Tonalic is great, but why are we required to take out a monthly subscription to get the full version? I have Halion 7 and have been using it from the start, and I bought it. Make Tonalic a paid version after all. In my opinion (I have been using Cubase from the beginning), Steinberg has chosen the wrong path now. I am definitely not getting a subscription.
Hi @Kor_Groen - well, sorry but this is nothing to do with Steinberg or any of their ‘actions’.
Tonalic is a third party app/tool/instrument made by Celemony (the people who created and developed Melodyne). You should contact them directly with your concerns.
Yes, you are right. Thanks
I suppose Celemony’s answer is that they intend to keep adding artists, and they have to pay the artists.
IMHO, there is a very high risk in any subscription model these days. Ask Adobe about that. Their stock was $700 five years ago. Adobe is still profitable, but their stock has dropped to $250 and they dumped their CEO, mainly because the market doesn’t believe that their subscription model (at a super high price) is sustainable in a world that is getting a lot of options, especially the AI-enabled ones.
As I see Tonalic, it is a modern version of Band-in-a-box that is tightly integrated with the DAW. For singer-songwriters who are already composing inside the DAW, this could be very valuable for producing strong demos at low cost. For them, a subscription payment is probably not a deal-killer.
For a person like me who might use the function once a month – or maybe go 3 months without using it at all – no monthly subscription makes any sense. I’m probably not their target customer, but I’d really suggest any company thinking about subscriptions had better plan options for the user who can’t pay 25 monthly subscriptions as a “cost of doing business.”
I’m not against paying fair value for what it delivers to me. But I am simply not going to hand out my credit card to 25 companies to bill me monthly even if I am not using the product.
I hink the same. Thanks for you comment. Greetings Kor
I think their model is quite likely a very good balance between working with actual real musicians on the one hand and killing the studio musician industry with pre-recorded stuff on the other.
Really the way to look at this is as if you’re working with real musicians, just at a fraction of the cost and with far more flexibility over time. Rather than paying for a studio, paying for an engineer and paying for the musicians, you’d pay once per month, and only $25. That is insane value.
And the way I think it still makes absolute sense for hobbyists if a full year’s subscription is too much is that you can write your song using other means and once you’re ready to actually produce the track you can sign up for a month or two and get all the parts “recorded with musicians”. Print the audio, end subscription, done.
I know this isn’t the year 2005 any longer, but there was a time where a really good “not famous” studio musician with a studio and engineer could easily be in the hundreds. Per hour. Obviously depending on the market. Either way far higher than we’re now getting.
If this is as convenient as it seems and sounds as good as is advertised the value is amazing.
We should all be happy to support live musicians in the studio when we can, and if we can’t afford that this seems to be the next best thing.
(though I could be wrong)
i got the studio subscription of tonalic studio in januar, so far i´m liking it.
i´m not a fan of subscriptions, but i had the chance to do the 1$ month full demo and got hooked 
great things first:
the players in tonalic are top notch studio musicians, i have never imagined having Kenny Aronoff, Tim Pierce, Justin Derrico, Nate Mendel of the Foot Fighters or Sean Hurley playing on my tracks
there is already a lot of material to choose from and the quality of the recordings is great.
also the tonalic engine works nice
but there are also some things i dislike:
for example if you use chords that does not change on the beat, tonalic doesnt get them right (in the instrument version) and you have to manually correct them within tonalic (i havnt tried the ARA version yet, so i dont know if its different with the ARA Version)
because there is so much material to choose from, its hard to make yourself aware of whats all in there, there are so many options, lol
i found its great if to get inspiration and discover things, you havent had thought of.
i dont think its a good tool if you already quite know in your head how something should sound and then let a tonalic musician do the job, because even if something like you imagine in your head is in the library, the chances that you will find them are low
But there are also lots of bread and butter rhythmn parts that are great for adding textures and to your existing songs which i find quite useful.
on the technical side, there are a couple of things that can be improved for sure.
i would love to see the favorite section added as a filter into the search, color coding elements within tonalic (virtual instrument version). and also one thing that is a bit of annyoing, if you make manual adjustments to a tonalic lick, and duplicate the lick, the duplicate doesnt include the adjustments, so you have to do them again, which is kinda a pita.
but i´m confident they will further improve tonalic and add such features
also one thing i dislike is that you cannot download the whole library, i assume i would have enough harddrive space and a fast enough internet connection to do so, but its not an option, also its not an option to choose where the temporary data is saved which i find unpractical, especially users with a smaller main harddrive will dislike this.
Typically it downloads quite fast, but sometimes there is a little bit of waiting involved which indeed can kill the creative flow a bit.
i found, when you are opening older projects with tonalic used, it needs to download the whole elements again if they are not in the local cache anymore and sometimes the tracks didnt play right, until i opened each individual instance of tonalic in that project and then it synched itself working again.
I recommend once you are finished, bounce to place so you have final wav files no matter what 
According with their FAQ:
Why a subscription?
Because Tonalic keeps growing — and you get it all at no extra cost.
Our content is constantly expanded and improved, so you’ll always have access to the latest and most complete collection. Plus, the musicians involved share in Tonalic’s success, and a subscription model is the only fair and transparent way to make that possible.
Yes, is a good story, its a choice. Thanks
Indeed, the musicians need to be paid, a good argument for a subscription. But there is also competition and good, usable alternatives. It is the musicians’ choice to participate in a project, but I think if your livelihood depends on income from Tonalic, you are better off giving concerts. Actually, everyone has a good point. My preference is still a fixed price with the possibility of updates in the future.
Tonalic Essential is simply a subscription trap. Purged it from my disc after in hours. it’s the worst method getting customers hooked,
Why should people not get paid for their work?
For anyone who has worked for a living in the music industry in the past it’s painful to see this attitude.
How do guitar plugins perform the other time, then?
You drive me to tears…
How do you conclude that I don’t want people to be paid?
Do you really believe they get a constant payment of the company?
Much more fair would be to sell the single artists or instruments as added libraries for a adequqte fee.
Spurious arguments don’t work here.
Subscriptions are just reckless methods of capitalism as its worst, it is the software equivalent to music streaming which I avoid too. Both are shameless squeezing artists and customers.
But go on, justify it for yourself. In my case I could not stand this cognitive dissonance.
No, really, I completely agree with you. The translation from Dutch didn’t go well. So don’t cry. I also just want to pay for a good plug-in but not a subscription. Kind regards, Kor
Thanks.
They are more likely to get more money the more money the company gets, and the company probably gets more money using a subscription. That doesn’t mean “a constant payment” automatically given to them from the company, even though it could.
It’s not spurious.
Music streaming is basically radio-on-demand, with a licensing fee attached to the radio station and consumers. The main problems with streaming music is a) artists get paid too little and the pie keeps getting larger without the revenue going up to match, and b) consumers won’t pay more because the alternative is to just not pay at all and just steal the music (i.e. share illegally) instead.
The actual difference here is that Tonalic is a tool to create art that you can then benefit from indefinitely. Once a recording has been made the right to that is yours. Historically a studio musician was hired to record a part and once that was done the part was used for the one purpose. Sampling became a legal issue exactly because the musicians didn’t get compensated fairly for all instances that their work was included in.
Fair to whom? To them? Do you know how they are getting compensated?
Again, if a single library sells once the possibility of getting paid more than once is zero, and the artist gets paid once. After that the buyer gets a lifetime possibility to reuse the work of the musician. How is that more fair to the artist than to regularly get compensated, if that indeed is how money flows?
The streaming service vs buying a record analogy breaks down because you can make money off of Tonalic, off of the work of the musicians. Would you say it’s fair for you to buy a CD, rip it, and then just use samples from it indefinitely, for work, without further compensating the artists involved? Probably not, right? And this is similar.
There is no dissonance. The musicians cut a deal with Tonalic and they seem to think that the deal is reasonable. There is no “trap” here. If people want these performances and this integration they can pay for it. If not, then just don’t pay. Zero “trap”.
Come on - that’s the knockout argument for capitalistic misbehaviour since the 40s of the last century.
At the end we can only agree to almost completely disagree.
None of your points persuades me but the right of artists to get paid.
I guess you’re a believer of the neoliberal market and I am a strong critic,
I really don’t know what you’re aiming for but justifying your decision to give them your money. That is totally OK for me. I did nothing but to reject, their suspicious offer and purged this thing from my disc. That’s all - nobody got harmed - not me, not you not celamony. My desision.
Ok, but think about this for a second:
You said it would be "Much more fair " “to sell the single artists or instruments as added libraries for a adequqte fee”, right? So let’s just presume that that’s the case. The first issue is if Tonalic is going to pay musicians up front for their services or if they are going to pay retroactively after the libraries are sold. One way or another either Tonalic or the musicians are going to have to invest up front. You agree, right?
Now look at the consumers. They have a range of libraries that they may or may not buy. They are not paying for future libraries directly. So there is no guarantee that customers will pay for an upcoming library.
Therefore either Tonalic or the musicians stand to gain nothing if consumers aren’t paying for the new libraries that are created.
By using a subscription model there is a more predictable revenue stream that can be used to better budget for new recordings.
But there are more considerations: since we don’t know the actual contract these musicians entered into it’s actually possible that their payments are per-“use”, assuming there’s telemetry data sent, in which case that’s possibly a good thing. The more a musician is being used the more they get paid. That seems like a possibly good thing to me.
In fact, since you brought up streaming earlier, presumably compared to buying a CD, isn’t the problem exactly that a single-buy means possibly infinite use of the musician’s work? I mean I know I brought this up earlier, but it just seems like you ignore this. At least with a subscription there is the potential for musicians to make more as people keep paying over time, as opposed to there being a set of single payments for a library that can then be used infinitely.
Again, it makes far more sense to think about this as virtual studio musicians actually interacting with you in a studio, and that is not something we pay for once and get to enjoy in perpetuity in real life.
You guess completely wrong. I’m merely pointing out that among all the options available within the system that we’re forced to exist in this is likely a better one.
Nothing suspicious about their offer, at all. And I never said you harmed anybody.
We are headed to a economy filled with subscriptions, I think the idea is that you can design your life buy what you subscribe to. Not only silly, but dangerous!
It’s obviously dangerous depending on the category of good or service we’re talking about. But let’s use some perspective here; it’s one thing, and infinitely worse, that you don’t get guaranteed health care unless you effectively subscribe to an insurance, yet we’ve sort of gotten used to that… and it’s a very different thing whether or not something like this - a non-essential good or service, is subscription or not.
Like I said, the previous guess about my view on economics was wildly wrong, so I get what you’re saying. But we really, really should also look at this from the perspective of the musicians involved in Tonalic. If then get compensated continuously based on subscription level then it could very well be a better deal for them, and in that case I think we should support it.
I’ve been around long enough to actually remember back when “studio musician” was a real thing in music, film and advertising, and when selling records was a thing as well. Then gradually people just started downloading without paying and basically giving the middle finger to it all. A prevailing attitude ever since has been that everything has to be cheaper and better. I want to own it, but I don’t even want to pay for it. Ok, I’ll pay for it, but make it extremely good without any associated costs.
We should embrace all models that pay living musicians decently regardless of the model, at least if we are a part of their community as well.
Especially in the age of AI machine-creation rather than human creation.
PS: Someone should find out how these musicians are getting paid.