I see it doing the opposite since IMHO the true value of MC is in the audio engine/DSP and if they were included in the Virtual Sound Card there would be less need for MC in many people's
mind since they could have the sound quality without the base program. Maybe I am just misunderstanding what you would have included but that is the way I see it.
Perhaps, but I don't think you can really worry about cannibalizing sales too much in this industry. As
Jobs said, "If anybody is going to cannibalize us, I want it to be us. I don't want it to be a competitor." Plus, I don't know about you, but I know that for me, if I buy one program from a particular software vendor, and I like it, I tend to be willing to try their other offerings and I'm a lot more willing to click "buy". I think your view of the
value of MC might be a little clouded by your particular niche interest and your reason for trying MC in the first place. MC does a lot more well than just have awesome, pristine sound quality. A
whole lot more.
The big point of this application would be to bring that audio power to your other applications. It annoys me that when I want to watch web video in my browser, that I can't apply JRSS to it and expand it to all of my speakers. It prevents me from using the built-in Room Correction in my living room for the same reason, because I want games and web video and other applications to all be corrected too. So you can't really use MC as an "receiver replacement" if you are interested in more than just music and recorded/downloaded video on your PC.
This solves that, and could solve other problems in the pro-market as well. And I think all those uses combined might be a
broader market than the people looking for an application like MC itself might have. More potential customers means more people might like it, and then might look at your "flagship product". Which is, of course, built from the ground up to take the best advantage of all of this bit-perfect audio system stuff. It integrates fully.
Why would they need MC for Video couldn't they just use a splitter/extractor to separate the audio and send it to the Virtual Audio River (I like that name/play on words)
That's a perfect example. Two words: Red October. "Just use a splitter/extractor", even installing pre-packaged codec packs, is often a nightmare of flaky installations that mangle other applications and conflict with one another. For regular people, that's a great feature.
And it manages your audio files so well, and it syncs with your Android phone. And look over here, there's a sweet remote control and streaming app for your girlfriend's iPhone or your iPad. And it looks up the metadata for your TV Shows and Movies automatically and there's a whole, nice Home Theater front-end that works with a remote and is
fast.
If they are really worried about cannibalization, then they could certainly disable or cripple a few things here and there, but generally I'd caution against it. That kind of "plus pack" scheme is distasteful if not done extremely well (there are lots of studies to support that it often turns off as many people as it entices when the feature that is disabled "feels arbitrary" to a casual observer). One place it
might make sense would be in supporting those third-party filters and plugins that Matt mentioned earlier in the thread.
I do like your Virtual Audio River name idea though.