How to develop and sell your own instruments

Would you like to develop a plug-in or a sample instrument in order to offer it commercially? When generating ideas, two questions are crucial: What can I do and what does the world need? Here, researching the already well-filled market is useful to estimate the sales chances of your own software. If you browse through the offerings of various online stores, you will quickly find out which product types and music styles are particularly hot and which niche you could occupy with your product. Tip: ask directly at the shops where there is a need. You may be able to make good contacts for selling your instrument, library or plug-in right away.

Format

The format of your product also plays an important role: Do you want to create a VST or AU plug-in, a sample library, or a sample instrument? The more platforms you support, the larger the potential audience. Most samplers use their own special file formats to save. However, there are two formats, Soundfont and SFZ, that can be loaded by almost all popular samplers. However, these formats do not have their own user interface. SFZ files can be created with a simple text editor, but tools like the Folder to SFZ Converter [1] or Bjoern‘s Sample Mapper [2] are much more comfortable. Of course it is especially attractive to offer instruments for common and free sample players, like Native Instruments‘ Kontakt or Reaktor Player, Steinberg‘s HALion Sonic SE or the UVI Workstation.

However, some players incur license fees. These are usually staggered, depending on the amount of products sold, with attractive volume discounts. In many cases, you can only find out how high the license fees are on request. An alternative