Digidesign Structure v2 Pricing and General Price Increases

[relaxo]

Dear Digidesign,

I make my living off of many of your great products and I am 100% behind you making a profit and being exceedingly successful. Your success is my success and visa versa. Like many companies, you are financially struggling now, unable to hire enough programmers...it's clear that you cannot keep up with your bug-fixing these days. Yet still you pressed on with the biggest leap ever, PT8, inviting composers to join the club and a true a Godsend to me. AIR is a blessing to all of us as well.

I've stated before that I support price increases if that's what it takes to get everything working right again. In fact, I personally believe that you should raise prices immediately in the HD world to fix bugs and hasten RTAS II / Freeze Track development. As a pro studio owner, I imagine I speak for many, not all, that I would pay more if we could be rid of serious bugs and have RTAS kicking for the first time.

That being said, I am quite upset at your handling of Structure. Many of us bought full copies of Structure SOLELY to be used as EXS players. Releasing Structure without EXS import working is like releasing ProTools without video import functioning. Pro Tools works just fine for most users, but it doesn't work at all for video people. This may seem like an exaggeration to those that don’t need EXS import, but that’s the ONLY task we purchased Structure for, EXS playback only…NOTHING ELSE. Structure is great for making new patches and seems to do it like a mature sampler VI. I do not ever make my own patches, I browse and audition EXS instruments only. It’s nothing less than outrageous for a company to release a product advertising a major feature and then still not coming up with it after 2.5 years and counting.

The painful twist and real mishandling comes with the fact that a relatively small bug with these product-ruining results should have been dealt with a beta bug-fix and not a major next release. It's not elastic audio or the RTAS engine! I can only imagine that to get the promised EXS import working and tested would take 5-40 hours of programming time, as it is only the envelopes that translate wrong. The lack of high speed browsing and auditioning can be classed as a feature and therefore appropriate as a v1.5 or v2 improvement, even a paid one. The EXS import was advertised to us before Structure's release and therefore should be fixed without additional cost.

Thanks

[RussUK]

Originally Posted by relaxo

Dear Digidesign,

I make my living off of many of your great products and I am 100% behind you making a profit and being exceedingly successful. Your success is my success and visa versa. Like many companies, you are financially struggling now, unable to hire enough programmers...it's clear that you cannot keep up with your bug-fixing these days. Yet still you pressed on with the biggest leap ever, PT8, inviting composers to join the club and a true a Godsend to me. AIR is a blessing to all of us as well.

I've stated before that I support price increases if that's what it takes to get everything working right again. In fact, I personally believe that you should raise prices immediately in the HD world to fix bugs and hasten RTAS II / Freeze Track development. As a pro studio owner, I imagine I speak for many, not all, that I would pay more if we could be rid of serious bugs and have RTAS kicking for the first time.

That being said, I am dismayed at your handling of Structure. Many of us bought full copies of Structure SOLELY to be used as EXS players. Releasing Structure without EXS import working is like releasing ProTools without video import functioning. Pro Tools works just fine for most users, but it doesn't work at all for video people. This may seem like an exaggeration to those that don’t need EXS import, but that’s the ONLY task we purchased Structure for, EXS playback only…NOTHING ELSE. Structure is great for making new patches and seems to do it like a mature sampler VI. I do not ever make my own patches, I browse and audition EXS instruments only. It’s nothing less than outrageous for a company to release a product advertising a major feature and then still not coming up with it after 2.5 years and counting.

The painful twist and real mishandling comes with the fact that a relatively small bug with these product-ruining results should have been dealt with a beta bug-fix and not a major next release. It's not elastic audio or the RTAS engine! I can only imagine that to get the promised EXS import working and tested would take 5-40 hours of programming time, as it is only the envelopes that translate wrong. The lack of high speed browsing and auditioning can be classed as a feature and therefore appropriate as a v1.5 or v2 improvement, even a paid one. The EXS import was advertised to us before Structure's release and therefore should be fixed without additional cost.

Thanks

Relax bud, not to take anything away from what you're saying there's a zillion threads on this subject you can chime in on.

[gruddlebug]

Hello,

Structure is horribly broken in a few areas, like not reading its own database properly, and the aforementioned (non)import. It will have to improve light years to catch up with kontakt 4 (fingers crossed).

if Digi/Avid charge for the upgrade (bugfix) then they are truly extracting the urine. Mind you they charge for those (should be included in the first place to match other DAW features) toolkits .

Cheers

evs

[Gothboy]

Originally Posted by gruddlebug

if Digi/Avid charge for the upgrade (bugfix) then they are truly extracting the urine.

perhaps the most bizzare way of putting it I've yet seen.........

but it IS Halloween so....

[sunburst79]

Quite a few areas of Structure have been considered broken since it launched. I fail to see how they could charge for a an update at this point. They would have to add a significant amount of content or features in order to exact any tribute without a revolt of the current users.

It will be interesting to see whats fixed and whats new.

[daslicht]

sunburst, you are the sunburst from #hANDwASH ?

[ladewd]

Well, I've found structure pretty much unusable. I only bought it 6 months ago and haven't used it on any project. I don't want to have to remember that if I close a certain window using the X it will crash protools. I've moved on to Play and Omnisphere. I will not pay for an upgrade to Structure at this point. That is unless I get the Goliath package free, since Goliath Play engine is quirky and so is Structure. I love Velvet and some of the other synths. I need a solid sampler with a decent library

Cary

[nod25]

Regular updates/bug-fixes please.

There would be much less complaining from your loyal paying customers.

[Eric Lambert]

I spent a helluva lot of money on Structure (I bought two full copies plus two copies of Goliath) and it can't be used in sessions which I feel are important. It's simply not reliable enough.

If anything, I expect money back, certainly NOT a demand for me to pay more money for the repaired version. They scammed me the first time when I payed well over $1,000 for a specific product which could not do what it claimed it could do. That's false advertising and theft.

Someone tell me that the rumor of a "price increase" is false. It's insulting enough that AIR wouldn't try to fix these issues sooner. Now they're asking for additional money after forcing us to wait this long???

[nod25]

This is gonna get ugly...