I would even agree with a lot of this "community" talk, but it's still a bit black & white-ish to me.
Let me make a last comparison and suppose a bunch of Zappa admirers are guessing he must have a bunch of presets laying on the side that are only 90% there to him, but may be awesome for them. They really would like to have 'em and are saying "Pretty please, Dweezil!
" Dweezil thinks about it and realizes "why not" but that he would need days of work to look for them, bring them up-to-date, etc. and if we understand that is a lot of time he would not normally lose. People would be interrupting him with "Oh, but we'd *love* to appropiately compensate you for it! But *please* make 'em available!"
Dweezil would make 'em for a pretty good price
and IMO it would not hurt the community at all and a lot of us would be enriched by it and honored to be able to get stuff we normally would never have seen.
The main difference is that Don is not some L.A. big shot [don't mean that Dweezil is one, well "yes and no"
].
A *big* difference with what the thread title suggests is still that
Don is not proposing this himself. But at least he would be engaged making them. That in itself is reassuring.
Sure, if Don had never shared before and everyone started charging for their stuff, I wouldn't be happy either (even if they were actually right), but that's just because of the "wanting everything" disease that most have.
I still see at least two solutions:
I can't speak for Cliff, but I'd still think that if I spotted such preset wizards, I'd ask what they wanted for a pretty filled bank of presets and offer them for free to us. TC made an Artist Card for the G-Force, so it's a treat [not a TC prices] a customer is kinda expecting and he wouldn't have any work on it. OTOH, it is a solution we preferably won't like to see, because we're getting enough from Cliff already [Toto song "Never Enough" suddenly pops into my mind
]
Don could also make a webpage with a FREE preset pack and include a PayPal link for appreciation. But it would be pretty saddening to see 500 downloads and 15 people that payed $5.00, so that's up to him.
I personally don't have a problem with him selling it, because I compare it to the Zappa example. I think it's great if you can support someone making a living with something he actually loves to do (so much that he gives plenty of quality stuff away).
I personally see more danger in people popping up selling IRs, because they also know "People want it all, we just have to churn out IRs and they will keep buying them." Unexperienced as I am in audio analysis, my gut feeling of OwnHammers was that he may have applied something extra "in Fletcher-Munson style" so we'd like his IRs at least as much. I'm not at all implying that is actually the case, but Scott's recent idea about them seems to make that possible? "If it sounds good, it sounds good", but you understand the dangers here.