My contention (echoing others) is that VCV VST gets much of it’s value from the free plugins. I believe that if VCV VST had no access to free plugins it would be much less attractive as a $99 product. Whereas with thousands of free modules it is a very attractive product.
This may be incorrect, but that is what I meant (actually what the person who told me this meant) by “VCV is making money from the free plugins”.
I think some of the comments here are missing the point or misinterpreting? As I’ve said before, I don’t develop VCV modules any more, and if I did I don’t know what my option would be on this.
First, some obvious things:
No one disputes any of these things. I think they are “facts”.
To me, however, this case is significantly different from other cases where a commercial program loads a free extension. And that is my belief that a significant amount (most?) of the value of VCV comes from the available free modules. Whereas whatever you think of them, commercial programs like Photoshop or Outlook don’t get most of their value from free plugins – they are successful on their own.
But, even sticking with the “facts” (1…3) the question the poster is asking is, I believe, “would developers like a way to easily provide their plugins as free in VCV free, and paid in VCV?”.
The answer to that question could be mainly yes, or mainly no, but the answer can’t be any one the of obvious tautologies listed above.
How come this hasn’t been an issue for the two years where everyone knew what was coming?
Sincerely interested–other than the issue above, what are your biggest problems with the VST? Have you been hitting the stuff that’s more annoying to transfer over (framebuffering, context, etc.)?
Is more philosophical: I love Rack as platform virtual modular I hate it in a DAW: destroys the concept of new revolutionary platform
I love it in a DAW, but if it makes you feel better I never use your modules
no problem, I’ll give you back the money 
@Squinky, @Vega, others, thanks for engaging thoughtfully with this–I always like having my own perspectives open, and I’m seeing more of the other side of this argument thanks to this thread.
@Vega, I can especially see the point that in cases where the VST transition is non-trivial, the paid component is putting an additional burden on the community (and this joins to @synthi’s point above, in which the paid component is also bringing in a new energy that free devs may not want to deal with).
Perhaps these are things that can be learned from if and when there’s another big API transition. In hindsight, there might have been ways to get ahead of some of it, but (A) hindsight! and (B) they would have certainly been imperfect and would have taken additional time and resources that might not have been worth it.
This is the only “fact” out of your three that I think might be more complicated, and I think that complexity is relevant to this discussion as a whole. I’d rephrase it as “All else being equal, users would prefer everything to be free.” But what if the thing users get if everything is free is markedly inferior to the thing users get if there’s a paid option? In my opinion, VCV Free V2 is an astonishing “have and eat cake” situation for users who can’t or won’t pay for the VST option; they get the whole ecosystem and all non-VST development benefits that go into Pro with absolutely no outlay on their part. I’m not sure that deal exists anywhere else in musical software, although there are some moves in that direction (Vital, for example).
I don’t think VCV Rack as a musical tool would be anywhere as appealing as it is now without the vast number of free modules, so yes, those modules are certainly adding to the value of Rack’s paid option (as well as to Rack’s free option). But the other side of this is that I don’t think Rack as a development platform would be anywhere near as good, be open-sourced, or possibly even exist if the paid side hadn’t been a target. And the plugin version, the development and (substantial) support burden of which has fallen almost entirely on VCV as a company, opens up tons of musical possibilities as well.
I suppose it comes down to what motivates free devs. Offhand, I can come up with a dozen different reasons, so there are probably plenty more, and some of those reasons jibe with a paid version, some are neutral to it, and some may be against it.
Anyway, this post is plenty long, especially for someone who doesn’t have any plugins released yet and therefore hasn’t really had to deal with this in real time. But there’s a remarkable and complicated symbiosis happening here between VCV as a company, VCV Free users, VCV Pro users, the Rack source code (which among other things enables plugins to work better and do more than they could ever do if all we had was a published API), free devs, paid devs, and various communities that have sprung up around those things. I think if this symbiosis is balanced right it’s going to take this ecosystem (not to mention contemporary music production) to even greater heights, but that’ll take flexibility and careful consideration from everyone.
I respect that. Maybe it’s the 2020s version of the Ussachevsky vs. Carlos debate over whether the Moog should have a keyboard.
You should, they’re great
thanks for the thoughtful response. fwiw I probably agree with most of what you say. Certainly I found VCV to be an awesome dev platform for DSP fun, and I’ve used many in the past. And the distribution via the library get your stuff in front of people. In the past I have had maybe one or two users of my free stuff.
Hey, let’s all try to be calm and respectful here, ok? I think most everyone here are doing that, yes?
I bought Rack2 paid as much to support ongoing platform development; I will use it in Live, but not the way I use it standalone.
The 2 years it took for Rack as VST to be finished were good for me creatively, because I found a workflow in Rack Standalone whereby I could make complete tracks in Rack. Some of my released music is completely unedited first take recordings.
Going back to Live to construct a piece can feel less inspiring somehow. I don’t hate it in the DAW but it isn’t where I use it mostly.
It appears to me that this thread seems to be designed to stir up some controversy. The OP has posted it both on FB and now here whilst not being a developer themselves. I would be more comfortable if such a thread had actually been started by a developer.
Having said that, some interesting issues have been raised. Splitting the library is a terrible idea from a user standpoint. I think @vega made some good points though. if Rack Pro is advertising the size of the free library as a selling point, then I hadn’t really considered that before. If we only developed free modules then that might bother me more than it does. But as we also develop a commercial module, then the more users Rack can get, the more we will be likely to sell. In general I can see Rack development becoming more commercial over time I think, as it becomes potentially more viable due to the larger audience.
I have to say I LOVE using the VST, it’s an absolute game changer. I think Andrew was very wise to give every developer a free copy - there would have probably been a shit-storm of biblical proportions if devs had been expected to pay for the privilege of using their own free software in the VST!
I really felt for @synthi when he was getting moaned at by newbies “because they’d paid $99 for this!” - no they damn well hadn’t - and this is perhaps the thing I feel strongest about. I think VCV needs to make it as clear as they possibly can about what people are paying for, and what they are not. And this comes back to the advertising of ‘over 2000’ modules thing. If people think they are paying for a library of over 2000 modules, then if there’s a problem with one of those plugins, they feel they have a right to complain about it. So the developer gets these entitled complaints from people because there are some issues on day 1 with the 150 modules they code, maintain and offer up for FREE. And which they had to spend days working on solely to support the VST, from which they receive no benefit at all. There definitely IS something wrong with that.
Over the last few years there has been a great culture of respect, patience and gratitude between the users of VCV and the developers of FOSS plugins. That needs to be carefully nurtured and protected and VCV should consider how best to inform and educate these new VST users about the way things work round here. Otherwise I think there is a very good chance some developers will just throw in the towel because they simply don’t need this kind of grief from entitled people, who feel they have paid for the right to complain, when there is no benefit in it at all for them.
It may be, but why do you say that? It’s not obvious to me why this is.
Patches made in the free version might not be able to be opened in the VST version because the modules are either not available at all, or you need to pay to use them. And because it would take up double the disk space.
And it might also then open the door to the opposite scenario - some developers arguing that they only want their plugins to be used in the paid version - perhaps to make them more exclusive or whatever.
And it would almost certainly lead to more ‘freemium’ modules - so there would be a free version and a paid one with more features - not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that - it’s exactly what we do with ShapeMaster. But ShapeMaster was always intended to be commercial, and the free version is like a (slightly) feature-limited, never ending demo that is also very capable in it’s own right. But you might find devs removing features from existing modules in the free version that were already not that feature rich to start with.
Would it be a good idea to start thinking about having multiple ‘rings’ for plugin releases and updates?
For instance, Hora 2.0.0 was just released and broke Rack. A scenario like that, when you have a bigger DAW-centric userbase (who, let’s be honest, are on the whole less likely to be engaged with the VCV community) could cause an avalanche of support issues, not just for VCV but the plugin devs themselves, making it more likely that those off-colour complaints occur.
Have the default ring push updates a few days later than ‘brave and fearless’ and it gives time for the community to identify and devs to fix whatever the problem is.
I’d say so yes. In fact I’m really surprised this didn’t happen before the release of Rack 2. I’m sure there would be plenty of volunteers from within the Rack community who would be willing to act as a first line of defence. They would expect things to perhaps be a bit buggy and would just report back with issues rather than kick up a stink. I reckon it would be good to have maybe 100 or more of them, with a good spread of Platforms, OSs and DAWs etc, who got new releases a few days before the user base at large.
One of the problems Rack faces right now is getting the blame for problems with 3rd party developers code (like the Hora example you mentioned). Users just see Rack crash, they don’t know it was a particular plugin that caused it. And when you have so many different developers submitting code to the library there should be some kind of check/process in place to prevent code that causes Rack and DAWS to crash from reaching the main user base, both to ensure a better user experience and protect VCVs reputation. Users are a lot less forgiving about this kind of thing when they have paid good money.
It might be worth splitting this part of the discussion about release rings, into a separate thread. As a dev, I think a beta test ring might be a good idea. I try to make sure my code is stable before I release, I’m sure we all do, but I don’t always get it right, and I can’t test on a Mac, and I don’t have a saw daw, so I can’t easily test in the vst. Having a semi formal test community would be helpful
You have more confidence in this than I do. I’m always really interested in new modules and have beta tested quite a few for people, but I wouldn’t want to just be beta-testing en mass- when I’m sitting down for what’s not exclusively a development/testing session with Rack it’s because I want to make music. Things crashing would be really, really annoying. Sure, some people may turn on the dev ring/channel at first, but I don’t think it would get much use long term.
Every dev needs a saw, 
and a hammer!
Submarine Audio Workstation?