DS-Audio Thorn Synthesizer Is Available Now Exclusive at Plugin Alliance!

DS-Audio has today released an update of the Thorn Synthesizer plugin. It includes improvements as well as new sounds. More interesting is that Thorn is no longer available everywhere but exclusively at Plugin Alliance. For economic/financial reasons, the developer has decided to take this path. He wants to guarantee that he can continue to work on new products and updates. I can understand this move very well but there is also downsides for his existing customers and products that I don’t like!

If you want to have the Thorn 1.2 installer, you have to pay $19 USD to Plugin Alliance for the change. For existing customers certainly not good news. Compensation gives you three preset libraries for free. But it remains for me the bland aftertaste that you have to pay as a customer again. Also, the easy authorization of DS-Audio plugins is history. Now you have to click through a menu forest before you can use the plugin again.

Last but not least the official price of Thorn has increased with the change: it’s now $199 (on sale $149) instead of $119. Unfortunately, Thorn is no longer cheap and an absolute insider tip. Important is primarily the DS-Audio can continue to work. Find the decision not so great, as it has many downsides for existing customers!

Official Message From Dmitry Sches

We have some important news to share with you. In the past few months we have been working on migrating DS Audio to Plugin Alliance platform. As you know DS Audio always was a one-man team. Being alone means that DS Audio has limited resources for marketing, download assistance and account management. Together with Plugin Alliance, DS Audio can now provide much better services and concentrate exactly and solely on plugin development. Plugin Alliance certainly will help us a lot to keep on the audio plugin market among all other great companies and competitive products.

Our first step was porting Thorn to Plugin Alliance. It will be exclusively distributed by Plugin Alliance, DS Audio will not be selling and provide download links for Thorn at the website anymore. The downside is that we have to charge for extra fee for the transition to Plugin Alliance platform. We know, you might think it’s not fair. It’s always a pain to pay for any minor update and there is really no much reasons to do that. Frankly DS Audio as well never thought of any additional charges it could ask for in future. However, we did everything to minimize the fee as much as possible and set it to $19 USD. The fee is needed to cover expenses for allocating storage and bandwidth at Plugin Alliance servers, beta testing and integration work. We hope that the benefits of Plugin Alliance platform could be worth enough for you to upgrade.

As for future plans, DS Audio is intensively working on Diversion 2 now, which will be released at Plugin Alliance this year. After that we start working on Tantra 2. Both Diversion 2 and Tantra 2 will provide much more new features and improvements than their current versions. We hope to port all our existing plugins before 2019 ends. So in 2020 DS Audio products will be exclusively distributed by Plugin Alliance.

We sincerely hope you will understand us, we’re now having hard times with the transition, but we believe that we are building future for DS Audio.

Thorn 1.2 Update Features

Thorn is distributed by Plugin Alliance now
Integrated Plugin Alliance framework with toolbar and authorization scheme
Thorn Essentials, HouseMaster One and Thorn Expansion 2 by Rob Lee are in the factory library now, free of charge
Modulation depth can be modulated now without issues
MIDI CC is working now when ARP is turned on
Thorn now returns text values to be displayed in automation lanes for AAX / VST3 / AU
Removed Optimize Polyphony option, will be returned later
Fixed automation smoothing issue
Fixed a crash when opening AAX page-table
Fixed minor preset loading issues on Windows