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Do you regret your spending on Sample Libraries and feel you've succumb to Marketing and sales?

Do you regret your spending on Sample Libraries and feel you’ve succumb to Marketing and sales?

  • Yes

    Votes: 68 39.8%

  • No

    Votes: 66 38.6%

  • If I could turn back time.

    Votes: 37 21.6%
  • Total voters
    171
Definitely; I could easily have gotten two Neumann mics for my mandolin instead and been recording it like a beauty (compared to library purchases over past 3 years). I think Dorico and Noteperformer was all I really needed but I do love the CS libraries, don't regret those even if they were a little premature a purchase - I'm just starting to put them to use. Everything else was unnecessary, but I learned a lot about the world sample libraries in the process - still quite a few I think I'll end up using as I get better at composing. I've got things like Celtic Era 2 waiting, which is an awesome library, I just didn't need it yet. I also got a lot of Musical Sampling Atelier libraries which are also brilliant, but again, I wasn't really in a place of needing them, I was just impressed by the design, which is something. Anyway, no more purchases planned for coming year or two! Mostly skipped Black Friday except for upgrading to Dorico Pro and getting VEPro to host the CS libraries (but even that was quite a bit of spending so planning having that be my toolset for next few years).
 
I bought things I shouldn't have many times, but I also accept that this is part of my personality, I get excited by the possibilities of the VI or Synth or plugin. In recent times that has reduced and this BF I had a list that I reasonably kept to (still had to gulp a bit at the cost).

My biggest challenge is time, or the lack of it to learn everything, including all the sample libraries, plugins and synths.

I don't do regrets, I try and learn from things, so it happens less often, but I also try to understand why I bought what I did.

In the end music, sample libraries, synths, etc got me through 2 years of lock down whilst doing a pretty boring job. For getting me through that I am grateful, even if it did end up costing a small fortune.
 
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Yes and no…regret is a strong word for me. Some days I’m happy to have them and others I find myself painfully aware…I just love getting my hands on a library…something special about that first time…it’s addicting. I think overtime I’ve learned about what I do and don’t like, or what is and isn’t useful for me, and I wouldn’t have some purchased some of the libraries I have. I’ve learned something, even just a little bit, from every purchase.
 
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I do regret spending money on a ton of stuff. But not really because of the marketing or sales - at least not "first party" marketing. But I bought too much stuff based on people constantly raving about it - much of that was on V.I. Control - only to figure out later that those people don't know what they're talking about either. :grin:

The other thing is obviously this semi-criminal wild west we still live in in the sample library industry. You just don't know what you're spending your money on until you have it and were able to experience working with other products as well. So by the time you have a good and professionally reliable idea of what you need and like, you've sunk a painful amount of cash into this particular "education".
 
Was going to say no I haven't, but it turns out I've written more music using free software (Musescore) than all the libraries I bought.

HOWEVER, now I will be able to put those to good use in rendering the music I wrote in Musescore, thus rendering them useful again.
 
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Yes I’ve succumbed to impulsive buying with samples. It’s kind of embarrassing because there is no “30% off” - there is you spending money. On a positive tip I just got a solid 88 weighted key controller that has way more dynamics than my intro plastic keyboard has so a lot of the libraries I was bored of have new life and layers I didn’t even know were there.

But now it’s trying to stave off the piano libraries addiction that people seem to have problems with. Hammersmith Pro is calling!
 
I've built up quite the arsenal over 20 years, a lot of which was needed at the time but now sits idle on external hard drives. So, no, I don't regret buying the libraries, but I am sad that they're no longer of use to me.
 
Honigdachs said:
But I bought too much stuff based on people constantly raving about it - much of that was on V.I. Control - only to figure out later that those people don't know what they're talking about either. :grin:
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There are so many people here that just buy everything and praise libraries that aren't that good, I only buy blindly If the praise is by a select few people. There are also many fanboys that think everything by certain developers is always gold.

I don't usually get gassy, I usually buy only what I need. In the beginning I tried to save money by buying libs and plugins that were second best, but in the end ended up paying more because I had to also buy the best one since the second best wasn't good enough. I mostly buy resellable libraries and plugins now, and I rarely pay full price, or even half.
 
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liquidlino said:
Yes. But. I've learnt my lesson. I only buy stuff I can resell now. Unless it's super cheap (less than 20 bucks).
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Same here. At this point, I will only buy things that are resaleable, unless they are very cheap and I'm 100 percent sure it will add something to what I already have.

I don't regret most of what I've got, although there are quite a few libraries that I now don't really need or utilize nowhere near enough so would happily sale them on to recoup funds. So yep, I've learnt to not buy any libraries that do not offer resales.
 
Cubase 12. Whilst I like a lot about the update it’s two headline features:

Go dongleless, WHOOPEE. except you can’t if you want to use any other products from them

MIDI Remote integration is now so much easier, WHOOPEE, except it isn’t, the interface is far more complicated than say Mackie and it probably does not even support the majority of controllers.
 
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I don't think I have any huge regrets with samples. I should've skipped Spitfire Studio Orchestra Core and a bunch of 8Dio stuff, but otherwise, I'm pretty satisfied with what I have these days. There are some things I don't use, but... there are also a lot of things that I do use.
 
I'd say no for me this year. I got everything I had on my list from the summer time during the BF sales. And I went through all my spending grievance feelings before buying the bonus stuff like CineBrass Complete so once I pulled the trigger, I knew not to look back. Also it feels good to finally have them. I tell myself to make a decision and live with it.

I think because I'm still in the early stages of collecting premium libraries, I don't have the problem of "Do I really need that" thoughts because I'm not at that stage where everything you buy is overkill from what you have already. I have yet to have a satisfying string and woodwinds library I really want for example. Maybe the real question is, when will you be satisfied?
 
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No, no real regrets for me. My bigger purchases have been EWHO, SCS, and Komplete 11 or 12. Each was a couple hundred bucks plus. But those have all been great, get plenty of use from them. (edit: to be clear, I haven’t purchased these libraries this year. I’ve had them for several years.)

I did get Orchestral Swarm in The Ton (last year or the year before). There are a lot of great sounds in it. I like the library but I do find it hard to implement in an actual track. For example, do I use it to add accents to an existing track, or do I find a cool sounding patch and use that as the source material for a whole new track? Either way, I haven’t really been able to make it shine.
 
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