I contacted steinberg support and native instruments support about a issue regarding cubase 8.5 and komplete kontrol recently. Native instruments took around 12 days i think to reply and denied me help as i had ccleaner installed ( no i dont clean/destroy my registry willy nilly ) and steinberg took a whopping 23 days to reply.

 

R2R (and HEXWARS) have made BETTER versions of a lot of my legitimate purchases, hell I see less cpu hit as they aren't constantly checking to see if they are legit or not etc....

 

I know it's been mentioned already, I'm also aware it's not a DAW but for me Arturia has been the absolute worst in customer service based on hardware purchases. I would never personally buy anything else they make mainly for that reason but not ignoring they make a keyboard or hardware piece and obsolete it in 6 months. I really felt like Arturia was saying you no like something fuck you charlie .

I like Steinberg Customer Service and I don't look at them as a Giant company, they have held an incredible sonic advantage from working hard on their product. I think maybe the customer service side could be Yamaha ( US based ) but I can't speak for Europe on that. I can say I've been to a trade show and the Steinberg booth looked like night of the living dead. Maybe freshen up the team.

I think people buy stuff expecting some sort of basics on customer service and when there's none to be had.. #*&$(*#&#(*&$ happens.

I had some Tone2 stuff I bought but I could never update it because they won't allow you to update it without going thru hurdles, them and ReFX get the GAS FACE. How can you have anyone invest into an e-lic key and not offer atleast some insurance plan or something? Those keys are easy as shit to break. Personally to my ears, the free stuff in Logic and Cubase sounds better than most of what Tone 2 and REFX makes.

 

be very careful letting Native Instruments " view your computer for service " VERY careful nothing good comes from this

 

without a doubt, have waited over two months.....

 

articstorm is right: Ableton devs: SLOW, service, ok.... so I won't bus toss them, they just really need to get to 2013 in terms of some basic functionality...

and what is this about NI "viewing your computer" .... are you talking about from remote or whatnot? I have all legit NI stuff, I have spoken with their customer service (which bucking trend here, has been decent to me), .... just want some clarification on that... as service center software doesn't seem to care...

 

...arghh.. and can't change my vote to ARTURIA!!!!!

 

m-audio sucked to my experience,independently of who owned the company, that had different owners throughout the years,the last being avid.What really pissed me off about them is the lack of support for their products after a short time.U bought a master keyboard when there was windows xp,and if a year later vista was released,u had to struggle to to find the proper drivers,because rather than updating them ,they simply forgot about your master keyboard model and released a new version of it, with a different color.I don t know u, but to me it s pretty stupid having to change the master keyboard because the drivers for the new Os are not available.U still can use it because it s plug and play, but it lacks a lot of features.Expecially if it s supposed to be used with a mapping software like aenigma that they completely forgot

 

M-Audio is terrible. I used to own a Keystation Pro-88 -- the fact that you could buy a fully-weighted 88 key controller for around $500 should have been a warning sign, but at the time, I just figured I was being a smart consumer. The Enigma Editor software was virtually useless. I could never get any of the impressive-looking controls on the Keystation to actually do anything in any DAW or VI. The action on the board itself wasn't bad, so it wasn't a total loss, but since I also had a Korg K61 controller, it didn't get as much use as it would have had the transport and control surface controls worked. Finally, after about a year of extremely moderate use, the weight in the middle "C" went out for no reason. Just stopped working, or broke. You'd hit the key and it would stay down until you jiggled it, then, it would slowly come back up. It was around that time that I noticed the bottom of the controller was made out of multiple layers of pressed cardboard. I considered getting it fixed, which probably would have cost about as much as buying a used replacement, and I wound up throwing it away, all the while swearing I would never buy another M-Audio product. I notice they either don't make or just don't mention the Keystation Pro-88 anymore. The take-away here is, spend the extra money and buy something better than an M-Audio product.

 

I don't want to bash tone2 just for the pleasure of doing it, but

I think all the tone2 synths sound 95% the same.

On each announcement/trailer, we have a fancy video with a wonderful 3dmax animation of the synth... a synth that is the best ever done, with 5 years of intense research... and again, for a little 199 euros, lucky musicians will have access to the BRAND NEW:
3d-scanning-phase_delayed-opto-negative-vectorized-hyper_substractive-spectralized_poly_morphed-adolf_shaped SYNTHESIS,

WHERE 95% of the presets will have , at the same time:
Delay 80%, phaser 70%, chorus 85%, reverb 98%, ensemble 88%, compression 77%, filter 69%, distortion 66%

Applied at the same time.

For sure, the patches sound huge...it's impossible to have 2 or 3 tone2 sounds playing on the same project...the audio spectrum looks like a white noise...

And once we remove that wall of effects, those sounds and its fantastic synthesis start sounding like a bontempi patch... whereas a simple waveform and patch, with no effects, from a synth like sylenth, will already sound creamy and tick at the same time.

Tone2 plug-ins shouldn't cost more than 60-70 euros each. Synthmaster can be purchased for 65$. But at that price, people would think 'hey, tone2 synthetic at 65 euros.. they are cheap because they sound like shit'. When, at 200 euros, people will think 'hey, it's expensive because it's professional and really really good'.

Even for free, I wouldn't use their synths. Even for free, at audi*z, no thanks.

 

I guess I am lucky. I never have problems with any customer service departments whenever I need to tap into them, those that I have ever dealt with which have been a good many, ever. Even when I bought a used SparkLE from the dreaded Arturia and wanted to transfer the license to my name and register the hardware so I could download the updates and the software, they were fast to get back to me, simpatico and bent over backwards to help me with any difficulty. Maybe I should go out and play the Lotto tonight, lucky, lucky me.

 

Or you could supply R2R with the latest updates, just as some kinda payback. The plugs will then work and no more shutting down.

 

Every softsynth ever made should have a GLOBAL REVERB BYPASS.

 

Actually I found reFX responding quickly (50 minutes to 6 hours) and helping me in both situations that I needed. What kind of issues did you have with them?

 

iLok in my experience has the worst customer experience. They have the worst attitudes for a company that has such a strangle hold on the copy protection/dongle market. And end users are forced to deal with their shit products in order to use the software they want. Which is why I laughed & was quite happy when AudioTopia came around.

 

Yes indeed, you are beyond lucky! And, if and when you play the Lottery, please put in some digits for me! <lol>

 

Native Instruments, which is why I went with the Push by Ableton.

 

Access has the worst

 

My vote goes to Steinberg and Native Instruments they both used to be awesome years and years ago but once they stop phone support and other crap with their tech support in their customer service the best thing to do if you buy any software is go buy it at sweetwater.com because they have their own customer service tech support so anything you buy from them they will support and you can call them anytime