Dalibor Loncar wrote:
cubase is owned by yamaha. apple aquired emagic in 2002. roland aquired cakewalk ... the list goes on ...
i hope this will not happen with ableton!
Ah! Now we're talking! That's exactly what I think. A couple of years ago, Logic with all addons used to be at least 3 times as expensive as Live Suite costs nowadays. Cubase was just slightly cheaper than Logic and Ableton the cheap outsider. Now the market has changed, which is of course good for us, but I can't believe that a small company like Ableton would be able to cover their expenses if they were selling such a comprehensive software like Logic and Cubase for $499. Live 8 (non-Suite) costs $450 and you get a great range of good sounding effects, a super inspiring tool called Session View, great routing possibilities and whatnot. Still sounds like a fair deal to me. If you need synths, get some freeware stuff, buy some of the bigger ones or get Suite, which gives you a ton of stuff for only $200 more.
I also never get the people who complain about upgrade prices. The amount of new features and useful stuff is immense. If you don't need it, skip the upgrade. How simple can it be?
I love all the new stuff they have put into Live 8 and I think it's great value for the money. At the KVR forums they are praising the new SSL bus compressor emulation from Cytomic ("The Glue") in a 130 pages-long thread, and everyone of them is willing to spend 99 Pounds/Euros/Dollars/whatever right away. For a single compressor plugin. And there is no grumbling about the price at all. It is considered as an "awesome price", because they compare it to the much more expensive Waves, UAD and SSL software-replicas. Well, The Glue sounds very good indeed. Ableton's new multiband compressor sounds very, very good as well. Different of course, but incredibly good. So how much would these guys be willing to spend on a standalone VST version of Ableton's multiband compressor? $99? Ok.
How about the Vocoder? What I have heard in the beta sounds like one of the best software vocoders around. Orange vocoder costs how much? $200? Ok, let's say Ableton makes a real good deal and sells it for $99.
So we have $198 for the compressor and the vocoder.
"Oh wait, the Live 8 upgrade only costs $189!"
"..."
