Took you long enough!... BTW, it was a pleasure to meet you

You guys means this? Oh, wait... actually this one is "cracking" music hardware... like R2R counterpart?

 

Here's something to really fuck you up:

Bought plugins sound better.

 

Holy Molly!! All these years making excuses for making terrible music and it was as simple as that...

You left me as fucked up as it gets...

 

Last edited: Jun 8, 2019

I swear to god my amp sims sound better when im looking at the GUI

 

When we use a lot of cracked plugins we can underestimate them. They was free, so fuck it.
My point is, we got a lot of tools in our hands that worth thousands of dollars (sometimes the price dont equal the quality) and we ended up underestimating ourselves. We don't need to stop using them, but is a thing to think about it and elevate our skills.

humans do not value what comes easy

 

So true. This is a human mistake we all know but in practice is hard to correct.

 

I don't know. The day I can make 1000$ a week with music that's the day I'll pay 1000$ for DAWs & plugins.
I'm not going to spend for a "maybe", I'll pay when I can make a living of this.

 

Wow, echoes of the pre-covid world...

 

It's pain as day. Nobody in their right mind would use pirated software {probably somali pirates} because as soon as they put it up on soundcloud they would find themselves under investigation. Everyone knows the sister site is for informational purposes only.

 

There are different categories of developer:

1. Small, independent, innovative and passionate about audio. Often just a single dev or small team, charging realistic money for the products they produce.

2. The corporates, large teams, bigger overheads, more marketing oriented, often headed by management that have no interest in audio other than it being a product for profit. Nonetheless, the devs that work for these companies tend to be highly skilled and also passionate about the products they develop (though can be held back by management marketing priorities). Varied output, sometimes are innovative leaders but can also have a tendency to prefer quantity over quality. Hence, many have branched out toward "content" as being a more consumable product.

3. Small, independent, unoriginal, desperate to generate a foothold in the market via marketing overload. We've seen a lot of these companies spring up over the last five years or so. Many are a result of developer education; taught VST development in combination with marketing in University, they emerge seeing audio as a viable business strategy and are no more passionate about it than they would be if they were developing any other software. It doesn't mean they're not passionate about code but they aren't necessarily passionate about audio itself. What we have now are multitudes of these companies all with identikit portfolios where the only real difference is a varying GUI. They're churning out plugins at an alarming rate because they're not innovating and all using the same underlying pre-built modules that are available in applications like JUCE and just glueing them together, modular fashion and sticking a skin on top. It's a massive con-trick and all their plugins are a waste of money. Quite a few of these companies have failed and dissappeared within a very short period of time, some are still managing to bludgeon their way into users burgeoning plugin folders due to their propaganda campaigns (it may be apparent that I'm non too keen on this particular style of minimum effort=maximum output companies).

4. Not a type of developer at all, but a type of user: The type that never uses stock processing plugins as they somehow believe that they are inferior to plugins made by other developers, maybe because the GUI isn't quite as sparkly. When it comes to digital plugins, there's basically no difference and stock plugins have been just as good as third-party for many, many years. Of course, there are a great many plugins out there that can add to the pallete but for 90% of work, it's actually already built into every serious DAW.

All this may seem slightly unrelated, but it isn't because it's tied to the consumerist nature of plugin collecting that pretty much all of us are guilty of in one way or another, cracked or legit. There are simply too many developers and too many plugins for the available market which causes increasing desperation from both developers and consumers. There's really no need to swarm like piranhas over 99.9% new products because it really is only one in every thousand that provide anything new that's worthwhile.

Developers are worth supporting. They're human beings, and mostly quite intelligent, decent people, putting in long hours of work to put food on the table, just like most of humanity. They're (mostly) not actually some alien parasitic species attempting to leech the blood from unsuspecting consumers. It's up to the individual to control their overwhelming addiction to consume and not be a prisoner of the psychological insecurities reinforced by the market. People choose, or just end up on, a particular "career" path. Developers, musicians, plumbers, hairdressers, it doesn't matter what it is, nobody wants to work for free. We have the privilege of being able to use warez for free solely because it is a digital product. That product is a result of someone's hard work and dedication, it definitely deserves recompense, if you can afford it. If you can't, then the "industry" has no case in my opinion and the old "lost revenue" trope is an entirely illegitimate accusation, projected by puritanical worshippers at the altar of capitalism with no understanding of the majority of circumstances that drives piracy. The truth is that most of us here are not wealthy and if we were, we'd no doubt have no issue providing a capital exchange for all of the goods we use.

One final point is this: We now live in an age where a complete digital audio environment can be achieved for free, or for a minimal expense. Go back ten years and I'd say most of the free stuff on offer was substandard but that's simply not the case any longer. There's a quality free version of every style of plugin imaginable and more free sample libraries than you could possibly ever use in a lifetime. Many more expensive plugins are periodically available at massive discounts, making them much more realistically affordable (my last purchase was ArcSyn a couple of weeks ago for £15, one plugin that's truly worth it's standard pricing). The DAW is possibly one exception but really, who can't afford to buy Reaper at $60? (plus I understand it is actually fully working without a license but with a nag screen at boot) I'd be inclined to disbelieve anyone posting here that they can't afford that whilst using a device that cost many times that amount...

A lot of the arguments for PURE piracy are quite hollow these days due to these factors. The most valid ones in my opinion are for realistic demo periods, circumventing ridiculous online authorisation systems, being a novice (no true understanding of what is quality or needed due to lack of experience and open to exploitation by the market) and of course, relative poverty because warez can bring light into an otherwise difficult existence.

 

Last edited: Feb 1, 2025

Just take the word "musician", cross it out, and write "developer" in with crayon.

 

i have wished that some developers could have a donation thing where you could send them some moneys even if you cant afford hundreds of dollars to purchase the product
probably doesnt stand up legally
i have also considered purchasing a cheaper product from them that i wont use just to support
might be a dumb idea, dont know

 

Thank you dear @Haze for your insights and perspectives.

An example is Camel Audio - Alchemy, a one-man company, he worked on Alchemy for 4 years. During that time he had no investor to lend him money to live on. A software developer currently earns €4,274 per month, which is around €200,000 for 4 years. So theoretically the plugin would cost €200,000, as the average market price is €199, he would have to sell 1005 Alchemy plugins just to cover costs. So if he sells more than 1005 he will be in the profit zone, but he also has to use that to support his life, pay for the website and the accounting etc. and probably pay taxes.

The greater the competition and the more saturated the market is with plugins, the more likely the market prices for plugins will fall and the manufacturers' earnings will fall. Sometimes they are so cheap that they generate even more buyers in the short term (Black Friday, Summer Sale etc. for example).

The less money people have in their pockets due to inflation or unemployment, the more likely they are not to buy plugins, but rather only the bare necessities for food and energy or, as @Haze already wrote, they use cracked plugins.