Hmmm... If there'd been some kind of cumulative discount I probably would have given them money.

As it is, I can live with V6. I'll think about upgrading Filterbank for the RTA... maybe.

I feel for those who bought some plugins a couple weeks ago just to see they have to pay another fee to have the new version.

You think that’s slow? Try iZotope Ozone or NI Guitar Rig (though my system is old I must confess)

This kind of reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. The ratio of ‘expensive-ness’ is just as much wether you are upgrading 1 plugin or a 100. It’s about the price per plugin upgrade. I paid $29 for Retro EQ (which seems to be the going rate of any FX plugin these days.. I’m looking at you Waves and PA .. haha) so am I going to pay for an upgrade as much as I paid for the plugin?

Will you pay $500 to upgrade Omnisphere which you have bought for $500? Hellznoo

And let’s not pretend like Waves “yeah but the MRSP prices..” those are totally made up just like PA prices and everyone knows that you just wait until the plugin goes on “sale” for $29 (which is the ACTUAL MRSP of the plugin).

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...
This has to be one of the silliest ideas ever, even Waves WUP for all the plugins - if you own everything - is capped at a little over a couple hundred bucks.
I think McDSP has received an amazing amount of good will due to Colin’s charm and the quality of the products but this has seriously put a dent in everything he has built over the years.
Wrong move...

Let me tell you something. I hate every company that is using the "apple silicon native support" card to suck their customer's blood. Period. As a company, you HAVE TO support the newest OS or CPU architecture if you are supporting the OS from the beginning. In this case, Apple switched to ARM64 (and ohh boy glad they did as I'm sitting with an M1 Ultra on 110 tracks mixing with loads of plugins at their minimum 4X oversampling turned on and it can handle it like a piece of cake without turning to my computer fans like a helicopter or my CPU a toaster) and all SERIOUS companies should support it eventually and it MUST be free to update.

From a programmer's perspective, it should be relatively easy because most of the FRAMEWORKS to build plugins can compile the ARM64 plugin with a single click. I completely understand that it may take some time to maintain all of the plugins and make sure they are working correctly. But that's NOT a customer problem because it's the company that sells it. Customers will always want to get the latest, fastest and best whenever they can.

Companies should support their old plugins and make sure they are working with new systems or should give free updates to keep their customers happy. Like Acustica did, Softube did, Plugin Alliance did, Fabfilter did... These companies are the ones who deserve real support, not the ones who left you alone with an outdated plugin. I will be happily paying for the UPGRADE price if there is an added feature, significant improvements, but if you are putting the "native silicon support" card on the table and abandoned my plugins, and don't care about how much money I spend on your products before sorry but it's your loss. Customers are not as stupid as some companies think they are.

It's not even an upgrade and 29 USD/plugin for an update? it's a BIG FAT HARD PASS...

This was the quickest transition from excitement to heartbroken (seeing V7 release, to the upgrade price for all my plug-ins), wanted so bad McDSP on my M1, but I suppose it's never going to happen, unless something changes.

After building up that goodwill with the free echo plugin they just throw it all in the bin with WUP? What’s with this greed? Before the hand-wringers get started, yes it costs money to keep your plugin updated with bug fixes and support for new operating-systems & hardware, but that’s the trade-off for writing your code once and then selling it thousands of times. If you want to get more money out of your customers, build a new product and factor in the cost of maintenance (and write your code well so it’s cheaper to maintain). If you’re smart, give your customers a loyalty discount too. You will make more, and we won’t hate you.

Just go with Audiority, or even Softube - both with amazing sound and treat their customers with respect.

I thought I was missing something, could not believe that you have to basicaly buy a product once again for it to update.

Such a shame, got really excited - using McDSP more and more lately Hope for money to talk and McDSP to open their eyes after that.
Updates should be free, If its a solid update - I understand, there should be some money involved, but its absurd to pay 29$ a plugin, without any discounts!
Their marketing guys are not doing good, thats one of the biggest letdowns in the business lately.

Over the years, I've shied away from buying more into McDSP because of these kinds of stunts. This is not the first time they've done this kind of thing, though with v5 and v6 the differential between buying a new plugin and the upgrade was much larger.

I will probably upgrade the EC300 I bought a while ago but will either not bother with the 6050 or wait for some later upgrade deal to the 6060 – that's one where I never got offered the cheaper upgrade path that a lot of people seemed to have scored in recent years, after McDSP tried to claim it was a whole different plugin and not an upgraded 6050 at all.

It's way too costly. Sorry McDSP, I'll have to pass for now. I'll wait for a better offer.

Plus, you failed to take the occasion to add a preset manager with v7, especially for FutzBox.

It would have been a good thing to do.

McDSP wants to sell subscriptions. That's the whole reason why they are f-ing their customers with perpetual licenses. They just want your money to keep going their way. If it's not with a subscription, it's with a worse version of Waves WUP.

v7: no news for a old McDSP supporter: ML8000 and AE600 crash (go to sleeping mode) Steinberg WaveLab 11 Pro (Win 10). Congrats !

You might be right. Whole subscription thing, anywhere you go - its something we cannot let happen - we will be f*ed if we do.

Right now, we can just stick to what we have (old versions) and do not care for anything the company does. If everything is subscription, we're slaves, it can get easily out of control and lord knows what will that lead to.

Really really dumb move Colin, rethink

You’re right, $29 upgrade fee for something that originally cost about the same $ is ridiculous. I was thinking of the ML4000 or Revolver (both expensive plugins) in my initial comment.

Generally, in my opinion, companies should only charge for upgrades if there is substantial functionality added to a plugin. ( i.e. FF Saturn 2 was a huge step up from Saturn 1)

But it seems that most of these ‘updates’ are simply cosmetic with added M1 compatibility. This is just keeping up with technological trends that should be a cost of doing business for McDSP- not passed on to the consumer.

I disagree ‘a little’ no problem with wup or paying for updates

You can’t expect your software to run freely forever without updates. Updates take time and money.

How much money is another issue.

Best mike

I think Collin is a brilliant guy and I bet he is going to find a better solution for all if us after this thread. He can not see McDSP company reputation being destroyed like that. I do have 7 McDSP plugins and will hold on my v6 for now. Let's see what happens.

Yep I agree. Don’t mind WUP at all as it’s capped. Which is actually a (minor) incentive for you to own more plugs. This is just stupid expensive.

How about I offer you a free mix. You're happy with the mix and we wrap the project.

Then I surprise you with having to pay an upgrade fee to get the WAV of the mix instead of an MP3.

The free plugin and the cheap "upgrade" to the retro-pack are the free mix. V7 a few weeks later is the WAV.

Bait and switch.

Colin seems like a good guy with good intentions, I don't think this is malicious and he just missed the ball, but this is what it is...

It's also troubling that users who are heavily bought into McDSP have to pay eye-bleeding upgrade prices, at the same time as being offered 150/year subscription.

I pay max WUP and Avid yearly so I have skin in the game; with the current state of affairs of McDSP's upgrade pricing, I'm glad I only have FutzBox.

Asking long-term users to pay 1000 bucks for upgrades and offering a 150/year subscription is ... odd. Even the cheapest upgrade price for everything users (6.4 to v7 whatever that means) is 500 bucks, double the WUP cap. Wassa??!

No one willing to pay for subscriptions or upgrades, and god forbid a new plug-in cost more than $29. Good luck finding any plug-in companies still around in 5 years outside of the mega ones like NI, PA, waves, and softube.

Just to be clear, I’m not really different myself. Honestly a great time to be a consumer compared to 10 years ago as these companies are all forced to offer bottom of the barrel pricing.

Out of the three people I can find in this thread who mentioned having the free EC300, two said they were happy to pay for the v7 update. Everyone else I can find, including me, paid for it. Also, the main complaint was about the high cost for those who have bought heavily into McDSP's product line.

Now I may have miscounted, but you may want to take your strawman to another thread.

Lol hey, I'm on Windows with many McDSP plugins...what benefit am I getting. A sweetened up GUI? In fact my plugins run flawlessly as is. So what am I paying $29 per plugin for...presets...I make my own! I normally buy plugins for that kind of money. Remember if you don't stand up for something you will fall for everything.

I have bought the complete bundle not even 2 months ago and now have to pay $499 for an upgrade? That is exactly the opposite of being customer friendly, I guess it’s best for me to sell my bundle again and just use other brands as there are many great replacements for McDSP plugins

I didn't "grow up" using McDSP plugins and I'm not a legacy Pro Tools user who has used these plugins since the beginning. I'm not attached to them in any way and if they were to disappear from my system then no big deal because there are tons of alternatives. I think they're good plugins, but certainly not anything special. So I'm not going to upgrade at these prices, and I'm definitely not going the SUB route. What I am going to do is keep using V6 till I can't. Most likely will also be phasing them out of my workflow. Eventually will cease being a McDSP customer. Oh well...

I waited for a looong time to upgrade Analog Channel from v5 to v6 because it was too expensive for me... so I pulled the trigger less than a month ago (exactly 19 days ago) and now they want me to pay $29 from v6 to v7 (if I had jumped from v5 to v7 it would be cheaper)
I wrote to them and they said there was nothing they can do about it...
It's not that $29 bucks will change my life... but this is NOT the customer service I would expect from a company like McDSP

I really felt the pain and I would be really pissed off I am too.

What really irks me here is they've spent all this time developing new attractive GUIs, but done f*ck all to address at least two critical problems I've reported to them over the past two years in great detail (and at some expense of my time communicating with their support team):

- Channel G has a bug where the high and low pass filters don't switch off properly with the Global EQ bypass despite the graph showing there are no filters in place. The problem remains identical in V7. I bloody well sent multiple emails back and forth with their team, they acknowledged the issue a year ago, haven't fixed it, and now want to charge me $29 for a still-broken plugin.

- the sluggish GUI loading times for all McDSP plugins. They pause all of the graphics on my system every time I open them. My MCU controller even pauses waiting for the plugin to load upon changing track selection.

I'm out.

If someone demos V7, could you report if (for non-M1 users) there have been any improvements besides GUIs?

Supporting a platform isn't the same as upgrades. If they say they support MacOS, they must support MacOS, no matter what Apple does. An upgrade is when you add significant features, and for audio plugins, this means sound related features, not pretty graphics although I appreciate them.

That went well