The more money I save to spend doesn't change my perspective on what I see as a rip-off. For example, I have a thing about the tennis shoes I wear.. they always have to look brand new. I can see a pair for $150 that look good but might feel they are a rip-off at that price. So I end up buying 6 pairs of shoes for $200 that all look good to me and suit my brand-new shoe fetish for a longer period of time. Now this next part is NOT true.. but if there were some tennis shoe thieves in my neighborhood handing out all kinds of new shoes ranging from $20 to $400 a pair absolutely free, and some of these shoes were more favorable than the $150 pair I saw to be a rip-off when I was out buying shoes.. this $150 pair of Divas, Zebras, or Hives is now stuck somewhere in the middle of what I already have in my possession. And what I'm saying is from this perspective a person shouldn't even be in the market looking to spend $150 on a software synth, especially if they've already acquired ones that surpass it in their opinion. If you got Omnisphere 2 for free it would still be stupid to trade it in for Hive. The best bet would be to hold on to Omnisphere 2 and not pretend it aint shit just because you got it free. And put that $150 towards some shit that makes sense. There's people who came here running their mouth about what I should buy. These are the ones with a u-he bundle, a $200 interface, cheap controllers, cheap monitors, could use a better graphics card, cpu, ram, etc.. These same people with terabytes of shit collected from AudioZ can't think of a better investment than Hive?.. but want to sit up and try to discredit someone who knows how to spend money where it counts. If you don't have an "abundance" of money you don't have $150 to waste. If you haven't quit smoking you don't have an extra cigarette. The post was intended to be humorous and provoke people to reconsider the value of such products based on other variables.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2015

This thread (and others uh-rs-or-what related) must be “clever” advertising.. like someone said. I looked at the “demos” (one way or another) of 100s of vsts.. and at some point I also installed this Diva and Zebra stuff. I make music (not sound design) so apart the ugly gui (that’s my opinion!), there were like amm.. “some” presets that probably don’t do justice to this synths (or..).

So to get to the point – they would never caught 1% of my attention IF it wasn’t for these endless discussions. Oh yeah and once I read some responses from the arrogant guy (the owner?) on KVR when I was looking for a synth to buy. This is really so unprofessional, come on..

But even if we take the good-bad publicity (as long as it’s publicity) approach this doesn’t apply to instruments. At least for me this software now has some negative vibe attached to it – and that’s a killer for creative process. So unless there is something that can’t be, at least to a point, achieved with other sw.. it really smells ..like a bad STD ;) I know I’m not going to touch it.

 

You're right, free access to it should be given to all people without any discrimination; class, race, origins etc...
...but the reality - especially in some countries like Germany - is really another!
The most of the established or successful musicians in Germany are part of a selected class of elite, mostly
classical musicians get pushed on, there's very narrow space for all the other musicians and those have
to fight hard to survive in the brutal music business! (See @ Milli Vanilli as example, tragic story).

I think reasonable prices for software Plug-Ins (also the PRO!) should range from 2 to max.50 US Dollars or Euro.
But there again some few Top Studio owners *dictate* the prices because they have more solid budgets.

 

i'm sure we all know sausage fattener is the one were they put in the most time and effort in coding and research. do you know how difficult it is to get a sausage pissed off? and to make graphics that represent this? not to mention the danger to the lives of the people doing this work. it's very very hazardous

 

@dbmusik, That was pretty damn hilarious. And I somewhat agree with you (about 80%). Thanks for the laugh. I needed it.
I use Zebra2 all the time. More so the last 3 or so months because I stopped using it for a while (legit user, here) because of other synths that grew on me and/or won me over (Ie: Serum, Spire, Dune 2, Synthmaster, Omnisphere 2). One thing I don't really like about U-he is they almost never have promotions like for instance, Christmas sale or New Year's. ReFX - you know, the company who makes you shove a $40 dildo into your computer's USB port in order to use their crap as if the poor computers don't experience enough penile-jabbing mayhem in their day - ReFX even hold Christmas and New Year's sales.
U-he could at least do that for a $200 synthesizer, IMHO. I just don't really see what truly makes it stand out from say Steve Duda Xfer records' Serum or Reveal sound's Spire. I know people who would love Zebra in their arsenal but just can't quite chalk up the money for it. But it definitely is nice and awesome sounding, for sure. But IMO they have some competition now, like Xfer and whatnot. Perhaps 4+ years ago that wasn't the case. Just my opinion. I respect others' opinions if they are different from mine, it helps keep an open mind. So no attacking meant here.

 

I dont agree with the op. Nobody is making anyone buy Uhe's shit, thusly, supporting his anti piracy practices. Sure theyre shitty, and really underhanded, but then its HIS shit, he can do what he wants. For those that pay for his shit, his plugins are near flawless. Dont hate because you cant have his shit for free.

 

And there's me thinking it was just about someone using it as an excuse to moan (again) about u-he when they don't own any of their products..

Oh and tennis shoes........ Wtf??!!

 

Money can really suck. It is the co-root of evil with it's near-do-well idiot cousin ego. Together they have accounted for most of the ills that have suffered humanity throughout this go round of recorded history, and while money and ego have also done much good, the zealous and greedy verb/noun"ME" has and will probably trump the positive until the end of the current paridigm, this crippling, limiting, flaccid veined bahn we all call consousness. Hell yea, Urs, coder extraordinairre, is free to feed the hungry consumer (I severely dislike that lump um in a barrel unflattering piss of a word) his wares at any darn price he feels the market will bear. My point being, in my mind to spread the good to "far and wide" on the cheap will ultimately rake in the same or even more dough than the "close and naŕrow" game that now is being played. Heck, it's not as if he needs to conserve resources, his stuff burns no fuel, fells not a single tree or rips asunder the Earth's skin like as a strip mine would do. Copy, paste, where's the waste? Make your bread and spread your love, your love of finest code. Oops, there goes " ME" again!

 

They say there is no such thing as bad press. If your plugin is cracked and freely distributed, that's a HUGE influx of users who would have otherwise not been able to buy it and would have likely passed it by. They learn how to use it well, they use it in projects and fully realize its utility. They then talk to their friends about it, they post about it on forums, they write reviews and make tutorials. As a student of economics, I can say with much certainty that such a widening of the potential buyers market can only be good for business. Given a quality product, whatever losses incurred by piracy are likely to be far exceeded by the benefit of a sharp rise in popularity and awareness. It's free grassroots advertising, basically, and on a level that would be difficult to rival even with millions of dollars spent on ad campaigns. This is what true freedom does - it creates more wealth for both the consumers and the producers. It's always a two-way street. Unfortunately, corporations seem to overlook this fact all to often and are chiefly concerned with maximising near-future profits. Like a drug, it will destroy them eventually (I am talking now in a more general scope, not about uhe or plugin manufacturers in particular).

As for u-he's copy protection scheme, I think it's actually pretty great. It gives you time to learn the ins and outs of the plugin, incorporate it into your workflow, and then it bombs. The people who love it enough will buy it. Very smart. If only u-he would lower their prices, I think they would see the popularity of their products explode, as they truly are exceptional.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2015

My 2 cents: in the world of economics, reaching the most customers doesn't equate to the most profits. E.G. if I can sell too 100 people at $1 I get $100. If I can sell to 20 at $10 I get $200.

Profit maximization occurs when marginal cost equals marginal revenue.

 

At the end of the day, U-he is a company -- probably a lot smaller of a company than you think! -- and not only are they interested in making a little profit, but they have to pay their programmers, their R and D department, their graphic designers, their Web designer, their sales department, and their replicators for any physical copies they're selling and shipping all over the world. They have to compete against other and oftentimes larger software companies making similar products and they have to have a decent advertising budget to stay in the public eye. Taking all this into account, their products are fairly reasonable in price and the quality of their software is decent enough that a fair amount of people choose to buy their stuff. You can complain that you don't have the money to buy their software, but you can't complain about the price of their software … not unless you've purchased it yourself and then felt like you weren't getting your money's worth. They're a company; companies usually exist to make money. Clearly, you're not the target market for their product. As for complaining that the free plugs available on their site are only there to entice you to pay money for the plugs they're selling … yeah. That's exactly why they do it. That's why every company does it. That's why they give away free samples of pizza rolls at supermarkets, or give you a free weekend of HBO on your cable provider. You're not entitled to free stuff from them, especially when there are a myriad of people depending on continuing sales and upgrade fees to pay their rent every month. And you can complain that the owner of the company is getting "fat and rich" (and trust me, in this day and age, there's a good chance he or she is lucky just to be breaking even) from their product, but even if that were the case, so what? No one's supposed to make money from a business they built from the ground up anymore? Isn't that the whole point? This isn't a remote commune of monks in Tibet making this stuff, it's a group of average, everyday people with average, everyday financial responsibilities. If it were your company, if you had designed all these software instruments and plugs, and scraped and clawed and sacrificed to get it rolling in a marketplace that's both overly crowded and exceedingly risky, wouldn't you want to know you'd be rewarded for all that with a modicum of wealth?

Even a "small stable of high-priced hoes (sic)" has to go home at night and feed their kids. If you can't afford their software, but still want to use it, I'll assume you already know the other ways of getting it. If you can afford their software, as you claim, either buy it or move on to wiser investments.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2015

well.. I am selling Zebra, Ace and Presswerk in the next month... for a competitive price as well... sure... you wont get 50% off or some shit, but you WILL be paying less than U-he will ever offer (at least, now that the intro prices are long gone for those products).

 

If you don't like it (or the company), don't buy it. That's how it works. I fail to understand what this fuzz is all about.

I have not yet purchased anything from U-He but thanks to our sister site I'm able to state:
Diva is the best sounding virtual analog synthesizer there is. Period. It's not like they are trying to sell you crap for gold. Plus, the price is absolutely average for such products.

 

There is absolutely no reason for use to not make some price reductions.
Everybody does it. Everybody.
Would them become more poor by making a little 10 or 15% reduction during one weekend? Of course not.
Right now, they are reading this thread and comment, I know they will.

How many thousands guys like me are waiting for that little price drop, to run and buy a diva or zebra or other plug-in? TENS OF THOUSANDS.

Only, uhe turned into a over- pretentious over-selfish over-stubborn over-confident over-everything over-arrogant ridiculous tool, hated by another 100 new guys, each day. He may not give a fuck about whatever the planet thinks, but I see what I see, and each day, I see more people feeling pissed, betrayed and fooled, and those people aren't spending euro on his company.
-stubborn, because he refuses to make a price drop
- pretentious, because he says he is the number 1 in the world, and the Warez scene doesn't exist and are just little script kids
- confident, because he believes his plug-ins are the best, and people should pay its price because they're worth it, more than anything else in the market, and because everybody should buy the best plug-ins ever, they should pay the price they decide, if they decide to sell Presswerk at 800 euros, it's because the plug-in is worth that!
- he lies, when he says the reason for not lowering prices is because they don't want to piss off customers who have paid 200 euros 5 years ago, and will see the plug-in being sold at 170 only! Fuck, any customer knows a product will get a price drop over time! It's natural, normal, specially on Internet. A 600 euros device bought today, will eventually cost only 450, in about 4 or 5 months. Are their customers that stupid to not accept the fact their purchased plug-in will eventually cost less over time, or see some price drops during Christmas, holidays, etc?
- arrogant, he decided to do EXACTLY the opposite people would want. Want a price drop? I will show the world I hold the planet and its testicles in my hands, and can do MY WAY, because I'm the BEST, I'm GOD.
-etc etc etc (censored, must be over 30 to read it...)

shit, URS, stop being like that, and embrace the world and the dozens thousands people that just want a little kind move from you!
The quality of your plug-ins is undeniable. Everybody wants them. Only, not everybody can spend all that cash.

Damn, just do the test, and make a price drop, when nobody is expecting. Those who wanted to buy, will still buy at the older price, those who will know about the price drop, well, they will benefit from it, during 1 day or a few hours. And then, raise the price again, and too bad for those who missed the price drop: maybe next one will only come in 3 years. Afraid of people not buying your plug-ins because they wait for a price drop? Don't worry, those WHO ABSOLUTELY NEED your plugs will still buy them ,like they did so far.

Damn, print those coupons here, I promise, in front of the 10'000 readers of this thread, at 120-130 euros each, tomorrow I WILL PURCHASE Zebra AND Diva. Make Hive at 89 euros, tomorrow I WILL PURCHASE IT. Make Presswerk at 49 euros, tomorrow I WILL PURCHASE it.

but no. Don't listen to us, me, and only do it YOUR way. Don't make any price drop. Just listen to YOU, look at the mirror, and see how magnificent you are, and how much the whole world loves and respects you. It must feel so good, having all that power.

 

Hey, Da*mler, sell me your new S600 for 50.000 € and I'll buy it right now. I bet 10000s other car drivers would do the same.
What? Not gonna happen? Then fuck you and your capitalist company. You're the worst.

Really, wouala, are you serious? If you want those plugins so badly why don't you just buy a used license? If you are able to pony up 130 Euros tomorrow, you'll be able to save up to 169 Euros in another six months. Stop whining.


btw - tens of thousands? Your perception of the audio software market seems to be a little off...

 

"Hell, even if you didn't buy their stuff, you can always send your rants to their sales department, assuming they're justified"

LOL,
When you have dozens thousands people begging for a tiny price drop, and you don't give a fuck about them,
It's easy to imagine they have set some filters on their email servers, if an email contains "I don't like...", 'you should...", 'when will we...', 'when is it...', 'too high...', 'why can't you...', 'please,...', 'why don't you...', '...too expensive...', 'have no money...', 'cpu -hog...', '..is freezing my...', ...1 note polyphony. ..', etc etc,
Those emails are automatically sent to the UVHOV (Urs Virtual HOVen)

 

But it does not preclude that it could

 

In economics, marginal cost is the change in the total cost that arises when the quantity produced is incremented by one unit. That is, it is the cost of producing one more unit of a good. (That's what marginal cost is.)

u-he marginal cost for one unit = $0
u-he total profit for one unit = $200

At no marginal cost, you will quicker sell 3 units for $100 = ($300) than you will 1 unit for $200 = ($200)

We're not talking automobile sales, and importing, and fuel economy, and a list of variables that would be long enough to take up a whole page in this thread.

 

Last edited: Oct 23, 2015

ha this made me laugh,

my opinion? these plug-ins are rather moderate but hey,
thats not the first one that got to much attention around here,

Serum: all has been done before...

Nebula: great, but sooooo not user friendly

Lindel channel x: geeez why we waited for that?

Omni sphere: look at me, not having this and still being alive and shit.....