I think your attitude is disgusting, the plug developer is not responsible for music sales in the slightest. The problem with music sales being down goes back to the release of CD's, which soon could be copied perfectly, vinyl could not except to cassette & no one wanted a cassette. Then it moves to downloadable files, MP3 etc so more sharing or "borrowing" and finally we have streamify, where artists get basically nothing while the owner of the company is one of the richest people in the world, I call it legal stealing. So if you tal=ken part in sharing of any kind or even paid streaming, you are part of the cause of the problem, not part of the solution. If it was acceptable to use wares etc on the basis someone can't afford it, I doubt if commercial success occurs , that artist is ever going to invest legitimately in the products that helped them achieve that success. Yes I use some wares, I own 95% of what I use, but not for paid work, for extended evaluation and developing sound & techniques and this cannot be achieved in 14 days nor can you demo other new plugins at the same time. In the case of Nebula presets, its not possible to demo at all or properly, so thee releases are great for that, so far everyone of AlexB's Ive tried sounds amazing and more efficient than Aqua's, but I'm realising that there are few algorithmic plugins of similar quality or that, for example all mastering EQ's sound quite similar and you don't need them all, so this releases are useful for that.A Patreon situation would actually be good, you pay what they're worth to you but it sort of destroys his business model, he's basically trying to get back the money he put into making them.

 

To put it simply, he clearly knew what he was getting into. He understands better than the average person that while this business is lucrative, there is a massive risk of work being shared, pirated, or ripped off. He’s been fully aware of how this landscape works since the 90s.

What he also fails to grasp is that his specific type of work isn't fully protected by copyright, especially since the hardware isn't his own creation. In a way, he’s profiting off other businesses popularity and name, likely without written permission or a proper profit-sharing agreement. Even industry big boys like Waves, who pioneered the plugin business, with their stuff copyrighted to death still have to deal with cracks since day 1. While maybe they have the resources to fight and win lawsuits, it still doesn't stop the piracy. For him to now expect to be untouchable is, frankly, bizarre logic.

 

this is bizarre logic not what you're describing lmao, but thus is the nature of digital assets, we are not digital creatures therefore many don't feel as if they're actually stealing because they can't conceive of something that isn't right in front of them.

and before anyone tries it, yes I have used and downloaded warez, making me also, a thief, and im even worse than the vast majority of you cuz this is my day job

 

Copyright on Nebula/Acustica business has been always at a limbo. If your not using your own DSP, sampling a copyrighted hardware with recognizable configs and name, will lead you to not have legal security to claim anything. It's not uncommon plugin devs changing knobs and plugin names because of that. How can you claim intelectual propriety of a library based on a hardware which the owner didn't licensed it's use for that task? As Clone said it's not fair with those paying fees to use "Neev" name. That's why i see no difference between Nebula libs and AnalogX Genesis captures, regarding copyright. But at least AnalogX knows what he's doing and it's not that level of delusional.

 

Different tiers get you different stuff, smallest one could just be "buy me a coffee" thing where you just want to support him without getting anything in return, for other tiers you get new N-AI lib's and whatnot, influence what he should do next and all that community stuff. Point is to build an community that supports you on monthly basis, not play a lottery with existing or potential customers, but have constant cash flow to ease up development cost's and actually develop things those folks are interested in.

 

I fail to understand what that has to do with your actions? Or mine? Am i now fully justified to do whatever?

 

New song out today ... Audioz Killed The Nebula Star

 

Spoken like a true hobbyist. FYI the setups once made become instant plugins, very fast to use. They're only cumbersome if you're not using a professional level current machine, like any plugin really.

 

Some people have hybrid DAW mix templates too! Imagine clicking one button and everything is setup & ready to go

 

There's a really cool story about hardware sampling and IR's:

A lot of you guys probably know the famous Samplicity Bricasti M7 IRs. But for those who don't know, they sampled Bricasti M7 as impulse responses and were willing to sell it. Bricasti didn't allowed it, instead, they allowed the IRs to be released as a freebie. I mean, why it should be different with Nebula since it's the exact same thing, but with Volterra Kernels and Harmonics?

 

Imagine sampling some unknown brand nobody ever heard of taiwan made karaoke reverb rack unit and selling it for $30 each. I think that's fair if you consider all the work, time, tools and especially skills from capturing to rendering it into final usable Nebula library. Who's gonna buy it though ? slap "Brigetti M007" name on the packages with pictures of the knobs, then people pay twice that price.

 

Let's start with a fairly typical scenario. Suppose there is a developer whose catalog contains a really large number of products, and one item sells somewhere between $30 and $50. About $40 per library. Let's consider the production cost. Of course, this can vary, but for a small independent developer sampling hardware they already own, the cost of creating a single library can be somewhere around $300–$800. That covers the time spent sampling, preparing programs (those vintage but shiny knobs), editing kernels, testing, and perhaps a bit of studio time. And of course, a lot of love, which money cannot buy. If the developer already has the hardware and a recording setup, which most of them probably do, the cost often sits closer to the lower end of that range. If a library sells for about $40, then 10 buyers generate about $400, 15 about $600, 20 about $800. So, in a very ordinary scenario, somewhere between ten and twenty sales already cover the cost of producing the library. So, a pirated copy isn't a big problem for "Don't hurt me Arch! I'm only Littol." a small developer who does this out of love for the community. A community of twenty buyers, of course, returns that love, and a small circle of like-minded enthusiasts who enjoy the indescribable quality of sampled hardware, even when they own a fully analog studio that they use both privately and professionally, remains happily self-contained.

Catalog size? Most developers in this niche don't sell just one library; many have dozens. Some who are really in love with the process have accumulated numerous products over the years. Digital products have a peculiar economic property, you pay the production cost once, but the product can continue selling indefinitely. The older the product, the better; the more vintage it sounds, the more desirable. Imagine a developer with 50+ libraries in their catalog. Suppose each one sells a modest 20 copies per year at $40. That gives 50*20*$40=$40,000 in annual revenue. If each library originally cost around $500 to create, the total development cost for the entire catalog would have been about $25,000. After a relatively small number of sales, that initial investment is already recovered. Everything beyond that point becomes largely margin, aside from minimal distribution and support costs. Some libraries barely sell, while a few popular ones carry most of the revenue, which is normal in digital marketplaces. A handful of well-liked products can easily pull the weight of the entire catalog. Developers (or rather, samplers) often (over)emphasize that a product has been sold "for years," as if that alone indicates how hard it was to produce. Once a library exists, it can continue generating income for many years, with very little or no additional work. A developer with dozens of libraries selling for years and making profit over time does not need to fear warez, especially if a supportive community of like-minded people is willing to reward the developer for unmatched satisfaction. A modest number of buyers per unit is enough to cover production costs, and everything beyond that point is profit? The romantic sob story sounds (vintage) nice and can be tearjerking at times, but simple math can perhaps paint a somewhat different picture.