>To me $3000 to have an orchestra at your whim for the rest of your life is not a bad deal.

Hmmm... Yes, but in this case you have to play all instruments by yourself. So it's not exactly like owning a real orchestra.

>But they're expensive because of the price to produce divided by the likely number of sales.

1 - The number of sales would increase if they would lower the prices and apply a better marketing strategy. Did you ever see any of these products featured on a TV commercial?

I think not many people even knows what's a sampler yet!

2 - The likely number of sales is not the customer's problem.

3 - I'll give you an example of cheap high quality sample CDs:

http://www.usbsounds.com/usb/exec/editor?editID=SS

38 Euros each. So making cheap sample CDs it's not such an impossible feat (NOTE: I don't work for USBSounds.com )

I suspect the reason behind high prices is that these companies believe only the super-rich have the time or the right to dedicate themselves to music. [:@]

The day some company releases high quality sample CDs at a reasonable price, the other businesses will be FORCED to lower their prices.

In the meantime, I'll have to keep saving... [:(]

"I suspect the reason behind high prices is that these companies believe only the super-rich have the time or the right to dedicate themselves to music"

I really don't believe that's true. If they thought they could get more poeple to purchase the library I'm sure they would sell it for less, but as you said most people know nothing about samplers.

But you obviously already have decided that they are unscrupulous, so why are you asking the question?

"as you said most people know nothing about samplers."

Seems that (as far as I know) not many people has made any real efforts to make samplers more known and popular either. They are still toys for the rich. Too bad for normal people who want to create decent music.

"But you obviously already have decided that they are unscrupulous, so why are you asking the question?"

Just to know if other people suspects what I'm suspecting...

We're in hard times of unemployment and depression. If you sell a group of DVDs at US$ 3000 I think it's obvious you don't intend to sell it to the middle and low classes!

well, you might say it´s oriented to pro studios, but don´t say it´s oriented to rich musicians, because everyone who´s or has been into music knows that such kind of musician (with very notable exceptions) simply does not exist. [:D]

Rich musicians? that´s scifi! *shrug* [:P]

If you want to blame anyone blame Gigastudio for being such a difficult product to purchase, own, and operate.

If Microsoft or another mainstream company like Roland came out with a software sampler that rivaled Gigastudio and actually had good quality and didn't crash every day, maybe more people would use sampler synths and they could create a "Lite" Vienna for people to use with their General MIDI compositions, etc.

But as far as right now, they're already priced at LESS than the Miroslav library which is far inferior to this one. But this library, at $1900 for the Orchestral Cube, I just don't see that as excessive. How many copies do you think they'll realistically sell? A few thousand? The library undoubtedly cost millions to produce.

It wouldn't matter who made the damn sampler, it would only sell to a limited market. Forkign out major cash for advertisements on TV will get you no where. It would be diminishing returns. I mean how many orchestral composers are there out there?

How many of them are computer savvy?

I wish the people who say it must be so much cheaper than its worth would make sample libraries. They'd be poor, but I'd have a bunch more sample libraries [:D]

I took a look at Vol.29-Killer Brass Riffs at USBSounds - You get
845 samples for 38$ - thats about 0.045$/sample.
Now looke at the complete orchestral package:
You get 160.000 samples for 3090 Eur - thats about 0.019 Eur/sample
Now the $ and Eur are almost of the same value, so the USBSounds are
actually more than twice the price - Cheap? Expensive?
The VSL is not expensive at all - and anyway you can't just compare
a price pr. sample - You have to consider quality and type of samples
as well - the above was just an example to make a point.

regards
Bjarne

Bjarne is quite correct (see above) regarding value for money.
In my experience, people who complain about high-priced products are often not that committed to music or do not make much money from it.

As a professional composer, I'm quite happy to invest a significant amount of money into equipment, software and products like the VSL. I benefit, my clients benefit and the end product is generally that much better.

For some people who create music as a hobby or part-time, obviously VSL will be out of their price range. This has NO bearing on the huge amount of work that went into creating the VSL and will unfortunately exclude many people from buying it. Take also, for example, the excellent sample libraries produced by Eric Persing of Spectrasonics, like Symphony of Voices or Vocal Planet. These are not cheap, and correctly so.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for......

Regards - Colin

If you're a hobbyist, there are plenty of good libraries out there for you too - Advanced Orchestra + Ultimate Strings is a great combo and with it you can make some outstanding pices and that whole package should only run you around $500+ I think.

I agree. I think it´pretty obvious that we can do anything but to accept the price of the library. Specially since such decisions are a important part of a company strategy.
You can bet no matter how long we discuss this prices stuff, the people at VSL will surely have put twice this time into it.

Myself, seeing how I don´t work professionally into this (maybe one day) I´m not sure yet if I´ll be able to afford all or maybe part of this library. If I can´t buy it, well, I´ll set for something lower until I can. More importantly, I want to be sure I´m good at orchestration and MIDI sequencing before I invest into something like this. No matter how good the library is (probably exceptionally good), it´s still just a tool, not an end.

Anyway, not to critic the election of topic. Everybody here is free, I suppose, to give their opinion, but I think it´s a bit useless to discuss this stuff.