Almost free equalizer plugins

The good people at KVR forum pointed me to an interesting site with some potentially nice equalizer plugins. They offer three products:

• IIEQ Pro – a 10-band parametric EQ for equalizing single tracks with 12 types of filters per band that can be setup in parallel or serial configuration (available versions: Win-VST / Mac-VST / Mac-AU),
• LP10 – a 10-band mastering equalizer with fully adjustable phase response, 10 filter types per band (available versions: Win-VST / Mac-VST / Mac-AU),
• IIEQ – a freeware version of the first product offering a simple 10-band EQ (only Win-VST).

Now to reveal the mystery from the topic title. As you can see only one of the product is freeware and you have to pay for the other more advanced two. How much? Here comes the interesting part. As much as you think. The payment is handled by PayPal’s donations feature and you can specify the amount yourself. There’s no minimum (and obviously no maximum either).

Here’s how the author explains his approach:

Q: Wait a minute: are you serious? I can really pay, say, 60 cents and get away with it?
A: Yes, you got it. Let’s be perfectly clear: ddmf equalizers are among the finest on this planet. There are people out there who charge $ 200-300 for plugins of this quality. But I believe there are two kinds of people in the market: there are the guys working for big record studios who basically don’t have to care about plugin prices because their hardware equipment is worth a million dollars to beg with, and there are the hobbyists with a budget that is a lot smaller, who will look for other ways to get the software they need once it becomes too expensive for them. Now how much exactly is “too expensive”? This depends a lot on the personal and often also geographical situation of the buyer. 

Now if the quality of those plugins is as high it’s said to be, this a great deal for everyone. By the way it’s a clever way of dealing with software piracy. I bet there is not a single illegal copy of this product around :-)

Speaking of software piracy, there’s an interesting survey run by the IMSTA (International Music Software Trade Association), but that’s a subject for a different article.