acceptance of subscription services

[sircuit]

Export multitracks of your projects, people!

With a single subscription there's already no guarantee that in 10 years the respective company will still offer the same catalog of plugins. With more subscriptions, we pretty much give away any hope for opening and running our projects in 2032.

May the best multitrack manager & archiver* win!

*Feel free to come up with appropriate terms, my English does not helping me when it comes to filing and administration department

[wwjd]

they dropped their 'sub only' model and began offering perpetual licenses again. Why did they do that I wonder?:D

yyyyyup!

[bduffy]

I subscribe to East West Composer Cloud. Especially with the academic discount, it's stunning what you get for the money. I make music professionally, but I don't have the money lying around for perpetual licenses for several thousand-dollar orchestral libraries, so I like having this option.

However, I'm aware subscriptions don't make the most sense financially over time. And the Pro Tools sub pricing is just ridiculous—$46 CAD+tax/month? Yikes.

[Scotty]

I subscribe to East West Composer Cloud. Especially with the academic discount, it's stunning what you get for the money. I make music professionally, but I don't have the money lying around for perpetual licenses for several thousand-dollar orchestral libraries, so I like having this option.

However, I'm aware subscriptions don't make the most sense financially over time. And the Pro Tools sub pricing is just ridiculous—$46 CAD+tax/month? Yikes.

We are on the same page. The East West Cloud subscription is excellent value. The others don't come close.

[bduffy]

I subscribe to East West Composer Cloud. Especially with the academic discount, it's stunning what you get for the money. I make music professionally, but I don't have the money lying around for perpetual licenses for several thousand-dollar orchestral libraries, so I like having this option.

However, I'm aware subscriptions don't make the most sense financially over time. And the Pro Tools sub pricing is just ridiculous—$46 CAD+tax/month? Yikes.

We are on the same page. The East West Cloud subscription is excellent value. The others don't come close.

Agreed. Now I need to ween myself off my Adobe addiction...

[Atlatnesiti]

Truth is that you never own the software you buy, regardless of it being subscription based or not.
Subscription makes it more affordable to masses
Paying let’s say $99 a year for update is not different to paying $99 subscription fee with additional benefits.
People are complaining about being connected to use the subscription software once a month and yet they are connected here on kvr forums 24/7. What a joke…

[Ploki]

Export multitracks of your projects, people!

With a single subscription there's already no guarantee that in 10 years the respective company will still offer the same catalog of plugins. With more subscriptions, we pretty much give away any hope for opening and running our projects in 2032.

May the best multitrack manager & archiver* win!

*Feel free to come up with appropriate terms, my English does not helping me when it comes to filing and administration department

preach!

[masterhiggins]

It's worth keeping in mind that these threads are not even remotely representative of peoples' opinions on the matter. I have a few subscriptions and I like them, but the anti-subscription zealots are so loud and aggressive that I'm not interested in engaging with these threads. I'll probably regret this post as well! Anyhow, I'm sure there are lots of us who are fine with subscriptions but have no interest in talking about it here.

Bullshit. This is as scientific and definitive as it gets. I mean it even includes an option for potato.

[felis]

I prefer hardware.
I have way too many abandoned, defunct, and deprecated software programs.

Software is convenient and cheap though.
Buy it, use it until it turns to shit, and then forget about it and move on to the next thing, or just continue using your hardware.

[Kr3eM]

Truth is that you never own the software you buy, regardless of it being subscription based or not.

That is not the truth at all. You do own it, but you do not own the code (intellectual property), the same way you don't get the ownership of the patent rights of your laptop or any other goods when you buy them.

"Software in the EU is subject to the first-sale doctrine and when people purchase software in the EU they are definitively purchasing a copy of the software and from the copyright holder unto the purchaser "transfers the right of ownership of the copy of the computer software"

There's more information here in this thread for anyone who wants to know
You own the software that you purchase, and any claims otherwise are urban myth or corporate propaganda
https://linustechtips.com/topic/953835- ... ropaganda/

Paying let’s say $99 a year for update is not different to paying $99 subscription fee with additional benefits.

This make no sense. Bitwig doesn't stop working just because you do not pay for another year of updates.
A perpetual license, is ,non-exhaustive, meaning that the right it grants is eternal, forever-lasting, and never expires.
A subscription license is a time limited right to use (access) a software or service.

Subscription makes it more affordable to masses

That's debatable. There will be situations when it is not and some when it's not.

People are complaining about being connected to use the subscription software once a month and yet they are connected here on kvr forums 24/7. What a joke…

Sure, it can't be possible for people to have more than one device... trivialize the complaints like this shows how much skill you lack when it comes to discernment.

[Scotty]

I subscribe to East West Composer Cloud. Especially with the academic discount, it's stunning what you get for the money. I make music professionally, but I don't have the money lying around for perpetual licenses for several thousand-dollar orchestral libraries, so I like having this option.

However, I'm aware subscriptions don't make the most sense financially over time. And the Pro Tools sub pricing is just ridiculous—$46 CAD+tax/month? Yikes.

We are on the same page. The East West Cloud subscription is excellent value. The others don't come close.

Agreed. Now I need to ween myself off my Adobe addiction...

I do some video work and I am using Pinnacle Studio 24 Ultimate and will upgrade to 25 when the right promotion comes around. I got it for peanuts through Humble Bundle. It is working acceptably well. I miss Premiere but not enough to renew subscription. There are a lot of Photoshop replacements out there. The hard part was to close off those old Adobe projects and just accept that they are done and then start new with something else.

[jclosed]

I have build up a neat collection of instruments over the years. Some where expensive, some not, but I can use them any time I want. But just imagine I was forced to hire those instruments (by subscription) I would have to pay several subscriptions a month, adding up to a considerable sum - Every Single Month! While at this very moment I pay.... Nothing at all..
That's why I never subscribe to these kind of software. Sure - There is software where you have to pay a yearly fee to keep it up to date, but if you don't pay that fee, you still have perfectly working software that won't stop working only because you don't pay your monthly subscription.
I don't say I have no subscriptions at all. For example, I use Malwarebytes, and don't mind to pay a yearly fee for that. It's not perfect, but at least it give some protection, is not heavy on my system, and it's not expensive. And that's about it.

[vurt]

I have build up a neat collection of instruments over the years. Some where expensive, some not, but I can use them any time I want. But just imagine I was forced to hire those instruments (by subscription) I would have to pay several subscriptions a month,

or, write stuff with more basic sounds, using stock stuff in your host. then when tracks are finished, "hire" quality instruments for getting them finalised and recorded.

thats what we used to do in the olden days. spend months practicing tracks with our cheap guitars and drums, then for recordings, hire some better stuff.

you dont "need" all those nice things all the time

not thats im for or against the subscription idea, just pointing out its not any different than "the real world"

[bmanic]

Truth is that you never own the software you buy, regardless of it being subscription based or not.
Subscription makes it more affordable to masses
Paying let’s say $99 a year for update is not different to paying $99 subscription fee with additional benefits.
People are complaining about being connected to use the subscription software once a month and yet they are connected here on kvr forums 24/7. What a joke…

This is not correct though. Nobody forces you to update a perpetual license. If you tie an old synth or effects purchase to a computer, it basically lives "forever". For instance, I still have an old PC that I maintain which is pretty much dedicated to running Alchemy v1.5 mainly. I bought my license for that synth on day one, which is now about 12 years old. That same PC also has a few other old pieces of software that I sometimes use when going through old ideas and projects.

A subscription service makes this kind of owning financially restrictive and also is no guarantee that you will actually be able to run the software a decade later, whereas a perpetual license with a sensible copy protection scheme does.

As for affordable, have you ever actually calculated what it would cost you to be subscribed to say 5 different companies subscription services in case you want some variety? That's the main negative of subscriptions in general.. if everybody goes subscription only, you get forced into a corner and suddenly have much less freedom in choosing your tools. This is the very reason I suspect subscription only will never become an industry wide phenomenon, that and the fact that most money in the music software business comes from hobbyists. Studios and professional outlets are a tiny minority, which is not the case for something like Adobe Photoshop and the like where large companies easily have hundreds of licenses. When was the last time you saw a studio which had hundreds of computers and staff?

[bmanic]

I have build up a neat collection of instruments over the years. Some where expensive, some not, but I can use them any time I want. But just imagine I was forced to hire those instruments (by subscription) I would have to pay several subscriptions a month,

or, write stuff with more basic sounds, using stock stuff in your host. then when tracks are finished, "hire" quality instruments for getting them finalised and recorded.

thats what we used to do in the olden days. spend months practicing tracks with our cheap guitars and drums, then for recordings, hire some better stuff.

you dont "need" all those nice things all the time

not thats im for or against the subscription idea, just pointing out its not any different than "the real world"

True, but at least the way I personally make music when using synthesizers and plugin effects is getting inspired in the moment, due to the sound output of the device. This is very different from composing music with acoustic instruments. A crap 1000$ violin will still be recognized as a violin.. which when replaced with a 100 000$ professional instrument wont change all that much in terms of inspiration for the composition.

This is not the case with synthesizers and effects, at least not in my experience. Sure, you COULD try to compose a whole piece with nothing but your imagination and then try to figure out what to hire afterwards but damn that is some next level composing talent right there..