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A friend and I are actively working on innovating in the context of DAWs and music production, we're specifically trying to modernize the discovery and accessib

A friend and I are actively working on innovating in the context of DAWs and music production, we're specifically trying to modernize the discovery and accessibility of plugins. Nice to see DAWs mentioned here - there's a lot that could be improved in the field and we're hoping to tackle several outstanding issues in the near future. (If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)

IAmGraydon 10y ago
Don't you think it's a bit unethical to collect email addresses with the promise of a download, only to tell the user that the download isn't even available. But hey - thanks for giving us your email!
- Dragonai 10y ago
  That's on us, our bad - we intended to put the download up right around when we were finishing the site design but encountered a few last-minute bugs. This fell to the wayside, I'll fix it ASAP!
edraferi 10y ago
Random question since you're elbow deep in VST land... Have you seen any plugins taking advantage of GPUs? Seems like they should open up sonic complexity that you can't replicate on current hardware synths.
- joshuaduffy 10y ago
  The audio processing loop wouldn't benefit from using the GPU because we can already hit above audible sample rates. Beefy GPU's are usually noisy too so you don't want one in your rig.
jason_slack 10y ago
Can you elaborate more? As an Ableton and Push 2 user, I find plugins very easily accessible.
- Dragonai 10y ago
  Sure! To clarify, by "accessibility" we're not just talking about the ability to find plugins, but also the price barrier for most higher-end plugins. The former isn't a huge deal (as you mentioned), but there're two sub-problems we're attacking in the latter: 1) From interviewing a lot of producers and plugin developers, our findings show that there's a bit of a vicious cycle with pricing: most hobbyist producers aren't willing to shell out the money for plugins, so they opt to pirate them instead. The plugin developers lose out on a ton of sales, so they hike the prices up to make up for lost revenue. The hobbyist producers continue to see high prices and therefore continue to pirate plugins, and the cycle starts all over again. :) 2) Most paid plugins don't offer trial versions, and when they do, they're always crippled and DRMed in some form or another. When there's no trial, users don't want to make the leap of faith and buy the plugin, and when there is, the aforementioned crippling/DRM can be quite the hindrance. We're shooting to make the user experience better on both of these fronts by offering a more modern marketplace - you still get a nice store to browse through and read about plugins, but one of EQIP's value adds is the ability to instantly demo the full version of any plugin on the spot right within your session (and our technology's secret sauce prevents anyone from getting their hands on either the plugin or the audio). The next step in our gameplan is to offer bundled subscriptions for plugins; you might think of Splice's rent-to-own, which is a great offering, but the pricing model is on a per-plugin basis - we're looking at various tiers of affordable pricing for access to X number of plugins depending on the tier. This way, a producer can have unlimited access to several plugins they like for one low cost (and rent-to-own can easily be added to this, we're still working on the pricing for the time being). I hope that was a helpful brief rundown! There's a lot more to it - if you'd like to chat, you're more than welcome to email me, my email's available at my personal website (also in my profile). :)

IAmGraydon 10y ago

Don't you think it's a bit unethical to collect email addresses with the promise of a download, only to tell the user that the download isn't even available. But hey - thanks for giving us your email!

Dragonai 10y ago
That's on us, our bad - we intended to put the download up right around when we were finishing the site design but encountered a few last-minute bugs. This fell to the wayside, I'll fix it ASAP!

edraferi 10y ago

Random question since you're elbow deep in VST land... Have you seen any plugins taking advantage of GPUs? Seems like they should open up sonic complexity that you can't replicate on current hardware synths.

joshuaduffy 10y ago
The audio processing loop wouldn't benefit from using the GPU because we can already hit above audible sample rates. Beefy GPU's are usually noisy too so you don't want one in your rig.

jason_slack 10y ago

Can you elaborate more? As an Ableton and Push 2 user, I find plugins very easily accessible.

Dragonai 10y ago
Sure! To clarify, by "accessibility" we're not just talking about the ability to find plugins, but also the price barrier for most higher-end plugins. The former isn't a huge deal (as you mentioned), but there're two sub-problems we're attacking in the latter: 1) From interviewing a lot of producers and plugin developers, our findings show that there's a bit of a vicious cycle with pricing: most hobbyist producers aren't willing to shell out the money for plugins, so they opt to pirate them instead. The plugin developers lose out on a ton of sales, so they hike the prices up to make up for lost revenue. The hobbyist producers continue to see high prices and therefore continue to pirate plugins, and the cycle starts all over again. :) 2) Most paid plugins don't offer trial versions, and when they do, they're always crippled and DRMed in some form or another. When there's no trial, users don't want to make the leap of faith and buy the plugin, and when there is, the aforementioned crippling/DRM can be quite the hindrance. We're shooting to make the user experience better on both of these fronts by offering a more modern marketplace - you still get a nice store to browse through and read about plugins, but one of EQIP's value adds is the ability to instantly demo the full version of any plugin on the spot right within your session (and our technology's secret sauce prevents anyone from getting their hands on either the plugin or the audio). The next step in our gameplan is to offer bundled subscriptions for plugins; you might think of Splice's rent-to-own, which is a great offering, but the pricing model is on a per-plugin basis - we're looking at various tiers of affordable pricing for access to X number of plugins depending on the tier. This way, a producer can have unlimited access to several plugins they like for one low cost (and rent-to-own can easily be added to this, we're still working on the pricing for the time being). I hope that was a helpful brief rundown! There's a lot more to it - if you'd like to chat, you're more than welcome to email me, my email's available at my personal website (also in my profile). :)