FL Studio over Reaper?

[liquidsound]

Even a higher NI official has moved to them and is the new CEO or something like this...

I must admit, seeing how NI is doing these days, I found this comment ironic.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... 81k7_lo0eh

[Dionysos]

For me though, my stance goes way beyond all of this, and it is not even directed at Imageline. I've always felt that the honest customers are the ones that get punished and force to go through the DRM hoops, and the pirates don't have to worry at all--just download the product from a wares site and off they go. The whole idea bothers me. Intrusive copy protection bothers me.

IL staff have for years voiced that same sentiment on their forums and here, to explain their previous licence model. As far as you can "trust" a company, I'd trust IL to stick both to their lifetime-free updates promise and the informal promise to provide a DRM-free version were they to go bust. But of course there's not much convincing I can do if you're more on the cynical side, and it is absolutely fair to demand the latter to be formalised in the EULA.

It's also worth considering their motivation: the new activation method (which is still user-friendly and doesn't actually require any hoop-jumping to the vast majority of customers) is one way for them to ensure their ongoing business success, as the old one was so incredibly easy to abuse at scale. Making things needlessly easy for pirates is no way to run a business either.

If IL wanted to, they could come up with a new version and rebrand it with a different name, and then say that since it is a different product, the free updates for life only applied to the FL Studio product.

That'd be reputation and customer trust suicide.

AFAIK, the team are not employees, but contractors.

Source? I'm pretty certain that's incorrect and the coders are regular employees.

[Artie Fichelle]

Thing is, I have heard many times "free for lifetime." But I survived many of those companies.

[Dionysos]

What's your point? Companies can go bust, such wisdom.

If they never recharged you during the lifetime of the company, they held their promise.

[sjm]

AFAIK, the team are not employees, but contractors.

Source? I'm pretty certain that's incorrect and the coders are regular employees.

A combination of talking to the team and things I can't disclose, unfortunately. I know for sure that it at least applies/applied to some of the team. There's a core team in Belgium that are *probably* employed (though I don't know either way), and the rest of the team is spread over the globe and *probably* contractors - simply because of how complicated it would be to handle otherwise. There are taxes to be paid, social security contributions to take care of, and handling all that for a single person in various disparate countries sounds like an absolute bureaucratic nightmare. Those things are typically just easier to handle by signing a contract and letting the contractor deal with the local authorities (this isn't exclusive to IL, it's how a lot of other IT companies with remote workers operate btw). Otherwise you need people who know the labour laws in multiple jurisdictions, speak the local languages, and typically regular employment requires a local presence registered in that country as well. That's just not a realistic proposition for smaller companies.

[elassi]

Thing is, I have heard many times "free for lifetime." But I survived many of those companies.

They're addressing their lifetime, not yours.

[Dionysos]

That's just not a realistic proposition for smaller companies.

There are third-party payroll companies that can handle that complexity. I know because I work for a company even smaller than IL that's similarly spread across the globe and makes use of one (or several). Not that I'd know whether IL does, too.

[sQeetz]

Thing is, I have heard many times "free for lifetime." But I survived many of those companies.

They're addressing their lifetime, not yours.

The lifetime of the product

[xbitz]

Orjan has used it for drums in Cubase

from 14:18 isn't a bad idea ...let us say GrooveAgent has a similar pattern triggering stuff

I use that one

[sQeetz]

I strongly dislike FL nowadays for anything. But..... Do whatever does you good.

[xx JPRacer xx]

Except for Reaper all the DAWs I own/used to own require a license file that is made for the current computer and OS to be downloaded to function. Live, Bitwig, Studio One. I don't see anyone having a problem with that.

[Trancit]

Except for Reaper all the DAWs I own/used to own require a license file that is made for the current computer and OS to be downloaded to function. Live, Bitwig, Studio One. I don't see anyone having a problem with that.

This + this means otoh there aren´t any other alternatives anyway... so either you choose Reaper or you have to deal anyway with a product which goes broke together with the company ... so why worrying... you cannot change it.

[liquidsound]

It’s an idiotic problem.

If anyone wants to switch DAW now, because of possible catastrophic scenario, why don’t just wait for the imaginary scenario, if any, to occur “and then” switch DAW.

Either way, switching now or later, and later may never occur…

Ridiculous. Complaining about being eventually forced to switch and you want to do it now without facts?

[N__K]

To me, it seems a bit misguided to defend being dependent, and submit oneself to not being able to change things.

"I think I'm powerless, so better to comply than to resist."
That's the attitude of a prey animal.

If that's the path one allows self to take in life, one will be used and abused, repeatedly. Human societies aren't far from the jungle in that regard - over the course of millennia, those with more will and power merely have made those with less [will and power] believe so, in order to take advantage of them.

Some folks may laugh at that - until a fellow who has more [of something that they want] passes by them so close that their capacity for self-deception becomes insufficient for a moment. And that moment stings.

***

Somewhat closer to context of this thread: the fun part is that some of the fellows making the apps tacitly leave users options - at least on moral level - to not be their bitches. That includes some of the IL guys, if you read into what they write with a bit of thought. They can't spell it out of course, the world being what it is. But those of them with serious enough skills [in what they do] tend not to wish to be masters of users, as much as [some of] the users wish to be their bitches - both in the sense of bitching about some particular app, and bitching about not being able to ditch it.

In that sense, DAW forums tend to be a kind of a human nature documentary. An addictive one, too, due to being one of the beings observed.


My imagined civic duty done for today, I guess. That, knowing that I'm not too bright of a lightbulb either. But I have to say it again: the level of masochism in DAW forums is sometimes astounding.

[liquidsound]

It’s just a freaking DAW…
It doesn’t even exist… it’s a bunch of codes