Purveyors Of The Banal, Unite!!!

IK Multimedia, everyone’s favorite Italian MOTR plug-in makers, in cahoots with Line 6 to ensure that guitar tone becomes as lame as possible, have issued a rebuttal of sorts to Music Radar’s Freeware Love-Fest. I have to say that, interestingly, I generally agree with both points of view.

Music Radar was absolutely correct in at least half of their article, although most of it was incredibly obvious and some of it was outright falsehood. I’ll leave it to to you to decide which was what; I have my own opinions and for a change I’ll keep them to myself. IK’s “rebuttal,” aside from being poorly written and sounding fairly shrill, was also mostly correct, at least in my experience.

Now, with that out of the way, I’ll enumerate my thoughts on the subject, addressed to both Music Radar and IK, and just let ’em float about.

1. You Charge Too Fucking Much. Sorry, IK, but you don’t get to bitch about piracy and freebies when your prices enable/encourage both. Why is CSR US$319? How did you arrive at that figure? Your business model can’t possibly hope to compete with, oh, let’s say, Audio Damage’s, because you’re buying in to the traditional methods of marketing. Time for a new model.

2. Free != Free. The path from NorthPole to Automaton is absolutely littered with abandonware and broken projects. Search “VST” on SourceForge and look at how recently most of the FOSS projects have been updated. If you Switch from PC to Mac, and you rely on freeware plugs, you are most assuredly fucked. There is, as IK rightly pointed out, a real risk of having projects that won’t load in 2 years, because the plugins in them no longer work with whatever iteration Redmond and Cupertino have foisted on you that week. There is a big difference between “free right now” and “always free.”

3. The Man Behind The Curtain. When you buy a plugin from Audio Damage, the main thing you’re doing is supporting our research and development. That is, aside from advertising, essentially our sole cost. The money that we receive from sales pays our bills so that we can spend all day every day researching delay algorithms. This is looking at what we do from a groupthink mentality, but it is a fact. You’re also spending a bit of money so that we can worry about VST and AudioUnit compatibility problems so you don’t have to. A freeware developer does this sort of thing in his spare time, and that lends itself to the path of least resistance.

In short, as Peter Kirn pointed out, there are benefits and detriments to both courses of action, and a judicious mix is what’s called for. IK came up with a fairly bad rebuttal, frankly (at least they didn’t use the word “clearly,” the earmark of a frothy interwebs reply), and I think they’re just pissed because they spend so much money advertising in Future publications. But they do have a couple points to make.