Tone2 Firebird going Freeware

[V'ger]

...all the plugin does is check in its folder for existing blacklisted keyfiles (which i believe it does).

And you believe right, because its true.

To remove all remainders of doubt, just check the attached animation.

(I found out that clicking the setup button triggers the keyfile scan as well, which allowed me to clear the list and eliminate all the SAVIHost related stuff that necessarily also appears upon shutting down the process. And as you can see, it scans for a couple of Tone2 keyfiles in its own dir and thats it. IMO this is about as unintrusive as it could possibly be, because except for not doing anything at all it would be downright impossible to limit it even more. Thus in my opinion there is absolutely nothing to worry about here.)

The naivety of anyone to think they are on top of Tone2's copy protection with simple tools and even assume it's based on checking a single folder is frankly amazing, as is breaking the EULA in full public:

"The user is not allowed to apply or distribute technologies or knowledge for circumventing the copy protection of Tone2 products."

If you doubt Tone2's policy about even looking at their systems with the most basic of tools, ask a KVR mod to look up the now extinct Saurus Demo thread where the developer without mincing words made it clear that anyone monitoring the install or anything was trying to find out about the copy protection and was therefore a hacker and criminal.

Failing that, just send Tone2 an email and ask if they think it's Ok to monitor their program to find out about their copy protection in any way or post results about it here on KVR.. Good luck!

[V'ger]

Cool. So you finally proved what was already proposed by me and later confirmed by Bastiaan from Tone2.


Ingo

Where does Tone2 say it just checks a single directory? Since they obviously didn't it baffles why you would say it?

[chk071]

You seem a bit... biased...

[V'ger]

For telling the truth or for not wildly waving the Tone2 flag?

And what would you say of a poster that makes a post that has nothing to with the topic but is just to diss a poster? Non-biased I take it? Sigh..

[BBFG#]

This is such a weird argument. Just because a program is free it can do whatever it wants and those who complain about are stupid? To me it's obvious the ignorant here are those who think that..

They are free to write this into their software and EULA.

You are free to accept it or not.

You're even free to spout about wanting to accept it but won't because you won't accept it.
And they in turn are free to not listen to you complain about it.

[V'ger]

Bless..

[ENV1]

The naivety of anyone to think they are on top of Tone2's copy protection with simple tools and even assume it's based on checking a single folder is frankly amazing, as is breaking the EULA in full public

No, whats amazing is that you bring up this nonsense for the second time now.

I really dont know why i even have to spell it out for you, but nobody was interested in anyones 'copy protection', let alone in 'circumventing' anything. (Not to mention of course that FireBird doesnt even have any copy protection to circumvent.) The matter of interest was 'are the concerns and speculations brought up earlier in this thread warranted or not' and the answer was no. The tool used to arrive at that conclusion was good enough for the task as it provided all the information that was needed. This is good enough for me, and since there are absolutely no indications for any other activities by the plugin it is probably best to just leave it at that and end the subject.

[V'ger]

You weren't interested in the copy protection but "concerns and speculations brought up earlier in this thread" which were in fact about the copy protection? Omg..

[Examigan]

Do you guys always go after Tone2 this much, or do you take breaks once in a while?

Do you ever make music?

[ENV1]

You weren't interested in the copy protection but "concerns and speculations brought up earlier in this thread" which were in fact about the copy protection? Omg..

Quit playing dumb.

You know exactly what i was referring to.

[cosmosis]

I tried this a few more times to find out what happened with the Sylenth1 files. The Firebird setup marks the 'archive' attribute to all files inside the Sylenth1 folder, .DAT, .FXP, .DLL and .EXE. The CRC before and after all match, so the files themselves aren't modified.

I also noticed that onced modified, the installer won't do it again. But if I uninstall Sylenth1 and install FB again, it will turn the archive attribute on again. I don't know what to make of that, but I've reproduced it several times. Note that this is version 1 of Sylenth1.

To find out if the installer only scans it's own directory or Tone2's as advertised, run Filemon and find out for yourself.

I should also mention that I have no other Tone2 products and no file in my computer has the .t2k extension.

[planetearth]

Do you guys always go after Tone2 this much, or do you take breaks once in a while?

Do you ever make music?

There are some valid concerns here (some, and more about copy protection and modifying systems in general, IMHO), but still...that was pretty funny.

Steve

[SODDI]

I can do music assured of my computer's safety now that I got that malware off my system.

[arkmabat]

This thread has talked so much garbage about this synth I didn't even think of just midi cc data. ... thanks Is there a tool that strips everything but the notes and volume?

Fur windows:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=275021

MIDI File Stripper

Thanks. Both the other layered synths use an onnboard patch system, that's why they weren't affected.

Did you try this already?

The most easy way to test if there is a general problem with Firebird is to create a fresh project with a single instance of Firebird and check if the selected preset is kept after re-loading.

This way it is possible to see if there is a general problem with Firebird or not. If everything is OK after re-loading it should be indeed a problem with a CC message like shown in the screenshot of Halma (post above mine).

Ingo

Yeah, it's working correctly now. Some garbage cc data was in the midi, which was converted from an old tracker song I wrote on my NDS.
(btw, I used to love this NDS Tracker: http://nitrotracker.tobw.net/ ) Even with three VSTs all playing the same midi file, only firebird had host-accessible patches. What luck? It's all good now. Thanks!

[Ingonator]

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