TDM vs. Naive plugs = BIG $$$. Why the price gouging?

[Mind-Over-Midi]

Waves Platinum Native Bundle $2100.00, Waves Platinum TDM Bundle $4200.00!!! Why? What am I missing here?grudge

[Brad Blackwood]

Different coding for a smaller market?

[Robotnik]

The coding is the same. The shell is different. Like Brad said...smaller market (but, does that really make sense?).

[Brad Blackwood]

I dunno, just a guess by me.

Could be that PT users buy at a much greater percentage than native users, so that might be a wash...

FWIW, I know very (very) little about plugs, but Dave Hill told me that it wasn't as simple as porting the code over from TDM to, say, DX - he said it was a rewrite.

Probably more of a matter of, "We can, so we do"...

[Mind-Over-Midi]

I understand that there may be some extra work involved, but $2100.00 extra? Is it just me, or do you git the felling that Waves and others see the TDM user market as pigeons with deep pockets? Doesn't $2100.00 extra for the exact same product seem like a fuuck to you?

[andre tchmil]

my guess is , they think tdm people have more bucks.

I really wonder what the quality difference is. for a 2100 usd price difference , there should be.

I know when I had my tdm mix system; I could only run 4 C4 plugs in TDM, while on my powerbook 500, 8 in native mode .

I don't want to scare anyone but under OSX and with the same Mix system, I can only run 4 waves channelstrips and 1 C4.

try to explain that

[Bob Olhsson]

FWIW in the case of Waves, they used to be the same price and then they dropped the price of the native in order to compete in that market. Kind of amazing how people now consider PT-TDM "high-end" when just a few years ago it was by far the cheapest workstation available.

[alphajerk]

Originally posted by Bob Olhsson
FWIW in the case of Waves, they used to be the same price and then they dropped the price of the native in order to compete in that market. Kind of amazing how people now consider PT-TDM "high-end" when just a few years ago it was by far the cheapest workstation available.

FWIW, waves is entirely overpriced crap. native or tdm.

[Noah]

Hi There,

Noah here from SoundToys/Wave Mechanics. I understand the dismay at TDM Vs Native plug-in pricing, but it really is a whole bunch of work to put out a TDM plug vs a native one. First off it's easier to code to floating point native processing than it is to code to fixed point DSP. Plus some things are just really hard to get done in fixed-point math. IE it takes a long time to work it out/make it work.

So all in all it is much more time consuming to produce a TDM plug-in than a native one. Think in months or if you are starting years of development time. This is part of the reason why you don't see tons of new plug-ins from the long-term plug-in companies like us. We are working hard, but it just takes time. This time translates into a higher cost for the TDM version. When you see our new SoundToys TDM plugs released they most certainly won't be double the price of the native versions, but they will be more expensive.

I suppose that the second part of TDM is the constant upgrade path. In the last 1.5 years we have had to port our plugs 3 times. (HD, HD OSX, and now HD Accel) Apart from the jump to HD this have all been free upgrades for our users. I suppose that this is part of what you get for paying higher prices for TDM plugs...

Please understand that I'm not trying to justify really high prices, just explaining some of what goes into making a TDM plug-in. If we could bring down the price we would.

So that's it from the a plug-in makers perspective...

Noah

[jbuntz]

I'm pretty sure that the algorithms of TDM and Native plugs are the same. There might be a little bit of re-writing to support the 48-bit processing of TDM vs. the 64-bit processing of DX.

[gseibert]

I'm sure that Digidesign charges the Plug In makers a license fee to use their TDM format and developers kit. That's where I always assumed the cost difference came from. I may be mistaken, of course.

[Noah]

There is no license fee to develop for the TDM platform. You do have to be approved by Digidesign though, and they won't just let anyone have the TDM SDK.

To go into depth more on this, there is much more massaging that takes place on the TDM platform, and there are very few people who know how to write assembly code as opposed to the much more common C++ that you can write an RTAS plug-in.

Even things like simple division can be much more difficult on the TDM side.

Another aspect that gets over looked is that you have to very carefully engineer how you call up different processes on the TDM platform. Through each step you call and release different processes, and if not done correctly your plug won't work.

So like I said before it just takes way more time to write the plug, and very few people know how to do it. Even fewer know how to do it well.

Noah

[evac]

I suppose that the second part of TDM is the constant upgrade path. In the last 1.5 years we have had to port our plugs 3 times. (HD, HD OSX, and now HD Accel) Apart from the jump to HD this have all been free upgrades for our users. I suppose that this is part of what you get for paying higher prices for TDM plugs...

Not neccessarily. We upgraded to PT 6.1/OSX last month. Since Digi now uses a new form of copy protection (iLok) we need to upgrade almost all of our plugins. Waves charges $600 to go from their Gold bundle PT5 to Gold Bundle PT6 (+ they throw in the Ren. plugz) - seems a little ridiculous to me, seeing as we're not getting much of anything new - they can keep the Renn. plugins if they're going to charge us $600!

Bombfactory charges $200 for their Compressor upgrade...and the list goes on and on...


This has led to the studio owner and I re-considering which plugins we need/don't need...but that's a whole other post...

Ed

[Mind-Over-Midi]

Noah;

Thanks for the in-depth answer to my question! It makes some of the mark-ups seem more justifiable, and clears up some misconceptions about a TDM license fee. However I still can't bring myself to pay TWICE as much. When we start getting up around $4200.00 for one bundle, I'd rather add the extra cash and pick-up a couple of KSP-8's.

[faeflora]

TDM's more better. Duh!

BTW I agree with Alphajerk. Waves=Crap.

[Mind-Over-Midi]

$4200.00 Crap!

[faeflora]

Yah too bad waves=crap. so many people think it's the shiznit. another reason why modern recordings often sound like poo.

[doug_hti]

OT:
Hey Noah, your products are amazing, specifically sound blender!!

So easy to get satisfying results....

[Noah]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the nice words. It always makes us feel good to hear from happy users. SoundBlender is an under used plug, but it can do some very cool stuff, and it is practically bottomless as far as what it can do. As we release them you should check out our new SoundToys effects, as they sound tremendous.

Will you be at AES? We will be there at booth 257, and I would be happy to show you or anyone else around.

Noah