What is there to disagree with @famouslut in statement that "The Legend cannot hold a candle to Diva's capabilities"? Let's start at the five different modeled filters, and we could end there too, though there is a bit more. True, I felt that I could get away with a $99 vsti instead of spending much more on the hardware for the Moog thing and use The Legend, not Diva when that primal urge calls, and sister, I am stoked for this. Then, Legend's arppegiator can't hold a candle to Diva's...oops, Legend has no arp. So,what do you mean when you believe that The Legend is on par or has greater capabilities? Discerning housewives want to know.

 

Candles? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't care about ARP capabilities or FX or any of that romplery nonsense. I use stock arpeggiator, much moar controllable to DIY. Surprised ya don't mention "better reverb / delay" or smthn, just as relevant. Just look at the objective test earlier. DIVA certainly has moar presets and it certainly has moar AP slowing it down and it prolly costs moar. (well it defo costs moar unless it's "Urs' birthday" sale or smthn!)

"Diva sings a more complex melody"?, rather "Diva sings a less accurate melody". It has moar complex AP, maybe? =)

I think that Urs has devoted too much time (including processing time) to (paranoiac) AP, and not nearly enough time to modelling synths. I'd much rather spend less money supporting "better" (suited to me) albeit smaller devs (Synapse Audio). But I guess everybody's ears / needs are different!

I would take the time to read (edit: Urs is ashamed of his words and deleted it, but the Internet remembers!) that thread I linked to earlier before donating to Urs' particular cause / crusade. It's very illuminating. Especially the part where "lovely" Urs says that AiR are "very quiet lately because we're investigating them". This was seconds before they released Cubase 5! XD

 

Last edited: Oct 7, 2021

it looks like im going to decide like one hour before the campaign ends, looks like that at least, ive been on that side looking at the countdown at least 15 times this week..

 

famouslut, I wonder what you are getting at when linking that thread, because I can't see anything that would tarnish his reputation there. Sure, he is very supportive of the spyware/malware style measures that Tone2 took, and you can feel a certain kind of anger and downright disrespect towards piracy in general in his writing. But I don't think that this has to be contradictory to the fact that he doesn't use these practices himself in his own programs. Just because it would be a small step from publicly supporting others take immoral action against legit customers to doing similar things himself, doesn't mean that he is not trustworthy just because of the fact that he wrote these things. His software is a big challenge for crackers so you can be sure that, if he were to implement similar kinds of measures, it would be found and made public really quickly and a lot of people would become very upset and stop supporting him. He is not dumb enough to do things like that (at least that's what I would like to think), so I still have a good impression of him and will keep supporting him.

 

The fact UHe told that about Tone2's protection makes you hating his products,and you lose your objectivity I think.
I disapprove like you what he told but nevertheless I find his synths good,elaborated.

 

As far as objectivity goes, it's difficult to be that, about sound waves. I guess it's easy to be objective about the behaviour of devs, their attitude in black & white. I don't wanna support devs liek Urs, no matter how much he chats breeze about Lego on Twitter.

Well, you kinda contradicted urself. It's an entitled attitude, that all actions are legitimate when fighting the nebulous, pointless fight against piracy (consumers). I used to be a paying customer of uHe, but I had issues w/ their AP stuff borking out my legit install. And was told that it was my fault. Never again. Urs (even in that topic I linked to) seems more proud of his AP code than the sound of his plugs. Kinda telling, too. In other threads (maybe in that one?) he talks about "sharing code / secrets" with other devs. It doesn't seem at all liek he has any problem w/ the actions of Tone2, may have even helped them?

One of the worst (other) things about uHe is that it's pronounced "ew-eee" liek a Disney villain or smthn. Another thing most ppl don't know about those shameful heretics! /s

 

So I should only buy legit licenses from developers who are pro-piracy? How is that supposed to work?

I strongly disagree with Urs' opinion that it's OK to edit users' HOSTS file. Some [k] groups also tamper with them, which I don't approve of either. But on my systems, those are my responsibility to manage. It would be irresponsible of me to simply hope that others don't change these or other system settings.

Also FWIW I think that Urs overstates his dislike of piracy. His measures make it so that unauthorized users CAN try his software - while he could have separate demo/full versions, authenticated installers, dongles, or other techniques. I suspect that he sees piracy as inevitable, even if he doesn't like it. IMO he strikes a good balance between protection and usability.

I am not interested in the drama of what all the devs I patronize think, beyond how it affects the users and community at large. To this extent, I can agree to disagree with them.

 

I think it's better to support devs who are pro consumer. Synapse Audio don't spend their days "torturing (assumed) pirates" for having the temerity to edit their host files, change clocks etcs. Interesting that DIVA takes a far bigger processor hit, and (to me) isn't as good an emulation as Legend. Guess that AP takes as many processor cycles as the synth code? Anyway, it doesn't matter what I think about DIVA, irrelevant. Just hope to warn ppl about Tone2 & uHe, there's a hidden cost in there.

 

Urs has a reputation for excellent customer service.

I don't really care about emulation. I have tried both Repro and Prophets, and find those quite close. I am more interested in having nonlinearities which are as interesting as analog hardware, rather than trying to copy the sound. That's why I suspect that Zebra is a better fit for me, but that's a different subject.

It comes off as purely guilt-by-association to me. You speculate that Urs might have helped Tone2, by giving them code for a technique that U-He doesn't even use in their products? IMO whether Urs verbally praises or condemns Tone2 is pretty much irrelevant, since it makes no difference in practice. I think it doesn't work to transfer culpability from who did a thing, to somebody who agree with them but didn't do it. Urs isn't "torturing" users simply by virtue of not being sympathetic to Tone2 users, they aren't really his responsibility.

 

Well, in a topic about Tone2's abortive practices, Urs praises them and confesses that devs are "sharing code and practices" behind the scenes. Urs is the first to leap to their defence (of the indefensible) effectively saying "piracy is bad m'kay, that's all the excuse we need".

Urs is well known (and I think says in that topic) that he "enjoys torturing pirates" (users) and brags that "other devs are worried when I explain about the lengths I go to". His words. But he will chat breeze about Legos, too.

Well, I can only go on my own experience, not others.

 

ZebraHZ 2.8 cough, sneez ,wink wink ,been 12 weeks with this cold
only one cure knowing to man pig that will help wink wink.

we be ready

 

When I said that Urs was supportive of Tone2's problematic acts, that does not mean that Urs actively participated in them, but rather, that he thinks those acts were great. That is still nothing that could tarnish his reputation in any way. From an empathetic point of view, you can't blame a developer for feeling some kind of spitefulness when he sees that pirates are getting into trouble. The context of his statement was that he believed that Team AiR might be lying about the supposed host file manipulation, and further, that this kind of manipulation would only ever be a problem if the owner of the system uses pirated content in the first place. Is this naive? Of course it is, especially from a security point of view, because even if you believe that such measures would be effective against pirates, you still have to ask the user for consent, and if you don't do it, you expose them to severe security risks. That is an unacceptable line of thinking. But is it downright evil and deceptive to believe that this is a great way to go about doing things? No way. Would it be evil and deceptive if he actually did it himself? Absolutely. That's why you can badmouth Tone2 all you want, he deserves the bad rep he has and he has a long way to go before he can rebuild any kind of trust. But U-He has nothing to do with that at all.

When he talks about "torturing pirates" (did he actually say that? I forgot), he can only refer to the cracking groups. Because his countermeasures do not torture actual pirates (the people who illegally download and use cracked versions of his programs) in any way. The legit user, from what I can tell, never ever has any kind of contact with his countermeasures. All the legit user does it enter a legit serial and he's done, forever. R2R wrote in their nfos that u-he does not use "S+++ bombs" that would crash the system. The checks will only disable the plugin itself or render it unusable. So there is no "torture" there. Or do you think that any kind of countermeasure from a developer against theft of his work is "torture"? That is just not right. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to download and use his cracked plugins. And as far as the crackers are concerned - he certainly doesn't force them to crack his software, either. They can just as well not attempt to crack them and save themselves the trouble and the work. So no "torture" there either.

Urs did say that he is in touch with a lot of other developers (was it something like 80 and more?) and that there is a "secret group" in which they share strategies, and where he shares his own anti piracy system (delayed checks and whatever it is that renders his plugins unusable months or years after heavy use). I can't remember where I read this. I think on some KVR thread. That still does not in any way imply that he is complicit in Tone2's actions. Do you have any evidence of Urs' being complicit in Tone2's actions? Or do you have any evidence that he is using similar strategies in his own plugins? Of course not. He has a clean reputation and there is no problem at all. He deserves every bit of support he can get.

The reason why I'm so involved in this is because intrusive DRM, dongles, downloaders, drivers have been a huge pain in the butt for me. I hate these things, they make everything worse for legit customers while pirates generally get better versions. So when there's a developer who has the balls to turn it around and to do things as they are supposed to be - legit customers get the best version, pirates get the inferior one - then he deserves support. Every developer should do it like that and I would lose interest in the warez scene altogether.

 

If this bundle included Zebra . . . Wow!!

 

Or an armadillo!

 

You're basically repeating yourself, it is still guilt-by-association. Verbal praise and defense are still insubstantial. You can't blame one person for what another did, simply based upon the former approving of the latter. You are using those comments as weak conspiratorial connective tissue. Maybe YOU are Urs Heckmann, and you are saying these things to hide the fact! Anything is possible with shadowy conspiracy theorizing.

You are mangling the context of those words by using them to hold Urs to an absurd standard. "I think it's better to support devs who are pro consumer." And then you directly equate supporting consumers - users with a valid license, to supporting unlicensed users. So by this logic, since Synapse isn't as public about an anti-piracy stance, I can contact them about support for a cracked version and they will help me because they are "pro consumer"? That is literally what you are saying, and it's absurd, nobody does that.

I am not claiming some moral high-ground here. Being poor, almost all of my software has been an extended "try before buy". But I still understand and acknowledge that software has a license, and by those terms some uses are legitimate, while others are not. Honestly, I have not always abided those terms even of my legit software. But when I do that I know that that is my responsibility, and that the developer might not be sympathetic if it bites me on the ass.

Now THAT I can respect. But when you speculate too much based upon that, it can take away from the point you are trying to make.

It sounds like maybe a [k] was interfering with your legit U-He, and when you asked for help, they told you to get stuffed. Getting legit and cracked software to play nice together is a dicey game, as I suspect anyone with experience has found out.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 17, 2019

Question, how easy/hard is it to re-sell these synths if I buy them?

 

Depends on their condition. Sorry.

 

Xhun Audio Little One sounds amazing, not really had the chance to try DIVA, but as far as analogue emulation goes in the plugin field, Little One is one of the best i heard yet.
Jus sayin

 

Think someone should tell Warner Brothers its a crime to make a video with a Lego guy in it....

 

U-He plugins are badly optimized and will devour your computer resources, so I'm staying away from his crappy products. There are far better VST's out there anyway.

Also, I really hate Urs Heckmann's radical leftist political ideas.