<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>abaga129</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fairly new to the game, but I&amp;#x27;m a solo developer.  Currently I dont make enough to quit my day job, but it is a nice supplementary income, and it&amp;#x27;s nice to get paid a bit for something I truly enjoy.&lt;p&gt;There are also several solo&amp;#x2F;small shop developers that do make a living from selling plug-ins.   Here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head.&lt;p&gt;Auburn Sounds: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.auburnsounds.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.auburnsounds.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
Valhalla DSP: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;valhalladsp.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;valhalladsp.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
Kilohearts: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;kilohearts.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;kilohearts.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>whiddershins</author><text>Do solo or small shop vst plugin developers make any money?&lt;p&gt;I’m curious if anyone has any direct knowledge about that.&lt;p&gt;There are so many professional activities similar to that where no one makes any money and people really just do it for the love, and then there are seemingly similar things like that where people make surprisingly large amounts of money.</text></item><item><author>fab1an</author><text>Pretty cool, though I wonder what the latency of this would be if used as a plugin?&lt;p&gt;The author says it works in real-time, but to non music&amp;#x2F;audio folks this could mean &amp;#x27;100 ms latency is real-time enough, right?&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I think the audio VST business is a really fun space to be in for a lifestyle business, as it is way too small to be attractive for VCs. It seems like a space that provides many niches for lots of small players to thrive in.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it&amp;#x27;s really quite interesting that a lot of cutting edge tech is now used to emulate the hardware-based tech of yesteryear. Think film filters for photoshop, and about 90% of all audio plugins that emulate high end hardware, compressors, pedals, etc etc.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Deep Learning for Guitar Effect Emulation</title><url>https://teddykoker.com/2020/05/deep-learning-for-guitar-effect-emulation/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>munificent</author><text>Steve Duda, the developer of Serum is kind of the poster child for this. He contracts out for pieces of the synth (UI design, resampler, filters), but he&amp;#x27;s mostly a one-man shop and, as I understand it, Serum pays the bills.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to tell how much Duda is an outlier, though, and how many other people could succesfully follow his path.</text><parent_chain><item><author>whiddershins</author><text>Do solo or small shop vst plugin developers make any money?&lt;p&gt;I’m curious if anyone has any direct knowledge about that.&lt;p&gt;There are so many professional activities similar to that where no one makes any money and people really just do it for the love, and then there are seemingly similar things like that where people make surprisingly large amounts of money.</text></item><item><author>fab1an</author><text>Pretty cool, though I wonder what the latency of this would be if used as a plugin?&lt;p&gt;The author says it works in real-time, but to non music&amp;#x2F;audio folks this could mean &amp;#x27;100 ms latency is real-time enough, right?&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;Generally, I think the audio VST business is a really fun space to be in for a lifestyle business, as it is way too small to be attractive for VCs. It seems like a space that provides many niches for lots of small players to thrive in.&lt;p&gt;As an aside, it&amp;#x27;s really quite interesting that a lot of cutting edge tech is now used to emulate the hardware-based tech of yesteryear. Think film filters for photoshop, and about 90% of all audio plugins that emulate high end hardware, compressors, pedals, etc etc.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Deep Learning for Guitar Effect Emulation</title><url>https://teddykoker.com/2020/05/deep-learning-for-guitar-effect-emulation/</url></story>