from users point what do you think is the best politic for the company to make up demo versions?

also leave a message what is your most annoying.

Quote:

sound artifacts each 1 minute (each 10 seconds, each 30 sec, etc...)

This is the most annoying thing I have found in all demo schemes.

I totally agree with George. It's even more annoying when the noise comes up every fucking 5 seconds and when it is extremely loud( totally unacceptable at times) and happens even when the plug in not running.

If a demo is not able to let you play at least a few patterns with it, it's useless. Better not call it a demo. Imagine that you try a car whose engine shuts down every 5 seconds.

sometimes i give a try to soft-*ding*-ware by getting pirate versions

really - i even had bough some of it afterwards. i guess for such a stupid bastard like me warez is allowed to try instead of demo because its damn too similar to a blackmail. like pay us and we'll stop annoying you.

I find the noise annoying especially if its frequent, but the worst is the limited launches.

I tried the Space Synthesizer and liked it. Didn't have any money at the time so I didn't buy it. Later when I had some spare $, I wanted to try it again to see how it compared to other products in the price range. No luck. Guess which plugin I didn't buy?

number 4 without a doubt, like waves, antares etc..2 weeks of proper unrestricted use is enough to know whether you want the thing

Volume dropping out every 45-60 seconds but everything works is acceptable to me. I liked that with Ozone, so I got to play with everything. Playing with 2 weeks is nice, BUT sometimes I'll install something, find it totally useless at that time, and then want to try it again a year later. It might be that I haven't doen a reinstall at that point, and I want to try it again, but I can't. At least with te volume dropping out, I can try it ANYTIME again. The burst of sound is *NOT* acceptable. Damaging my hearing is not a good way to convince me to buy your product.

Devon

Alternatively, what about for x seconds every y minutes, the quality drops to 10 bits or something like that?? Just a thought... less disrupting than silence or (heaven forbid) noise bursts and tones but it would sure as hell make you want to upgrade...

Just an idea that occured to me, I've not thought it through too much at all...

Cheers

[edit]

When releasing mastering bundle, I'll probably go with time trial. (14 days or so)

DevonB wrote:

The burst of sound is *NOT* acceptable. Damaging my hearing is not a good way to convince me to buy your product. Devon

How do you think about detuned demos? The sound of the demo is self-consistent (no detuning can be heared, when the demo is played alone), whereas its output cannot be mixed with other synth's output.

I ask, because AnaMark uses this restriction, and am interested in what the people think of it.

Image Line makes the best demo. I used the demo for almost a year and I was able to export my track into Acid Xpress and mix them. All for free.

My vote went to time trials.

If it weren't for time trials, the Protools suite I use at work wouldn't have had Waves plugins, while some dumb shit at our provider company dug up the licenses so we could use the updates again.

As for composing at home, I favor time trials as well.
For those that prefer to let time fly during time trials, perhaps the dev people can have a 'use for 14 days' kind of trial, where the software ticks off each day it's used untill 14 days in all come together.

A note on Tracktion. After installation, I had to deal with an entirely new interface. The noise bursts did not help my concentration or casual composing habits.

I got rid of it within 10 minutes.

I can't believe that so far most of you have voted for "limited trial period (14 days, 30 days, etc)".

Sometimes I have some hours to spend on trying a synth, then have some work to do and only a few weeks later would like to give it a second try - maybe because now there is another project where the synth could fit, although before I had no use for it. With the "limited trial period (14 days, 30 days, etc)" scheme that is not possible.
For example I did not like Antares Kantos when it came out. Recently some people here whare raving about it and I was inspired to give it another try - but it was not possible.

I prefer limited features. If I like a piece of software, I like the feeling of unleashing the full power of the thing once I've purchased.

I rarely demo anything with a ping or dropout. My least favorite is save/load disabled. I like to know if the software fits in to my workflow habits, and for me that means saving a work in progress and returning to it the next day to improve what I've already done. If I'm always starting from scratch, it feels to me the same as listening to those awful audio demos on old cheapie yamaha synths. Impresses the 8-year olds I guess.

Cheers,
Steve

i think the detuned vst isn't such a great idea.

one of the main things i do with demo vsts is set up an arp into a chord on one track and a chord into an arp on another track and mix and match presets and vsts to see how well they blend or don't blend.

periodic noise is the worst, but I find periodic reduction in volume almost as annoying -- at least for the way I use demos.
I think limiting a per launch basis to 30 minutes really works best for me. It reminds me I don't 'own' it, but it gives me almost enough time to test it, relaunch an dtest again. It's annoying, but the full features while it's working are nice.

The Voxengo mastering tool set demo cuts out periodically. (and i think the tool set was synced so when one cuts out they all cut out -- imagine how rough that would be if that wasn't true) That's almost an A/B feature and at least with the eq real time display you get some feedback when it's happening, but

i think i'd still prefer full features for 30-40 minutes every launch for at least a month or open ended time period. Maybe with no exporting or saving just to keep it on a trial basis. It doesn't bother me that software makers don't want any real work getting done with demos, esp. with the kind of free and open support a lot of them that have forums on kvr provide.

wrench45us wrote:

I think limiting a per launch basis to 30 minutes really works best for me. It reminds me I don't 'own' it, but it gives me almost enough time to test it, relaunch an dtest again. It's annoying, but the full features while it's working are nice.

Without doubt my vote goes for this!

wrench45us wrote:

i think i'd still prefer full features for 30-40 minutes every launch for at least a month or open ended time period. Maybe with no exporting or saving just to keep it on a trial basis.

Saving still is important because I'd like to try the process of developing an own sound, which is not done within 30-40 minutes. The saving should be restricted to 5 sounds or so.

Orion and FLS are perfect examples of perfect demo versions.

Really, developers should provide a few choices, so you can choose which method of crippling is best for you to decide how much you like the product...

Forever,




Kim.