Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyBelmont  No they won't... you just won't be able to use the best tools available. |
Of course it will - if sales drop the companies will respond - just like they did in the graphics and business software fields. We only stuck with dongle protection through our own complacency.
I've been guilty of it too - I bought Nuendo - but never again. I'm currently looking for a dongle- free replacement. I've been considering Sonar (the guys at Cakewalk I talked to at AES assure me they will NEVER use a dongle), but I'm waiting to see the new PreSonus StudioOne program that's due out at the end of the summer - it looks like a much easier interface and it does VST3 and switches from 32 bit to 64 bit float on the fly, even under a 32 bit OS. Projected list is around $400.
Which reminds me of two other big reasons why dongles suck:
A) they drive up the cost of software development and make the product more expensive for the consumer.
B) they put a big load on the system and waste a lot of cpu and clock cycles with incessant calls to the dongle hardware. The dongle can, under certain circumstances, hog as much as 30% of you available cpu. Without the dongle programs would run significantly faster and you could run more iterations of plugins.