The way I would use it is Pianoteq in the background and a sheetmusic or chord chart app like OnSong in the background.
I am already doing this with the 1.7GB CMP Grand and it sounds great. I would just far prefer the Pianoteq models.
]]>I was looking at the registered user list in the forum. There are less than 2500 users registered over a 7 year period. I wonder how that number correlates to number of units sold.
]]>Opinion or do you have some data that would back this up?
This is a matter of opinion, of course. But from what I heard from dealers over the years suggests that they make in general at most about 10-12% on items like this.
Which is very consistent with the fact that even the largest mail-order retailers in Europe (e.g. Thomann) sell Pianoteq Standard for about 96% of the price Modartt charge themselves. There is simply not much room for discounts. If I would have to take a very wild guess, it would be that the dealers have to pay about 190 Euros for the standard licence, maybe slightly less. If Thomann sells it for 238 Euros, they would make about 10 bucks per copy. Would they charge the suggested retail price, they would make about 19 Euros, or 10%. Yes, this is just my personal estimate, but I would be very surprised were the margins that much bigger.
In the iOS world, to keep the 249 Euro retail price point, Modartt would effectively have to sell for about 146 Euros per copy, since (e.g. considering German sales tax) 249 Euros equals 209 Euros before tax, from which Apple takes about 63 Euros (or 30 percent) as far as I know. Maybe I'm mistaken, I would be happy to be corrected here. So selling through retail means they take a hit of about 9-10% per copy, which is a reasonable gamble against the larger audience they reach this way. Through the Apple store we are talking about close to 30% less revenue per copy, which means they would have to sell huge numbers of copies for this to be profitable.
]]>Huh? I bought directly from Modartt -- what's the point of buying from a distributor when you then have to go to the Modartt website to register & get your unlock codes?
I think if you ask yourself the reciprocal question (i.e., why would virtually every reseller of musical instruments and software offer this product in their catalog?), then you'll have your answer.
]]>...they almost certainly do not keep a revenue share of 30% either.
Opinion or do you have some data that would back this up?
]]>EvilDragon wrote:if a program depends very much on SSE2/AVX registers that a CPU offers (Intel/AMD), and the ARM CPU doesn't have those registers...
According to the A7 Wikipedia page, the A7 (and by implication the A8) has 32 128-bit registers for the ARM floating point/NEON instructions. The NEON instructions are the ARM SIMD instructions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A7
For a description of the ARM NEON SIMD engine, see:
So that would still mean a decent amount of rewriting happening, no?
]]>I am trying to understand why an iOS version of the product would require a higher price. Modartt has deals with other distributors. They don't require a higher price from them. Those distributors aren't selling these products for free.
Huh? I bought directly from Modartt -- what's the point of buying from a distributor when you then have to go to the Modartt website to register & get your unlock codes? Since these distributors don't actually stock the Modartt software, I doubt they charge the same 30% of total price that Apple does.
]]>I am trying to understand why an iOS version of the product would require a higher price. Modartt has deals with other distributors. They don't require a higher price from them. Those distributors aren't selling these products for free.
Yes. But they almost certainly do not keep a revenue share of 30% either (plus taxes). Either way, the main problem as you have already noted is the relation of expected revenue to needed investment, and that is something we can only speculate about. I have my doubts, you apparently haven't. But revenue on mobile devices is not all it's cracked up to be if you listen to anyone actually selling software on those platforms. And the death of the personal computer has been prophesied many times already, and yet... e.g. Apple still makes and sells Macs.
As for whether there is enough market demand to provide a decent ROI for the development cost, that is something Modartt will need to determine. An iOS version certainly would provide more potential customers than say Linux, right? I mean come on...
As a developer myself, I know a thing or two about cross-platform development. If Modartt know what they are doing, and I suppose they do, and assuming a codebase of at least a few hundred thousand lines of code for Pianoteq (more likely much more)... if they use proper design and cross-platform libraries, the Windows, Mac and Linux versions share probably about 99% of their codebase, meaning a difference of a few thousand lines for the low-level stuff. So maintaining those three ports does not mean much more work than maintaining only one.
In the iOS case, were this one percent even to rise to maybe 5 percent, this would mean that the iOS port is more work to maintain than the other three combined. And I guess we would be talking of 10, maybe 20 or even 30 percent of code that has to be ported and maintained specifically for iOS and the ARM architecture. If it even works. As I said before, the A8 is only powerful enough if you manage to completely use its potential... and as EvilDragon correctly points out, there's only so much to gain by parallel processing in solving this particular problem.
]]>if a program depends very much on SSE2/AVX registers that a CPU offers (Intel/AMD), and the ARM CPU doesn't have those registers...
According to the A7 Wikipedia page, the A7 (and by implication the A8) has 32 128-bit registers for the ARM floating point/NEON instructions. The NEON instructions are the ARM SIMD instructions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A7
For a description of the ARM NEON SIMD engine, see:
]]>Not to go into too much detail, but I am studying computer science and have a particular interest in DSP, so I have informed myself about GPGPU quite extensively. It is not a good solution for realtime playable instrument, period. Otherwise we would have already seen some actual plugin synthesizers utilizing GPGPU by now - the technology itself has been available for quite a while now. But, nope, didn't happen. Why? Because latency issues make it unplayable in realtime. Case closed.
]]>GPUs aren't really THAT good at serial processing (which audio is in 99.99% of cases all about). They are made for parallel processing
Polyphony certainly provides a source for needed parallel processing. So I respectfully disagree that such an approach would not benefit audio apps like Pianoteq.
]]>Reason being - if a program depends very much on SSE2/AVX registers that a CPU offers (Intel/AMD), and the ARM CPU doesn't have those registers, it's definitely NOT the case of a simple port, because the whole DSP part would have to be recoded to account for the differences in the CPU architecture. Which is something I don't think Modartt would be willing to do, since it would mean maintaining two separate codebases.
]]>http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7460/appl...air-review
Draw your own conclusions.
]]>