
Massive Master
www.massivemastering.com
I should explain to those who haven't read a rant or two on how piracy can cost $$$...Yeah for real. I haven't had to pay a ton because of pirates, but my rage at them comes from the fact that I have to keep track of a stupid little dongle thing just so I'll be able to run my legal, paid-for version of Cubase 6.5!!!
Just one example --
I use Samplitude. Samp went WIBU (dongle) a few versions ago. "Uncrackable" and all that jazz. Had to have an active internet connection and everything.
Had a project with a hybrid session -- Most of the session via the 'net, but the client was going to fly in on a Monday afternoon to finish everything up.
Dongle failed -- On Saturday afternoon. Magix (Germany) found me a replacement dongle in New York. Client already had reservations and I wasn't going to fail him if I could help it -- So, I had to pay a guy to courier a dongle and fly it out to Chicago and then have another courrier bring it here by 2PM on Monday (FedEx Same Day service couldn't get it to me until 7PM).
I'm not even going to get into what that cost me... But let's assume that the profit level that week was far into the negative. FAR into the negative.
No doubt -- I can bi*ch and moan about how the dongle failed and how Samplitude "went too far" in not having some sort of resource for their professional customers - But the fact is that they are simply protecting their product the best way they can from just plain rampant piracy. If it wasn't for a (rather impressively large from what I can tell) group of "non-kosher" software users out there, there wouldn't BE "crack proof" dongles in the first place.