Nine Volt Audio going out of business

Nine Volt Audio is shutting down in January, so there will be a going-out-of-business group buy sale. They weren't specific about the sale date.
 
If you're not familiar with the company, they sell primarily loop libraries, mostly REX/RMX and some Kontakt. Quality is decent but not spectacular, usability depends on how loop-oriented you are. I'm not much of a loop user, but some of the percussive libraries (esp. Shimmer & Shake tambourines and shakers) would be useful at the right price.

Studio One gives you a free 9 volt Audio guitar pack and I have found it is really great. I do professional tracks for advertising and stuff and found the guitars very very useable and helpful. Lots of variations, can be time stretched very nicely (although this is a Studio One thing mostly) I have found them to be very good in terms of usablity.
 
I am sorry to hear they are closing down. I will be jumping onto anything they might have for sale.

bitflipper
I think at least part of the reason for the company's demise is that many of the titles were overpriced. IMO, the current sale prices are probably more in line with what they should have been priced at all along.

 
Agreed. i understand sampling is time consuming work, but loops are too plentiful to charge so much. I downloaded their sample pack to get an idea.  They are ok and as Jeff pointed out, being in Rex format gives them a little more flexibility.  No way would I have paid the original prices for them.  Too many better choices in that range.  In fact, I would rather pay a musician of a prticular instrument for a session of riffs i cold record and make my own loops than pay those prices for something i share with others.

Don't be put off if you're strictly a Kontakt person when it comes to sample libraries and most of these titles aren't Kontakt instruments. If you have full Kontakt, it's very easy to make an instrument out of them.

Yup, I've heard that, too. But that's typical with sample libraries in general and loop libraries in particular. They get pirated because a) it's easy to do, and b) the demographic for loop users is heavily weighted toward the "everything's free on the internet" generation.
 
Still, given the extremely low cost of doing business for online software distribution, it's hard to imagine somebody not being able to make at least a modest profit from it. Amazon has plans with no monthly minimum fee for bandwidth, half a cent per 1,000 transactions and 10 cents per gigabyte for storage. Compared to conventional retailing, it's free money!
 
EDIT:
This may be the thread referred to above. It's a long explanation but worth the read. In it, NVA's owner talks about the theft of one of his most ambitious and expensive (and most popular) libraries. He also reveals how small the monetary rewards are for the amount of work that goes into creating a sample library.

I think you're probably right, dub.
 
Case in point is NVA's popular Taiko lib, which sold for (IIRC) about $120. That's obviously going to be a niche product at any price. Kontakt already bundles a serviceable taiko library, so how many users really need more taiko samples, even very good ones? If you do generic action movie trailers, OK. But for everybody else, it's a special effect you'd use maybe once a year. Something you might happily add to your collection for $20, but not $120.
 
The smart way to market such a product would have been to publish a list price of $120 but let it go at a $39.95 introductory price, and perhaps also offer a "lite" version for $19.95. The objective is to move as much product as possible in as short a time as possible.
 
Meldaproductions does this for every new product release. Their regular prices are often beyond my means, yet I own several meldaproductions products because of very low introductory prices. This strategy gets you instant buzz and high-volume sales out of the gate, before the warez pirates have had time to crack and post your product. Devs will tell you that most of their sales happen within the first 2-4 weeks of release, after which volume drops rapidly, often dropping to near zero as soon as the pirated version has been posted online.
 

I ended up watching/listening to the Shimmer and Shake demo video on the Nine Volt site and could see why folks were talking about it.  Pretty neat collection of that. 
 
I splurged and got it.  I was taken by surprise how huge the data set is for just the shimmer and shake collection.  I ordered the one shots and loops collection of Shimmer and Shake.  There were a variety of files to download and I downloaded them all, but ended up only storing the ones related to accessing the sounds via Kontakt.  For just the Kontakt samples alone it's 4.5 GB on my hard disk, just for these percussion sounds.  I stored off the other versions, like REX files on an external hard disk in case I ever wanted them.
 
The download process was long.   The sounds are nice though.  But holy cow, 4.5 GB for just these percussion sounds.