Camel Audio is closing shop! ;-( .......Alchemy is reborn!

[kgdrum]

Heard the bad news & just as I was beginning to figure out Alchemy,lol
It's really a shame a nice company with awesome products and great support,I'm really bummed out over this,this is one company I didn't expect to see this happen to.........
I wonder what caused this sudden announcement?







From their website:

January 8, 2015

We would like to thank you for the support we've received over the years in our efforts to create instruments and effects plug-ins and sound libraries.

Camel Audio's plug-ins, Alchemy Mobile IAPs and sound libraries are no longer available for purchase. We will continue to provide downloads of your previous purchases and email support until July 7, 2015. We recommend you download all of your purchases and back them up so that you can continue to use them (Instructions: How to Download and Backup Your Products).

[James Steele]

I wonder what caused this sudden announcement?

The "booming" economy?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I don't think you can blame the economy as much as the saturation of VIs in the marketplace. Prosamples.com closed shop a while ago. Not a great loss, but I do like seeing robust competition in the marketplace.

Of course, one might also blame globalization and corporate takeovers, etc. Remember Atari and Gibson? There were others who bought out the competition and then closed their doors for them. THe Gibson thing may have been somewhat different but the end result is the same. Less choice for the enduser and lack of innovation that competition can create.

[James Steele]

It doesn't help. I'm not trying to go political, but I know people in this business who say their sales have not really gotten back to where they were years ago. NAMM is still downsized... the whole sector depends on people having disposable income. Things are tight and I know people folding up shop left and right across many industries.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Yeah, and frankly I don't want to go there either, but from what I see firsthand, it does seem things are picking up steam. Just don't look at the stock market...

[HCMarkus]

Music is free, right?

[nk_e]

Isn't Alchemy based in the EU?

If so, I think the thing that may have pushed it over the fence is the change in the European VAT laws that took effect Jan 1. Folks based in the EU now have to collect VAT based on the location of the buyer. This means they have to register at VAT offices in each country (26 of them), remit money to them, and maintain records for 10 years. Too much for small shops.

I've received emails from 4 or 5 small developers that basically said they were ceasing or suspending operations because of this. I suspect Camel was struggling and this helped convince them to throw in the towel.

It's a damn shame too. Alchemy is a fantastic synth and Alchemy mobile is one of the better sounding iOS synths out there.

[cuttime]

Camel is in Scotland. This is a great shock. Their products are superb, and the management supported charities. If anyone ignores these products, it is their own loss. The greater loss is the lack of conscientious customer support. Perhaps the talent that lies with them will find a firm hold elsewhere.

[daniel.sneed]

So bad... Alchemy is involved in many of my recent projects.
In live dramatic shows which I may have opportunities to go on gig for some years more.
Alchemy is simply the best sample-based VI I've *ever* played.
Deep and powerful. So the real learning curve is just as to be expected.
Great libraries, great tools for building your own patches from the groundup. The world is turning wrong these days. I'm sorry for the Camel Audio team, too. So bad...

[kgdrum]

So bad... Alchemy is involved in many of my recent projects.
In live dramatic shows which I may have opportunities to go on gig for some years more.
Alchemy is simply the best sample-based VI I've *ever* played.
Deep and powerful. So the real learning curve is just as to be expected.
Great libraries, great tools for building your own patches from the groundup. The world is turning wrong these days. I'm sorry for the Camel Audio team, too. So bad...

Well until we actually get some more actual info about all of this we really don't know what happened,there's some speculation that Camel might have been acquired and they might have had to agree to a NDA which would explain the abrupt closing without any kind of explanation.
This feels a bit like Apple buying Redmatica........So it's possible we might not be feeling sorry for the Camel developers,they might have gotten an offer that made it worthwhile for them to close.
Users that have abandoned software are probably the more likely victims.

Time will tell........

[mhschmieder]

This is meant to be a joke, and not political, but maybe they were banking on the Scottish Independence Vote succeeding?

I'm very sad to see them go. I've been with them since Cameleon 5000 convinced me to sell my hardware Kawai K5000 Additive Synth upon which it was modeled.

I have never liked Alchemy as much as Cameleon 5000, and after dozens of hours haven't been able to get it to sound the same, no matter what I do with filters and processing. It has a lot of great add-on libraries so became one of my most-used synths, but I was only able to get a small handful of Cameleon 5000 patches to sound anything remotely the same in Alchemy. And of course Cameleon 5000 is long dead.

Now I'm wondering if I should wean myself from Alchemy, on projects that aren't yet completed, to protect myself from surprises if the product seizes up at some point (or refuses to acknowledge its authorizations). Nothing is quite like it though, and I often prefer it to Absynth, but use them for similar purposes (mostly soundscapes, sound effects, etc.).

Hopefully another developer can take it on, even if there's first a gap of time. I had given up on my all-time favorite synth, TimewARP 2600, only to be surprised when an update was issued by SONiVOX recently (though the AU version doesn't work; at least now we can use VST in DP).

That's a bummer about the new VAT rules; I didn't know. I'm still reeling from losing over $50 as a seller due to the unannounced (and unacknowledged near-doubling of shipping rates by USPS, UPS, and FedEx on 1 JAN. I checked before the holidays and nothing was said about this on their sites or on news sites. Even now, you have to punch in numbers until you start to see where the rates changed, but at the P.O. they told me about it (as did UPS and FedEx). I imagine that's going to hurt a lot of retailers, but probably on-line sellers the most, which might rub off on helping local stores (I hope).

So often, governments and other entities make changes with unintended consequences; it doesn't always occur to them to think these things through at that level.

[mhschmieder]

Daniel, you refer to Alchemy as the best sample-based VI (or one of the best). How do you use it? I've never thought of it as sample-based as I started with Cameleon 5000, which was mostly about additive synthesis (but did indeed often work best when mixing additive synthesis with sampling). Although I have yet to use it much, iZotope's Iris might be the closest in architecture (yet I think it might be based more on granular synthesis; I bought it but have never used it in a project and haven't opened it in eons).

[daniel.sneed]

Mhschmieder, yes, it's quite a way to work with samples in Alchemy, but the results fit my personal tastes and workflow.

Of course, Iris has many bells an whistles, and some sense of *fun* which Alchemy does not have at first glance. Could be that Iris is fine for taking fun, but not enough for making music? And, BTW, Iris is a processor, and a HD, hog and it's new patch browser is really poor.

IMHO, building a patch around your own samples for some expressive playing, is where Alchemy shines. Some basic tasks, like linking filters to velocity is done in a glance and extremely efficient in my experience. Can't be done in Iris, AFAICT.

Absynth libraries do not have the strange flavors I like in Alchemy. To my ears Absynth libraries sound outdated, to say the least. I think I may have heard them to often everywhere. Not to mention that going deep in Absynth tweaking has been far less intuitive to me, than in Alchemy.

[Michael Canavan]

Just a quick rumor note: Lots of talk of Camel being bought out by Apple.


IMO this makes the most sense, a while ago when Redmatica was bought out by Apple the same sort of announcement, I mean almost word for word, was put up on their sight, basically a non disclosure agreement has IMO obviously been signed by Camel.

Companies that go out of business because they were not able to meet their budget almost universally mention it, and almost universally have sales leading up to their demise, Camel had none of the sort.

Companies merging with other small businesses or moving to an unrelated field tend to be straightforward about it as well. This reeks of the Camel guys being under contract, if not by Apple, then by Avid, Steinberg etc.

[billf]

Just a quick rumor note: Lots of talk of Camel being bought out by Apple.

IMO this makes the most sense, a while ago when Redmatica was bought out by Apple the same sort of announcement

If you're correct, you know what that means:

Alchemy Beats for GarageBand on the iPad as an In-App purchase for 1.99 (or it will be Logic only, or it will completely disappear a la Redmatica).