What's new

Demo Instruments - Whats Reasonable?

Lindon

VST/AU Developer
Hello everyone,

We are a small developer producing Kontakt and VST instruments, and in the background over the last few months we've been working on a "demo system" for our releases.

Now not many developers offer demo versions, certainly Kontakt ones at least as without a fair-bit of "curly" coding they are pretty straightforward to work around. Now I'm not saying ours is great or anything but we are happy enough that it works and is fair and reasonable.

But of course my fair-and-reasonable might be your "what the ****", so here's the question...

Right now our demo system lets you load the full version of the library, lets you use the full functionality in the instrument, and even lets you save any snapshots you make to use later with the full version.

After 2 minutes it starts to cut audio intermittently, and/or starts ignoring midi note messages. So you have to re-load the instrument to get another 2 minutes worth of demo time.

So how does that sound? 2 minutes long enough? Anything else?
 
Hi Lindon,

on the one hand I would like to have a demoversion of some of your instruments like Electria for example cause you need to try this out to see/hear if your - normally very unique - concept/sound fits with what I would like into my workflow/sound palette.

On the other hand as your creations are normally very complex I cant imagine that 2 minutes would give me anything and I CAN imagine that after third or fourth reload I would just throw in the waste basket just out of frustration.

I think in general I prefer content reduced fully useable demoversions (for example highly reduced in instruments or only 1-2 octaves, something like that) but if that fits for your instruments ?

Especially in your case I would have to try it out to see but that dont help you while you want the decision before you devellop it finally. So no clear opinion from me, sorry...
 
I like the notion of a demo being full functionality but only for a limited pitch range, like an octave. So you still get to hear the instrument function and can work with it indefinitely without losing a compelling reason to get the full range.
 
Absolutely 15 minutes minimum.

Does Kontakt allow for this? Or do you have your own player?
its all done in kontakt, to be honest for the 2 min we took our lead from U-he.

This from their web site:
"u-he demo versions are fully functional however, after about two minutes they emit a crackling sound at irregular intervals. Zebra2 plays quasi-random notes instead of the crackling noise."


I understand what many are saying about a range-reduced version - that might be do-able - plus it woud reduce the download size too.
 
Last edited:
Perhaps don’t include any round robins in the demo to help save on the download size.

Don’t limit the range (or maybe just limit to white keys if you insist on limiting) if you can possibly avoid it - I like being able to hear the low and the high end of the library. You might consider limiting the articulations in the demo but if you have a legato system or other interesting features it’s nice to include those in the demo so we can see how well they actually work.
 
2 mins on synth stuff is tight, but generally you are banging 1 key and preset jumping. So not that much of an issue there.
If it's orchestral stuff, I'd not bother if it had a 2 min limit personally. It would frustrate me too much and I'd move on. 5mins would be the min I think.
You want the balance of the user just getting in the mood and then it stops. So they want more. 2 mins would just anger me.
 
Perhaps don’t include any round robins in the demo to help save on the download size.

Don’t limit the range (or maybe just limit to white keys if you insist on limiting) if you can possibly avoid it - I like being able to hear the low and the high end of the library. You might consider limiting the articulations in the demo but if you have a legato system or other interesting features it’s nice to include those in the demo so we can see how well they actually work.

Well we dont use Round-Robins in the classical sense - we use our IRRE (Infinite Round Robin Engine) which is more controllable and dynamic - its essentially modelling RRs, so thats not a route we can go down.

Much of what we produce isnt in the mold of other vendors (as KarlHeinz mentions above) so "articulations" are often not applied in any same-old same-old approach so again difficult to do and to be meaningful.

It looks like range-limiting might be where we go - I appreciate that hearing low and high end is important - especially for "classic" libraries of sampler-as-emulator stuff, but as I say that's not (usually) us any way.
 
2 mins on synth stuff is tight, but generally you are banging 1 key and preset jumping. So not that much of an issue there.
If it's orchestral stuff, I'd not bother if it had a 2 min limit personally. It would frustrate me too much and I'd move on. 5mins would be the min I think.
You want the balance of the user just getting in the mood and then it stops. So they want more. 2 mins would just anger me.
Good points. As I say above we're not your go-to orchestral-instrument-emulation-library guys, we are often using novel and unique play-back approaches - granular-sampling, or cross-sample playback, so perhaps the context is a little different - but yeah 2 mins might be a pain.

How about 15 minutes with 1 or 2 octaves?
 
One more little hint which is of course personal taste only. While I was (like ever, sigh....) confusingly thinking about my password it came to my mind how I hate to make up an account for a product where I dont know nothing and just want to test one demo to see if I ever be interested in that stuff. So just a consideration: its absolutely o.k. to keep the free products as bonus for people making up an account, but I would offer the demos as free download without the need to sign in. Demolitimation sounds absolutely fair, maybe to keep all the instruments in might be just a little to much (and a big download with nearly 0,5 GB dont know if bandwith matters to you). To tired today but maybe tomorrow I will give it a try and compare to the full version I already have.
 
Top Bottom