About – Admiral Quality

Founded in 2005, Admiral Quality are a Toronto based developer of top-of-the-line music-making instrument, effect and utility plug-in software for Digital Audio Workstations and a provider of custom solutions for your digital media applications.

Our specialty is highly accurate, innovative and convincing software emulations of sounds produced and processed by vintage analog electronics. While we don’t attempt to exactly clone any classic products, we do take our inspiration from them and blend the best features from famous vintage gear with unique and original ideas that should have and could have existed in the classic era.

Frequently Asked Questions

- What information do you collect on your customers and how do you keep it secure?
  We don’t collect any information about our customers other than your name (which can be fake) and your email address that we get from PayPal. Any other information you provide in your PayPal transaction is visible only to PayPal, not to us. We don’t want it because, (a) we’re not interested and, (b) we don’t want to be responsible for securing it. PayPal are a multi-billion dollar corporation and certainly have the capacity to secure your information in ways that we could never offer, and are under sufficient scrutiny that if there were security concerns with using their service, you’d hear about them. On the other hand, nobody should ever trust a small business site like ours with their financial information, that’s why we send you to PayPal’s secure site before any sensitive personal or financial information is requested from you, and that none of that information is returned to us (other than your name and email address, which is all we need to create your license-key). PayPal also provide a layer of protection both ways between seller and buyer. Feel free to contact us at info@admiralquality.com if you have any further concerns.
  
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Where’s my product info in my account?
You don’t have or need any! Your product keys were emailed to you after you completed your purchase transaction (check your Spam folder if you don’t see the email(s), you should receive a separate one for each product purchased). We don’t believe in forcing our customers to jump through hoops, so our license key-files are portable between systems; you won’t need new ones when you move to a new machine! If you need your original key-file email sent to you again or want to change your email address in our records, just email us at sales@admiralquality.com.

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Do you offer student pricing?
Not exactly, but we like to think our products are already at their “student price”, which we offer to everyone.

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I want to re-sell my copy of your software. Are license transfers supported?
No, sorry. This is for several reasons, the main one being that there’s no way to know the original owner has removed the software from their system (the only way we can think of to allow that would be if we used a hardware dongle based copy protection system, something we really don’t want to do). Another reason is the customer support we offer, if a license is re-sold we would be faced with additional work supporting the new user, which we don’t get paid for. Finally, it’s very important to us that there only be one price for our products, and only one place where you can go to purchase them (here), we don’t want our customers becoming our competition. Please note that we do take this policy into account when calculating our products’ prices.

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I’m interested in buying one of your products, but I’m afraid the next version will come out soon and I’ll have to pay for an upgrade.
No worries! Admiral Quality now has a new Upgrade Protection Policy (which applies to all our existing license holders as well as our new customers). When you purchase a license for any of our products, your license not only covers the current major version number, but also the next major version number as well, so it’s always the right time to buy. And our major version numbers, so far, have lasted for a very long time (with frequent, free updates within that major version). After 10 years in business we’re still on version 1.x of all our products! That’s not because they haven’t been maintained and updated (just take a look at how much Poly-Ana has grown over the years). Rather, it’s because we’re not interested in charging our existing customers again for upgrades. We’re much more interested in reaching new customers and a big part of that is keeping our existing licensees satisfied and without regrets over their purchases.

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Where are the VST3 and Apple Silicon versions of the plugins?
Do you really need them? (Probably not! Our customers report all our plugins work fine under Rosetta on modern Macs, and Cubase can still run VST 2.4, you just have to enable the option.) But yes, we know, it’s time, and we’ll be migrating to a new code platform that supports these for our future plugins and major updates. The main reason we’ve been reluctant to do this so far is that our VST 2.4 code base is 100% written in-house (it was VSTGUI3 based but we re-wrote almost the whole thing to make our controls work in ways most other products don’t support) and has been extensively tested to the point that we’ve been enjoying 100% bug free status in all of our products for years now. Also, VST3 only offers two new features we consider useful (support for extended, multi-byte character sets in the plugin program names, and interface scalability) while introducing a lot of bloat and complexity that does nothing for the user, introduces possibilities of different behaviors on different hosts (particularly in MIDI implementation), and makes our job far more complicated and reliant on third-parties. A lot of what makes our products stand-out will be lost when we do that and we may be forced to actually have to reduce feature sets to accommodate them (again, particularly in our MIDI and controls implementations).With the release of Stunning Phaser 1.0 and no features owing or bugs to fix in any of our existing products, we’re now moving on to prioritize that migration. (To what, we haven’t decided yet, that’s Job #1.) And please note that due to our Upgrade Protection Policy, all our existing customers already have licenses for the 2.x generation of our products. Please bear with us during this transition period, it took a couple of solid man-years of work to do the first time. (And much of the time we save by using a third-party codebase will be offset by the time we waste chasing their bugs and keeping up with their updates, in a process that, unlike our own codebase, will never be finished. That’s just how the industry works these days, but it actually makes development more work, which drives up product prices. And we’d much rather be developing new products than repackaging the existing ones, particularly as we don’t attempt to sell them to you again when we do. Unfortunately, we have to go with the industry trends or get left in history’s dustbin of obsolete software.)

So, don’t hold your breath, we have a lot of work to re-do, but that’s where we’re going next…

Having problems getting our plugins running on new Apple hardware? Please see: Apple Silicon Installation/Activation instructions.

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The GUI interface is too small on my screen, I can’t read anything!
We know, we’ve recently started using UHD resolution displays and experience that too. Our next generation of plugins and major updates will support re-sizing, but that means we have to completely build new GUIs for all of them – both art and code (and GUI development is where at least 90% of the work goes when building a plugin – getting to work on the actual audio DSP code is a rare treat for us!) In the meantime, we suggest you do what we do, and use the built-in Zoom feature of your operating system. (And we find this helpful for a lot of software, not just ours.) In Windows just hold the Windows key and hit + to bring up Magnifier. Hit Win + + once more to zoom in, and Win + – to zoom out (and Win + Esc to close Magnifier). On Mac, you’ll first need to enable “Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom” in System Settings | Accessibility. Then Option + Command + + to zoom in, Option + Command + – to zoom out, and Option + Command + 8 to exit the Magnifier.(Also note that Poly-Ana has a Tooltips feature that displays the name and value of any control just by hovering the mouse over it. This is often much easier to read than the panel graphics, and shows you the precise, current value of the control without actually touching it and changing the value.)

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Where can I learn more about the Admiral Quality story?
Wusik magazine did an interview with the Admiral where he tells the whole story. The interview, along with a review of Poly-Ana, can be found here.