Stereo Tool

I think StereoTool is great. I went to register it last week, and found this:
If you registered Stereo Tool in 2011 (before November), you should have received a free upgrade to use the declipper.

Wow! I'm sure everyone that registered before November feels wonderful about this. However, for those just coming to register and discovering the community here, the sense is that we missed the boat by a few short weeks. Knowing this, I'm having a hard time feeling good about registering. (Yeah, I know... when you are already inside the party, it is hard to feel sorry to those late arrivals left outside. )

There must be many people lining up to pay 100 Euro for de-clipper, and so I am baffled. I cannot afford such a high price for listening to music on my computer. So, perhaps I am missing something... Are people using this de-clipper for professional music production? For commercial broadcasting of poorly mastered recordings? If you paid full price, what makes de-clipper worth 85-100 Euro to you? Is most of your music clipped so badly that it is only listenable with de-clipper?

I'm really curious... and disappointed to register knowing I am a tier 2 customer because I arrived late.

Best regards,
mikebo

Hello Mikebo,

Sorry I didn't respond to your email yet - I was too busy this week with a lot of other things. And I wanted to create a post on this forum as well.

Here's my problem:
- Yes, the declipper is starting to be used by commercial users and is currently being tested by BIG radio stations conglomerates. BIG as in having hundreds of stations with a reach of douzens of millions of listeners. For them, the current price is a complete joke (in fact, so is the price of Stereo Tool, these big users often pay 50 times as much for a hardware processing box that sounds worse. I even read a review where the audio guy of a radio station wrote that he would pay $10,000 for just the declipper).

- And yes, there are consumers that want to listen to declipped audio on their audio systems as well. For them, 100 euro can be a lot (although, given the effect that it has on the audio, it can change the sound from sounding 'very cheap' to 'very good' - IF CD's were not this bad you would probably have to spend more than 100 euro extra on your audio equipment to get a comparable jump in quality).

Anyway, ideally I would have 2 separate versions or licenses: One for "consumers" that's cheap, and one for "professionals" that is expensive.

The problem is this: How do I stop professional users from using the "cheap" version? If I make the cheap version sound less good, consumers would get less quality, and for many radio stations the difference that remains might not even be noticeable after all the processing that occurs if they don't use Stereo Tool or the Omnia 9, so they could still use the cheap version.

One thing I could do is make a cheap version that beeps less often, making it 'listenable', but not usable for professional use. Dunno if that would make anyone happy? Other ideas are very welcome!


About the "registered before November" issue: The reason for this is that I have been working on the declipper since the beginning of this year, and it was already available in BETA versions. So people who bought a license at that time probably expected it to be covered by their license. Otherwise I would not have given it away for free. I hope this explains why the difference is there.

I find value in StereoTool, and so it's fair that you get paid for your effort. I used StereoTool for a long time, but it was the 6.20 upgrade WITH the declipper that brought me to the registration page, only to find the snappy new de-clipper feature adds 350% to the cost. A few weeks sooner, and that feature would have been free? How can I feel good about that?

On one hand, I spend 120 Euro - 85 Euro more just to have the de-clipper feature, which is cool and everything, but not so useful that I MUST have it. On the other hand, I can spend 35 Euro for software which has a really nice component stripped out of it, or beeping so as to make it annoying and therefore useless.

The predicament is to force commercial users to purchase a commercial license, while not deterring personal users from registering by asking too high a price. Since you asked... A recorded message that plays every 4 hours, such as you currently use for loudness feature in non-registered versions, would be fine for non-commercial users of de-clipper. If de-clipper is enabled, and there is no commercial key in use, you could say something like, "The StereoTool de-clipper feature is not licensed for commercial use." No commercial station would dare risk such an embarrassing audio clip being played, which should force them to do the right thing.

If the de-clipper pricing doesn't resolve to something I can reasonably afford, then perhaps I will just make a contribution instead of registering. In any case, I wish you well with your new endeavors.
Happy New Year and Keep up the good work!
mikebo

I agree with Hans.
A couple of things to consider.

Hans quit his job so he should earn his money with his software. I think everyone here agrees on that. I do not know how many hours Hans must have spend in programming and adjusting stuff up to this point but it must be enormous (Hans, maybe do a simple calculation on how many hours that you've already spent on this, just for the fun of it).

Pricing stuff is extreemly difficult and especially software since it is actually a bunch of 0's and 1's and doesn't hold any material value. Also the risk that someone cracks the software would result in disaster for Hans.

Like Hans said, the price for stereotool now is ... unbelievably low, almost to a point where it is unbelievable especially for big stations.
It's like buying a high end audio amplifier that costs $10000 and connecting a $1 cable to it.


@mikebo : I think we need to think realistically. The price for the declipper is 100€. So if Hans might sell 10 a month he earns a €1000 (minus taxes etc) and how long can he keep selling that amount per month?

It should be up to us now, the guys who got it for a more than nice price, to start promoting Hans'es processor (still call it sound shaper). Seldom have I seen a man that listens and works together with a bunch of freaks (yup, we are) to make one damn of a great universal tool. Full kudos to Hans!

I've used StereoTool for years, so I have registered the base functionality and made a donation for an additional amount that a) reflects the value I think is fair for the additional functionality of De-clipper to an individual user for personal use, and b) which I can afford to subsidize Hans' further development. If Hans disagrees with my value proposition, he can keep the extra funds as my gift for pleasure StereoTool has given me. So, now we are all on a level field in this discussion.

Just a few points, then I will rest my case...
1) No one is attacking Hans here. I'm sure we all agree he has put in a lot of time and made a wonderful tool to enjoy music. It's a technical labor of love to enhance the enjoyment of art. As a programmer for 30 years and an amateur audio engineer, I truly appreciate what StereoTool is, what it does, and the many hours of effort involved.

2) Anyone who received the De-clipper enhancement for free cannot claim to be objective about the pricing. To be truly objective about it, and to truly support Hans as Luke suggested, here is a fresh perspective and a friendly challenge. You have been able to use the De-clipper for two months without the annoying beep and do a real-world, A/B comparison as to the improvement in the sound. Do you think De-clipper is worth an 85 Euro premium over StereoTool itself? If so, how many will now step forward and donate 85 Euro? If not 85 Euro, then what would be fair? There is a saying... put your money where your mouth is. I guess we will see...

3) In my experience, good engineers rarely charge what their effort is truly worth to commercial entities. However, if you honestly look at the economics of this... large commercial users of StereoTool and De-clipper should pay a commercial license fee and annual maintenance. 160 Euro IS a joke, it should be in the hundreds, if not thousands of Euro, and hundreds a year for updates. How? I don't know... Market a dual-core, dedicated box with the proper I/O ports for a commercial station. Base the maintenance fee on station rating / number of listeners / commercial cost of airtime.

4) If you figure the market for personal use, there are an extremely small number of people who will listen to music through a computer, and an even smaller number will step forward and pay to register a shareware Winamp plugin. If you charge too much to register, you will get around ZERO donations, and that's what I fear will happen. The price for De-clipper for personal use, which is an incremental improvement in sound, should be an incremental increase in price - not an order of magnitude.

I have nothing to gain or lose here - just offering another perspective. Hans, I wish you all the success you deserve. My advice, if you haven't already done so, is to enlist the help of a good engineering marketing/research firm. They can help you with market valuation and strategies.
Best Regards,
mikebo

I'm planning to do that VERY soon. As others already pointed out in this thread, I recently quit my job to start working on ST full-time, and - starting tomorrow - I'll be free to do that.

O, and about the big price increment: I didn't want to suddenly increase the price of things that I've been selling for years now - especially for webcasters, who mainly do this as a hobby (actually that's how I got started on Stereo Tool, I needed it myself) I think they are not going to pay a lot anyway. The declipper is an extra feature, which is not really needed for webcasting, but it can give a BIG improvement in the audio quality depending on what you're playing. (See the Perfect Declipper website, http://www.perfectdeclipper.com/ , for some extreme examples). But you are right, the rest of ST is far too cheap compared to the declipper.

About a hardware box: That would be GREAT! But: I would also need to provide support and repair broken parts etc. Worldwide. With short response times. That's really problematic unless you work together with a company that's already doing things globally.

LOL... You're not going to believe this one... I was busy moving my licensing mechanism to a different PC (because I will finally really start working in my new office tomorrow), and due to a mixup I accidentally sent you a key that included the declipper . Not kidding!

DeClipper price is joke! period.
I don't have time to explain much now, Just look how many softwares/hardwares can do similar thing and what's their price.

You can "accidentally" send me a declipper key too. Have a happy New Year, Hans.

I'm still on the fence of buying/registering the complete package myself. Not being a radio amateur I plan to use it solely for getting rid of the crap they call 'brickwall limiting' which plagues every release for nearly a decade now.

My hobby is upmixing stereo to surround. Now some people will say that's pointless because every receiver can do that with the push of a button, but those in the know will tell you otherwise. Stereo to surround converting has come a long way and with some sources you can get results very close to a real discrete mix made from the multi stems.

However, the quality of the source is everything here. If you have a bad source, you are likely to get bad results, simple as that. Some people have even moved to 'needle drops' (rips from vinyl, the best one's are done with extreme high-end turntables, cartridges, tonearms, phono pre-amps etc), but no matter how good, it just doesn't have the level of precision that a true digital source has, if it weren't for the brickwall crap mentioned above and that's where the declipper might come in handy. Not entirely convinced though, that's why I haven't bought it yet. Price? Yeah, it's a bit high for an amateur, but it's not all that relevant because if I find it useful I will buy it anyway.

Bit off-topic here, but have you Hans, ever tried your luck with developing a stereo to surround tool? I was looking at the presentation from your colleague Leif the other day and was thinking how cool it would be to have a hardware device that would be able to undo the brickwall sh*t AND make good surround from stereo at the same time! You guys could be rich if you developed something like that. Just look at the sales of recent boxsets from Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, there really is a growing market for surround and the record company's are not going to provide 99.9999% of the titles people would want. Apart from that, radio in surround would be damn cool too, if you ask me.