaigns, as it is costing them a fortune.

This could be done to hundreds of thousands of companies.

Yes, it is indeed super easy, to make Google , etc, bleed. So easy.
(Of course, those million fake users had to take some precautions, like waiting a few days before searching and visiting the same website(eg. to avoid having the ip adress banned/blacklisted by the google engine...)

So easy

 

Normally, the only hurdle to this is the protection if something doesn't get cracked. This includes free plugins even more. People archive all the scene releases, so it's pretty rare something completely falls through the cracks. Even stuff that isn't all that great. They do not do this with stuff that was always freeware. That's the stuff that really disappears.

 

I have trouble understanding what that KVR audio site is trying to be. I always thought it was a forum for free plugins. So cluttered

 

I dont know if this helps you but i have this Softsynth freeware collection some guy collected and it has 1800 free vst plugins + a picture for every plugin. I just downloaded but never used anything from there lol. The guy who put this together was also going to write a little bit about every plugin but then got tired of the project or something and released it as is. I think hes mission was to document vst history

https://audiosex.pro/threads/1831-freeware-synthesizer-9-59-gb-only-windows-info-dl-links.59194/

Also i dont understand how all those old plugins got destroyed when some douchebag forum decided that they are no longer relevant. I had no trouble finding the oldest of the plugins but i had trouble getting them to work x64. The best of the old world got updates and are still around

 

Last edited: Dec 18, 2023