I wonder if there's any OF "model" stopped releasing nudes because someone leaked her content and complains about how she's losing subs

 

Maybe it's good idea to postpone new releases, rethink his current prices now when everything is already shared, some stuff don't even have proper skin, while being legacy (with legacy faults) and still cost the same as his newest stuff, dunno, if there wasn't azzimov, doubt I would even bother with many.

Nebula is clearly abandoned, this is probably all that is going to be and it's niche as it get's, we can keep it alive with supporting 3rd party developers and using k'd version, but right now even he have doubts that he will continue, so it's kinda of dead end.

So yeah, maybe he could start a Patreon, let people support him even with 5 bucks a month, it's better then nothing.

 

Try this one out then. Maybe it is not Giancarlo trying to harm third-party producers of these libraries, expansions, profiles, IRs, or whatever else they might be callled.

Maybe it is any one of the companies who aren't fooled by the old tactic of placing an unlicensed product harming their brand somehow.. Manufacturers have never thought tactics such as branding products with silly changed names such as "Neev" are some way to do anything other than rip them off. Maybe it is some software vendor like UAD who pays "Neev" licensing fees for every plugin they sell, and people not paying licensing fees driving down all their prices. Let's not forget there is an entire website full of people called Gearspace that may not like hearing the entire internet plugin "community" trying to tell them what their hardware sounds like after paying for expensive stuff.

There are a lot of people who do not like anything related to Acustica, for those very same reasons. People who would like nothing more to put any nail they could into the Giancarlo software wooden box with his company name painted on it.

Maybe what these guys do is hard work. But the recent thread about DicksoDSP would probably have a different tone if the dsp56300 emulators were being made for profits. What they are doing is definitely way more work, as you can see in the difference in release numbers. They have done under 10 emulations, for free; and these third-parties seemingly crank out these things 10 at a time and for profit.

Nebula could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't matter to me a single bit, in either direction. It's a CPU hog I don't need. However, I can appreciate the irony of the entire music production world being anti-AI because it's music people didn't even make; meanwhile telling everyone how great their music sounds through gear they have never even seen before sounds. It's all fantasyland anyway.

 

Who says sales dropped because of piracy? I think its more likely that sales are dropping because Nebula is basically abandonware, and with all of the shifts in music technology right now, its clunky and cumbersome in comparison to the newer tools available.

And this is coming from a someone who has a legit license for Nebula 4.5 and has purchased numerous Acustica products over the years. I been a fan of Nebula since version 3. Nebula libraries sound great, but its always been niche. I can't imagine with Acustica's lack of support that anyone expected to make a boat load of money from Nebula libraries in 2026.

 

Last edited: Mar 15, 2026 at 3:27 AM

I do feel for these nebula library creators, but there are so many more factors at play that others have mentioned.

I would never buy any of these libraries anyways, even through they outperform Acustica native plugins, because of how dogshit the UX is with Nebula.

1 EQ band per instance without a custom skin being made? In 2026?

The biggest issue is being tied to an Acustica product that is basically abandonware. Basing your business model on Acustica is nearly a death sentence imo, even worse it's a proprietary software/technology that Acustica refuses to improve.

Like starkid84 said, I own legit Nebula and have bought many Acustica plugins. I wholly regret spending any of my money on Acustica stuff.

If AlexB or TimP were able to develop their own plugins that have the same sound quality as their nebula libs, but with an actually good UX, and no association with Acustica, I would absolutely buy them!

Other companies are using hardware curve sampling technology now, correct? And I don't mean just clowns like Tone Empire.

 

I love Nebula but i gotta agree it's a niche. I don't see any high tier pro audio producers (i mean people really rich and hyped) using Nebula libs. Or they use normal plugins or they use HW. Or they are happy with normal DSP or they aren't, so they will pick the HW if that's the case. Nebula it's a great way to get a vibe from the hardware at the cost of a horrible install process, bloatware and CPU costs and only people who are geeking more than balling will use it.

I mean, not even Giancarlo supports Nebula anymore. If it was business i bet he would want a piece of the cake. And i agree Nebula libs are expensive for what they are in fact. Not everyone it's Henry Olonga, who sampled hundreds of HW and give it for free under donation. AlexB seems to be really passionate about what he's doing, but sometimes it's hard to accept things on what they really are.

I saw Nebula libs being shared on the sister site, and at the same time, a huge amount of Nebula threads being created here in a way that never existed before (i used Nebula before this release wave, and missed those threads here). Maybe with more people using it, people on pro audio start paying attention for it and putting real money on it. Or they already know it and don't give a damn. Mixed feelings about this one.

 

While technically an Acustica product, the developers that create the libraries are not Acustica, they are third party developers. One could use the "freed" version of Nebula, the host plugin, from sister site, and buy the third party libraries without supporting Acustica and their customer abuse.

A Patreon, only fan, discord etc is definitely a good idea. I agree its a good idea to rethink the prices and revamp the shop with new pricing, better customer loyalty, some freebies etc. Its a highly competitive market out there, even though his prices are not sky high, its still out of reach to many. I always try to look at this sort of thing as more affordable = more sales. 5 sales at 40 bucks? or 25 sales at 20 bucks? $200 or $500?

Good theory! I had the thought that its Analog X lmao. We're going to have plugin wars.

Side note, Its impossible to gauge who did what work, but i know they all put in work. What the Usual Suspects did is rare nowadays. Amazing they released such great tools for free. While these third party guys may have a significant amount of releases, they were done over many years. Not all at once. I know the latest libraries from the three main guys, Tim P, Cupwise, and Alex B, took significant time, research and experimentation. Speaking of free though, personally I think if they all did a free release here and there, amongst the paid, they would get more customers.

Also, i want to understand your last bit, the anti-AI vs gear they have never seen, but I don't think I understand haha. If you feel like elaborating, would love to hear!

Im not sure why people think Nebula is abandon ware, it was just updated not that long ago. Not just some "engine update", but an actual update, with new features, stability improvements etc. Maybe 6 months ago or so. It was also said that they will be revamping it even further, adding the ability to host AI snapshots and some other shit i can't remember.

But yah, I do agree being tied up with Acustica could be a major factor in not making sales. Thanks to zaphod's idiocy, many people want nothing to do with anything Acustica. It would be awesome if they could release their own plugins, but they are tied to the tech. Zaphod is an idiot, and should have made the nebula tech somewhat open-source, and just charge people a fee to host their products, similar to Kontakt.

There are other companies doing similar stuff. AI captures using NAM. I dont think anyone is doing the volterra kernel thing tho. The AI stuff can be really good, but it has limitations similar to Nebula. Funny enough, Acustica's latest product, Yellow, uses a blend of their traditional tech, and "AI" neural nets. They explain it as the volterra kernels is the best for lower level signals, but the neural nets are superior when things start to get pushed. So their plugin uses both, when you start driving the input, or slamming the threshold, the neural net slowly starts to take over.

 

it is very simple. when people start paying for music again, ill start paying for gear again.

 

Well, obviously I wrote that in a way to expand the possibilities of such "suppliers" to picture conspiring and possible reasons, and not to call anyone specifically out, because I have no idea who would do it. But the "usual suspects" in such a situation would have been the manufacturers themselves, and then other vendors of the same types of digital content. Either emulations of, or other "IR sourced" content. I know it can be different terms and tech, but it's the same as far as this subject needs technicality. In simple terms, it is people selling stuff they might be seen as selling something that doesn't actually exist in some form they are selling it, without any permission from the manufacturers of the gear.
When these things used to appear shared, they were a one-off kind of thing. It was easy to believe someone would share something like that with no intent to do anything but share something. The amount of them recently, seems like they would be outside of a normal amount of money someone would spend just to share them; so the reason for a conspiracy theory is because of someone's suspicion of some ulterior motive.

The first place I would suspect, of course; would be any direct competitors of Acustica. So in this case, AnalogX. Then I would think of their "like kind" competitors, which would be any plugin developers who specialize in analog emulation plugins. They still have more business to lose to Acustica than serious gear manufacturers; and they might also play by looser rules than companies with serious reputations to protect like Neve, API, SSL, etc. But still, buying and leaking all of this digital content is probably a much more effective way to shut some tiny operation down than going the legal route. And definitely cheaper.

Where I would really look to, would be where they are actually sourcing the files they are selling in the first place. I do not know anything about these kinds of IR-type of vendors sales figures, but I'd think if some posts sharing their files mean they are not even covering operating costs; it's really unlikely any of the gear they are probing to make such files is even something they have physical access to. Who is really losing business to these people the most? Probably Analog Access or Mix:Analog. The people who actually own the gear being sampled and packaged as these IRs. They have enough money for the gear, and the robots to configure signal paths, settings, and even have plugins made to do it.
By paying them and turning around and selling a product built on top of their service product, it would be the most obvious source of either ill will, or silent partners.

I don't think there will be any plugin wars about it. Nebula is a CPU hog. If AnalogX has been able to make effective use of all the modern GPU processing cores similar to CUDA to offload previously used CPU resources; Nebula is nothing to continue investing time and money into. This could be something as simple as third-party library creators jumping off a sinking ship. But I do like a conspiracy theory where I do not have to look at 3 million pdf files.

 

Last edited: Mar 15, 2026 at 5:35 AM

I see huge creative work and quality from Airwindows plugins, but they are freebies because of their nature. And Chris is doing a extensive coding work to make it happen. The same about The Usual Suspects. Nebula it's not really superior than that. But we are talking about effort vs delivery and it's hard to tell people to support a system which is not getting updated anymore and it's extremely clunky the way it was abandoned. Yes, we got upgrades for N4 libs, but N5 is not ever being released. The only person who can save AlexB and the other folks is the same one, who, on the conspiracy theories, is sharing libs on the Sister Site, aka Giancarlo. If the whole system doesn't get an upgrade to fit the standards of the modern audio production, Nebula project is dead a long ago.

 

Many smaller developers are one man shows and they still get cracked, regularly. Why would Nebula library devs be treated any different?

 

Lots of great insight, thanks for elaborating! I really hadn't thought of a conspiracy theory until it was mentioned here, but It does make a lot of sense. Who knows though, could also just be some random. Im not sure how cupwise or Tim P get the gear they sample, but Alex B is a studio tech / repair guy, so he's always got something new across his desk. Cupwise's libraries are not necessarily expensive equipment, a handful of them are, but most are just interesting or unique pieces of gear. Old tube radios, cassette decks etc. Tim P does have some of the heavy hitters, more expensive gear, but its nothing a small - medium sized project studio couldn't have.

Analog X did use Access Analog, and even admitted so, but im not sure if he still is, or if he's figured out another way to get access to the gear. Who knows. Thanks again for your insight, good stuff!

Its wild how much Chris from Airwindows has done. As just a singular person at that. Many of his plugins are superior to UAD etc. If he had more of a UI, I have no doubt his stuff would be way more popular.

As far as N5, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Ive heard from two different people over at Acustica, including Giancarlo himself, that they have been working on a major update for a while now, but are focusing on some other tech first, of which they plan to implement into the new nebula. But who knows. I wouldn't be surprised either way. It is pretty funny that the general consensus is that Nebula is dead, when to me, the best libraries have all come out in the last year or so.

 

Totally! I would be doing the same thing if it was a dev that i knew of, whose tools I use regularly , and they posted something along the lines of what Alex B posted.

I don't think alex or anyone should have special status, I honestly do have conflicting feelings about it. I understand many people genuinely cannot afford audio tools like this, and I love that they can have access. I also believe the sister site can sometimes act as advertising lol. I have found out about many plugins, kontakt instruments and so on, that I ended up buying, by seeing it on sister site. I also do understand the frustration of being a small independent creator and having your product distributed. Im Just opening up a dialog about it is all. As someone mentioned above, the same way we celebrate when a doucebag dev or mega-plugin-corp gets cracked, we should also do the opposite, and try to celebrate and support smaller, independent devs (as long as they aren't doucebags lol). Like i said, im pretty conflicted haha.

 

I actually do have sympathy for the developer that the OP discusses, mostly due to longtime impressions of how things work on Z and how that impacts the business of selling music-related apps. Mind you, I download plenty of stuff, but for a long time things used to be done differently on the warez scene.

For many years there was a longstanding unspoken rule among warez releasers and uploaders next door, and elsewhere, to wait a period of time before releasing cracked or fixed apps. Doing so gave developers a window of opportunity to sell what they have without interference from 'the scene'. That helped keep developers alive while still allowing for file sharing, albeit a bit delayed. This was important because clearly, without the developers there would ultimately be no files to share. Put these folks out of business, and in the end you put everyone out of business.

What really changed all that was when the policy next door became granting "ownership" to an uploader/releaser who first posted a particular file to share. If that uploader posted XYZ Reverb from R2R no one else could then post the same file on the site, the original uploader owned it. I always felt this was an extremely bad policy that causes harm to developers and downloaders, while giving excessive beneficial treatment to the uploaders. It also creates the circumstances outlined in this thread; it makes it so that uploaders want to put out releases as quickly as they possibly can so that they have that 'ownership' and make their money off of downloads, while at the same time they allow no window of opportunity to developers to actually sell what they've created, since within a day or two of product release you can already get it for free next door on Z.

This is apparently part of what's going on with these Nebula releases, along with this developers hard feelings about it all. I also frequently see this of late with releases of Native Instruments sample packs which show up next door before NI even has them listed on their website. An uploader on Z already has ownership of that file next door and is making money off of the downloads, before NI has made a penny from it! There's many examples that could be given of this sort of uneven approach occurring on Z.

I think the scene worked better for all when there was a more moderate approach to releasing that gave the developers some time to benefit from their work and then some months later gave file sharers a chance to do what they do, as well. However, the 'ownership' policy next door, IMO, put a bullet in that and its created these problems that many developers can't get out of. This 'ownership' policy is what ultimately leaves developers no choice but to pack it in because uploaders want to make their money off of this stuff before the developer sees any return at all on their work. In lean economic times, policies like this will continue to exert pressure on developers and help force many to call it a day.

 

WTF is that supposed to mean? He's pro mastering engineer that sampled his own gear, or hired gear to sample or drove distances to sample someone else's gear all at the highest level, he shared his time and work at a reasonable costs the alternative is to buy the hardware. What incentive is their for people to create something if they can't recoup their costs, and we all know time is money.

 

We need some kind of Azzimov to make skins for AW plugins! That would be a banger.

 

The usual experts that haven't even used Nebula bashing it in any Nebula thread here with unrelated opinions no one asked for that don't relate to the original topic. Well done. Why does Nebula trigger you so much? You have never used it. It reminds me of Ricky Gervais' analogy of seeing an add for guitar lessons nailed to a tree then yelling 'BUT I DON'T WANT FUCKING GUITAR LESSONS...!' Do I win a laugh emotion lol.

I will say in relation to the original post - to say stop sharing these programs is the same as don't share any cracked plugins or presets. You can't pull the moral thing in relation to Nebula libraries here while happily using others developer's pirated warez. Either everything is fair game or everything isn't. Honestly, I've bought a bunch of his libs - and as good as they are, I think they are too expensive, and if they were maybe 1/3 to half cheaper he would have sold so many more. If all these libs are coming out only now it's been a pretty good run? Literally 15+ years. I do also wonder why and how they are all suddenly available - either someone has purchased them all and decided to share - seems unlikely, or the AA dev sharing them theory kinda could make sense. Tin foil hat time.!

Here's a unrelated comment - I saw someone mention AnalogX Genesis.

If you want to run the trial indefinitely (on Mac) Find the folder user/library/Keyzy. inside is another folder with 3 files inside. Delete licence_file and serial_file. Leave host_id. It was on the sister site but got deleted, I'm not sure why. I simply used sudo fs_usage in terminal to work this out, sometimes you get lucky if the protection is basically non existent.

 

Last edited: Mar 15, 2026 at 9:06 AM

"he shared his time and work at a reasonable costs the alternative is to buy the hardware. What incentive is their for people to create something if they can't recoup their costs, and we all know time is money."

This line of reasoning applies to virtually all audio software developers.
Suggesting otherwise is frankly hypocritical.
He must have known what kind of environment he was entering. If he didn’t, then he was either uninformed or failed to do even basic market research - neither of which really justifies his position.
Being an audio software or soundware developer means you have to factor piracy into the equation. At some point your work will likely be pirated, so it’s something that should be accounted for in the initial business model. Ignoring that reality is simply naive.
Piracy is an established fact in this industry (as it is in others like gaming and film/TV) and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Nebula library developers don’t deserve special treatment in this regard; granting them that would amount to an arbitrary privilege.

 

I do believe that sharing of warez from independent, small devs / sample makers etc is sad all around, not just for nebula devs. For the most part, I don't use warez. I buy and own the majority of what i use.

As far as the libraries just now coming out, thats partially true, a lot of them are old releases. But all of their brand new stuff is being released too. Week old libraries.

It is what it is. i agree if the libraries were priced lower they would sell a lot more. Its also pretty lame to punish your actual supporters because sales are bad. Figure it out lol, theres always a solution. Like someone suggested here, make a patreon.

 

Yeah same. I buy a lot. Unless you are making money hand over fist it's pretty hard to resist the shiny warez freebies though sometimes huh!

But yes... AlexB is the prime candidate for a Patreon situation.