Greetings IK,
Allow me to introduce myself. I’m an musician and writer who operates a small project studio in Pawtucket, RI. While I have been a musician since I was 12, and a songwriter since before that (!), it wasn’t until my late 30s when I started with computer recording. Home computers have allowed me, like so many others, to make music the way that is best for me, to learn aspects of production that were otherwise out of my reach. I didn’t need prohibitively priced pro tools/ProTools to record my music, and as someone who fell into the computer/internet industry in the late mid-90s, working on computers comes easily to me.
Okay, yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s a familiar story. The point being, in the course of a few years I invested a small chunk of savings into getting a working project studio in which I could write songs and score videos. A lot of that investment was in software and sample libraries. I was a fairly early adopter of your products, both SampleTank and Amplitube. I still use both a lot (despite the sometimes hinky behavior of ST2 in Sonar). Naturally, I was interested in future products of yours.
You lost me at dongle.
I’ll be honest, my budget was on its last legs by the time current your wave of products hit the market. And as intriguing as any of these may have been they were out of my price range. (That’s a different rant.) But if I ever begin to break even or, knock wood, turn a small profit, I look forward to investing in new tools, and supporting companies I think are doing good work. I’m sure your work is stellar; Alas, it appears I shall never really know for myself.
USB dongles are not a route I’m prepared to take. Even my fairly recent AMD rig, which barely blinks when I start really challenging the CPU, doesn’t like it when I keep disk reading devices attached. If I forget to turn off my backup drive or take out a thumb drive I was transferring files from, I really notice small glitches in the processing performance. I usually remember when I hear Windows polling the device. I have 3 other devices attached to USB ports, all of which send MIDI data, but they don’t cause the same problem. Maybe it’s a legacy USB/USB2 port issue on my motherboard; maybe it has to do with the OS drivers versus the M-Audio-written and EZbus MIDI drivers; maybe it’s all in my head. But it’s easy enough to shut off a USB hard disk when I’m working on projects.
I hope you can see why I am, on purely practical level, reluctant to attach another USB device to my DAW. On a personal level, and as someone who has seen a lot of changes in the computer technology industry, dongles seem like a really wrongheaded way of dealing with a complicated problem. I’m sure it well sucks that thousands of users are freeloading off of your investment/hours of development, and I know the market you’re aiming for has no problem using said hardware. My advocacy of your products in terms of actual profit is marginal to none. But there it is.
I just wanted to let you know in a reasonable manner why I will no longer upgrade or purchase new software from you.
Good luck in all your efforts.
Sincerely, C. Puffer
www.digitallofi.com/www.puffermedia.com
Useful? I’m not entirely sure. Historically accurate? I doubt it. A way to kill a Saturday afternoon? Definitely.
