Orphaned?

[Agrajag]

I hate to be a pain about this but having paid for Sveta I'm a bit miffed at the lack of any progress on this product.

If you've lost interest in it, tell us so that we can give up hope for this thing and move on.

You're now working on version 13 and Sveta is still stuck at version 11. It was buggy in version 11 and needed some major work so what we paid for has never been right and now isn't getting any attention.

Having to keep version 11 around just to run this increasingly out of date product is not an acceptable answer.

What exactly are your future plans for this product? You once noted you'd fix it not long after version 12 was finished. (You said, "We will soon update CD writer, then Sveta.") Now you're working on 13 and made some comment about how 13 wasn't a big deal and that Sveta could be worked on after 13 with ease.

To my ears that doesn't sound helpful. Clearly 13 is going to take a lot of your time and then what about 14? It too could be viewed as easy as 13 pushing Sveta back again.

I know this must annoy you to get these kinds of messages but put yourself in our shoes. I paid for this more than 2 years ago and it's been pretty much stuck there since.

[Spoon]

Sveta amounts for less than 0.5% of dBpoweramp sales, yet demands at least 30% of development time, this is a disparity. We once spent (2 years ago) almost the full year updating Sveta, this was a bad move in retrospect, Music Converter suffered because of this and music converter is the goose that lays the golden eggs, it keeps Illustrate going. Music Converter is now in permanent development, it is important to Illustrate. All other programs (CD Writer, Aux Input, Sveta, Audio Player) have to fit into the 40% of remaining development time.

This is the honest answer.

[EliC]

spoon, have you considered partnering with some other companies. Clearly you have the best ripper on the market. Allowing the core of the ripper to be integrated into other media projects (mediamonkey, helium audio, ect...) would free up time to work on this core component.

Curious, have any major optical drive manufactures every inquired regarding OEM sales with their boxed products?

Also, it would seem to me that the batch ripper is a missed revenue opportunity. A small price would be easily afforded by the companies that typically spend hundreds or thousands on similar software.

I would also suggested that the future meta-data handling used for the ripper and the batch ripper be available and sold as a separate component.

Of course its your business and you would know better then I how things work from your end and your motivations. I just hope you will have the funding generated from your projects to be able to cont to work. I know I am very impressed and have referred quite a few people to give dBpoweramp a go.

[bhoar]

Curious, have any major optical drive manufactures every inquired regarding OEM sales with their boxed products?

Considering the prices of optical drives these days, perhaps the opposite arrangement might be more workable. :)

(i.e. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3424382&body=MAIN )

-brendan

[EliC]

lol, yes, on the low end drives. But they cant afford to give anything away with them. But the latest and greatest blue-ray, hd-dvd, or 55x dvd burner...

plus we are talking about a low cost version, no lifetime upgrade, enough to tease users to get the bigger, better version or at least a buck each from a few hundred thousand drives is an easier way to make money if you can convince the companies to use your product.

[Agrajag]

Sveta amounts for less than 0.5% of dBpoweramp sales, yet demands at least 30% of development time, this is a disparity.

I agree with you and I appreciate the very frank, very honest response. However, it sounds like Sveta is still pretty much orphaned given that its gotten none of that 40% time in quite a while. The best I could hope is that down the line you remember that some of us believed in it and funded it only to have it essentially go nowhere.

I've also mentioned partnering, most notably with MediaMonkey but it seems obvious there's no interest there given the lack of response (on either side). Both of these products get bogged down by what the other side does well. I would LOVE to see MediaMonkey fully support Music Converter and visa-versa. The problem would be how to split funds, etc.

The problem I see with convincing manufacturers to come on board is that the user interface of the product is not intuitive to the types of customers most of these guys deal with and they don't want the added tech support overhead. This is where a partnership could be awesome. MediaMonkey has a great interface but its converters aren't comparable to MC. Putting out a limited shareware version of these combined would be quite a nice product.

[spiralis]

Spoon, please also consider users like myself that bought the dmc license just because of Sveta. Without Sveta I would not have bought a dmc license! Sveta was what I needed, and that's why I am an Illustrate customer at all.

Without Sveta you would have sold not just one less Sveta license, but also one less dmc license.

I am really, really tired of waiting for an update :(

[fecund]

I too am a paid & registered user sticking with 11.5, because I need Aux Input... I don't even need features or bug fixes to Auxiliary Input, I'd just like it to work with the codecs / other tools.

[mattinger]

Same here. I'm using Sveta as well. Sveta promised lifetime upgrades, but not a single upgrade has been issued since i purchased it 1.5 years ago. In addition, I don't seem to be able to even just upgrade the dmc component to R12 which I use quite frequently.

Can sveta and R12 co-exist on the same machine? Is it also possible to issue R12+licenses to sveta users who were promised lifetime upgrades?

[Spoon]

Yes, see the R12 compatibility page:

http://dbpoweramp.com/legacy-compatibility.htm