Why Cytomic support so bad?

[DanielKonopka]

Ouch, was about to get their The Drop (by transfer) and later The Glue (directly), but now wondering if things are still like that in 2024, makes me reconsider everything. Has anything improved in this regard?

[andy-cytomic]

Cytomic has very quick support on install, authorisation, bugs, or any other type of technical issue where quick support is required. Depending on our workload we do not priorities license transfers, and this is to allows us to keep them free for full paying customers, or charging USD 30 for others. Is there anyone that had an actual technical support issue on this thread (which does not include license transfers), which was unhappy with how quickly they received support?

License transfers are a courtesy that Cytomic extends to our customers, but we are not required to provide them under any law in Australia. I try and check support and do "batches" of transfers so I don't get interrupted by this low priority task, sometimes if I'm travelling or deep in R&D land, or on holiday etc it can take a few weeks, but I eventually get around to servicing those transfers, and sometimes even do them for free if I take a while.

If people think this is "bad support" then I can give license transfers higher priority by increasing the fees. What do you think? How about USD 25 for full price paying transfers, and USD 50 for everyone else that received a discount?

[wintoid]

I raised a technical support query with your support on 1st April 2025 and haven't heard back. Is that normal?

I simply want to know what "HD Render" means exactly as it's not documented in the manual, and I have found the Drop crashes Bitwig when I render projects. I have read that Bitwig can get upset by plugins that alter the latency when offline rendering, so it would be good to work out whether the problem is Bitwig or the Drop.

Zero response. Zero attempt to help me troubleshoot. I have simply given up waiting and written off my purchase of the Drop.

Since you asked...

[jamcat]

How about USD 25 for full price paying transfers, and USD 50 for everyone else that received a discount?

Reselling software is an affront to reason and decency.

When a person purchases a plugin license, they are paying for permission to use that IP in their music. If a person sells their license after using it to create a finished work, then technically they have forfeited their right to have that IP in their work.

It would be like if a filmmaker licensed your music for their film, then once they released the film, they sold the rights to your music to another filmmaker. Once everyone was done passing your work around to each other to use in their films, you would have gotten paid only once. Does any of that make sense to any musician out there, or does the thought of that rightfully enrage you, as it should? If so, then why would you think it’s ok to do that to a software developer’s work?

For this reason, I do not think developers should allow license transfers, and I think instead they should vigorously defend their intellectual property rights.

[andy-cytomic]

I raised a technical support query with your support on 1st April 2025 and haven't heard back. Is that normal?

I simply want to know what "HD Render" means exactly as it's not documented in the manual, and I have found the Drop crashes Bitwig when I render projects. I have read that Bitwig can get upset by plugins that alter the latency when offline rendering, so it would be good to work out whether the problem is Bitwig or the Drop.

Zero response. Zero attempt to help me troubleshoot. I have simply given up waiting and written off my purchase of the Drop.

Since you asked...

Sorry about that. HD render means it switches to HD mode on render. Our plugins don't change latency between realtime and render as some hosts can't handle that and I prefer to help DAWs as much as possible. The fixed latency is reported in the menu.

[wintoid]

For the record, Andy has contacted me politely via email and is attempting to help me.

[andy-cytomic]

For the record, Andy has contacted me politely via email and is attempting to help me.

Just reporting back on this, there were no technical issues at all with Cytomic products that we could find, but wintoid's issue did seem to be from overloading their system with certain memory hungry (non-Cytomic) plugins which then caused crashes on render using bitwig studio, which most likely stems from memory limits on their sandboxed plugin processing.

[wintoid]

Just reporting back on this, there were no technical issues at all with Cytomic products that we could find, but wintoid's issue did seem to be from overloading their system with certain memory hungry (non-Cytomic) plugins which then caused crashes on render using bitwig studio, which most likely stems from memory limits on their sandboxed plugin processing.

Exactly that. Thanks for your help Andy!