The Antares/Subscription Rant, Part 1, Probably
I’ve used Antares technology for the last 20 years. It’s great! I love that the maths behind it originated from, well, oil, I think, but fundamentally, seismology. No other audio DSP can ‘affect’ the sound in quite the way their engine does. Autotune is a great tool/effect, HarmonyEngine is great for doubling and really cool MIDI-driven harmony effects, the AVOX things like Mutator and Throat are some of the nuttiest effect DSP I’ve ever used..
And then last year (was it?) they went and did something like bloody turning the whole business of it into a subscription-based farce. A real turn-off for a lot of producers and musicians. Even though purchasing software products doesn’t really mean you ever actually own any of the software you’ve bought (we just buy a license to allow us to use it as long as we observe the restrictions of the license) the act of ‘owning it’ is a single process; spend money -> use item.
This is MASSIVELY FRUSTRATING for many digital artists and producers. WE DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO PAY FOR YOUR INABILITY TO MAKE GOOD PROJECTIONS BASED ON YOUR REVENUE. From the customer’s perspective, and knowing the methods companies use to keep confidence up in the board room, to maintain investment, and to keep share prices high, we are just a set of numbers in some spreadsheets in some anonymous finance manager’s presentation folder. They’ve figured that if they take $250 from as many customers as possible, every year (or $25 a month ($300 per year), like every good business, taking more money from those who can’t afford the larger items), they don’t have to think so hard about how to make money (read: keep investors interested) every year. They could choose to release nothing, and yet thousands of people would be giving them several hundred pounds a year, for nothing. The point is, this model of selling software products to people is unsavoury and unfair.
Annoyingly, and I mean SUPER-annoyingly, the technology/IP/DSP they own is a great sounding DSP. Hmm, I say that, and then I think about the new vocoder Vocodist and that, quite frankly, is awful. They tried to make it able to model lots of old vocoders from yesteryear, and I suppose it can because of the functions they’ve built into it (how many bands, how the envelopes respond, frequency spread of detector/filtering circuit) but it still sounds rubbish!
What they have finally achieved, and I’ve been waiting literally 2 decades for this kind of instrument, is turning the Autotune engine into a sampler. Now, I still haven’t had the chance to play with it, and there aren’t many videos demoing it. Although, looking at the Vocodist videos, I have little faith in their ability to select producers or artists to demonstrate their products with aplomb. (HINT: I am available for these jobs)
Auto Tune Slice is their new product, and, assuming they’ve done a good job on it, we should be able to play back audio through the AutoTune engine, and repitch, stretch and mangelise those sounds with few artifacts. As I said somewhere else on the internet, it behaves a little bit like Melodyne when we could trigger the blobs, sequentially, from MIDI notes. And it played back the blobs at the MIDI note pitch! Like a cross between spectral sampling and those Vocaloid-style products. Then Celemony removed it from the functionality, which was a huge disappointment.
And so, here we are, with a similar kind of tool, possible better? At least it’s a thing, rather than undocumented functionality (as it was in Melodyne). And I really want it. But even moreso, I don’t want to support the subscription model currently employed by Antares. I am not alone.
I believe, the outcry surrounding their first foray into the subscription model, did influence somebody somewhere in Antares management, so it is now possible to buy the AVOX collection outright. But I suspect, owning that doesn’t give you a reduced price on the ‘Unlimited Subscription’ so you end up owning and renting plugins at the same time. Great value! NOT.
So they’ve still got a lot of thinking to do around how they sell their audio tech without making people feel as if they really don’t give a fuck about anyone apart from the unlimited subscription bundle owners. And the investors. Fucking, take a risk, accept a loss, do better business!
right slant, end-of-rant
Sorry about the swear words
EDIT:
I’ve just listened to some of the “SAMPLESCAPE PRESETS” on the Slice page, and I wish I were more impressed. With each of the examples being drenched in fx, I’m wondering how clean the sample playback actually is. The engine developed by Hildebrand tracks pitch beautifully, but can have problems with transients and noise, so I think they’ve tried to hide some of that. I’m very close to testing it for myself.