The thing is, all the other plugins are 64 bit, they don't warn anyone this one is 32 bit. For the record I knew it was long awaited for the AAX so I knew it was in the starting block for a release, that is also why I did buy it. Also, like I said, it simply crashes I cannot even use it (it crashes after a few seconds, the GUI freezes and it freezes the DAW). And for some reason, the demo version did not crash like that. Maybe because I only tested it on a blank project. Not sure.
I went from "I don't mind" to feeling raped because this remind me of the whole black friday thing, and I'll explain why. You could notice nothing, or you could understand it all this way :
- I have been forced to add money as opposed to an early buyer of VMR to get a 2nd plugin during black friday VS someone who bought it a black friday. It's very frustrating when you see other people get 1 extra plugin for 50 bucks, while for me it was in fact 100 (normal black friday deals). Then, he comes with the coupon thing, fair enough I could say I'm not gonna buy anything with this."sorry for the early birds, so in fact to make up for it we give you a voucher so you can spend a bit more on our store, it makes it a bigger discount in the end but in fact we are marketing-manipulating you to spend more money on us".
But of course I did, knowing the fact, because I had a use for a coupon knowing it was going to be part of VMR which I really like, but the psychologics behind this annoyed me, and I'd rather have chose option 2 (not being early buyer). And I would have preferred having the coupon before, since I did buy Trigger 2 expansions during black friday. But of course, slate comes with this coupon after black friday is finished, which is when the time pressure has finished to make us hit the buy button on what truly interests us, so we couldn't use it in conjonction. But it arrives after, for extra income, and people are going to use it because if they don't, they will feel like they had a lesser deal than black friday. The timing is just unfortunate and people have told him from day one of black friday.
It was planned all along by them, fair enough it's marketing, but it's not as nice as simply making the early bird deal better than black friday, not to mention most in this case are long term customers and he used to reward this with special prices for previous customers. All in all, this is not a real reward. If it had been separated by a year or at least 6 months, it would have felt kind of normal. Or if the coupon had been made during black friday.
- It's two plugins in a row which are buggy, and the second one was not buggy when I demoed it for some obscure reason, I have had plugins from major companies for years and except here and there a normal upgrade (32 -> 64 for example, for Soundtoys) where they need to work a bit on the code, 100% of them are stable, rock solid. I have a vanilla MacOs as well, nothing tweaked nor exotic. The only buggy ones are slate plugins. And yes I did test them, so I knew it, but if I had not bought them now I would have had to wait another black friday, or decide to not buy them now, and buy them later when they are more expensive, or on a random sale which sometimes does not synchronizes with my bank account being full. This is of course all decided assuming they will be corrected soon.
I do like Slate products, but if their sonics qualities were not what they were, they wouldn't get away with these strategies. I like the fact they are very responsive, I actually was on skype with one of their debuggers for VMR, and I am still supportive of their little company image and they've gone a long way, but their marketing is getting annoying and I miss the early days when you could contact them to arrange something in some cases of absurdities like that, or simply when they used to reward long term customers vs a new one.
