Music Library Please

The sudden shut-down of Photodex was distressing - particularly since I had just spent the money.  Now I find the successor (which is using the assets from Proshow) requires an annual subscription - as opposed to a one-time purchase - at 250% of the cost of ProshowProducer.

Frankly, to read that a music library is "very expensive" is a bit galling.  At this point, I question whether I am receiving value for the money.  Director has some features I had hoped Photodex would implement, but it is not that different.  Just a lot more expensive.

Hi Robert!

I'm not sure about the 250% increase... Creator costs about $100/year and that's at worst only a little more than buying the periodic software updates from Photodex. The people hurt by this shift are those who bought Photodex a long time ago and were content with keeping that old version with its functionality to occasionally produce shows. The people helped are those who create shows on a continual basis and need continued updates to keep their software stable and its output fresh and competitive.

Frankly, I'm somewhere in the middle and still paid for the updates. I just recalled that one of those updates was only a few months ago. Give me a moment to seethe...

From what I can tell, the choice for Photodex -> Photopia was either to change or shutdown completely. Now it's up to the marketplace to determine if there really is sufficient demand to once again produce what I consider to be best in class software.

As for the music, royalty free tunes aren't free. In fact they can cost lots more than royalty-encombered alternatives. I do hope they get something in place because the library, both for its depth and organization, made it really easy to select good music for a show.

Bob

I agree with earlier posts that a music library is one of the key features that I would seek before using any slide show utility. I am a casual amateur user who simply wants a tool to create presentations of holiday photos etc and Proshow Gold basic version 8 suits me fine.

A larger music library would be all I would wish to add. I use online and ripped CD music sources and personal video clips too and the existing package is easy to use for my personal slide shows.

I hate the idea of a subscription and the pain of turning it on and off to spin out the cost for my sporadic use. What a lot of hassle!

If a one-off purchase licence is not possible, why not have some form of metered use on an account system and pay by metered minute or whatever? You could have different tariffs according to feature levels used. Offline use could be achieved by a prepaid time limit being set perhaps on a rolling basis. 

Rest assured that we ARE working on adding a quality royalty-free music library in Photopia.  This is one feature we could not port over, for licensing reasons, and there is a large upfront investment associated with features of this nature, not to mention the normal development time.  While individual tracks can be obtained from a variety of vendors at a rather wide variety of prices (from free to hundreds of dollars per track), licensing a good library for use in a distributed product (like ours) is something else entirely.  It's not uncommon for costs to start at a hundred thousand dollars and go up (significantly) from there based on the size, quality, and licensing restrictions of the library being purchased.

While we continue to work on this feature, here are a few resources for obtaining licensed audio, much of it at a very reasonable rate.

Free Music Archive ( https://freemusicarchive.org/)
Pond5 ( https://www.pond5.com/)
AudioJungle ( https://audiojungle.net/)

You get what you pay for on much of this content, but it's worth starting at Free Music Archive to see if there are any zero cost options available.  As always, please pay close attention to the listed licensing restrictions.

@fisherbs

We did consider the idea of using a 'metered' payment system.  There are a lot more details to sort out with a system of that nature, and a much higher chance that customers could end up with a higher than expected bill or otherwise be without the necessary funds (if using a pre-paid model) while up against a critical deadline.  For these, and other, reasons we ultimately decided to go with a simpler subscription-based system, allowing customers to mitigate cost using the "Suspend" / "Reactivate" system available from the "My Account" > "Subscriptions" section of our website.  It's a largely automated process that should make the process of suspending / reactivating accounts never more than a few clicks away.

What are the "rules" for suspending my account. What is the impact of suspending my account and how frequently can I do it?

Posted by: @mgshn

What are the "rules" for suspending my account. What is the impact of suspending my account and how frequently can I do it?

Take a look here.

https://www.facebook.com/ChoiceSlides/videos/780965722345748/  

Bob