Is a blasfeme crap, wasting space for nothing; space on ssd for my business is a big cost, im mac user so space is not cheap. Giancarlo, again, switch to ilok put random timebomb, rsa it, you are wasting time and resorces in every direction, development and customers.
Remember that soon or later even the mac ilok will be cracked.

 

So if making the core framework optimisation as important as releasing new plugins you have a win win and less incentive for legit "WINDOWS" users to turn to piracy ?

Logic is an interesting concept when coding is reversed and the product is made to function as it's intended to...These are not your average noob crackers, they did not simply randomly remove protection, R2R rebuilt it from the ground up to work right ! Their crack logic seems to have decrapified allot of the files and as you acknowledged in your reply loading times are much better and they are just snappier.
I know because I've tested them all week and it's kinda driving me crazy with symptoms of buyers regret. My machine is no slouch either btw...

I will bet you money if I started a poll on varioius socials " Would you hesitate to buy Acustica plugins if they were not significantly optimised with every update " I have a feeling the verdict will be yes.

No reasonable person is saying you must remove your protection, we paying customers are expecting better performance with each update to validate our investment , niche market or not, it's a principled mindset and your responsibility to allocate enough resources to a protection scheme that does not kill the fun experience of producing music. We are your investors not dumb consumers !

 

Last edited: Nov 27, 2023

ohh guys, this is amazing: writing I’m skilled and getting lessons by crackers:


From last R2R releases info:

“A witch says,

Library is completely decrypted, decompressed, DRM related bloat removed, and built to the clean one.

Witches' Developing Course :

Don't save setting files to plugins' folder. There are no guarantee that plugins' folder can be written without admin right.

%APPDATA%, %LOCALAPPDATA%, %PROGRAMDATA% %USERPROFILE%, and its \Documents

There are lots of valid place to save the settings.

Acustica plugins saves *.SER file to the plugins' folder for offline authorization. We are not using Windows XP SP1.”

 

It is more likely to be circumvented. The wrapper gets exploited, but Mr. Acustica is already aware of that. Witches can obviously keep secrets, and it would be a real b*tch to change your whole business around only to find out they have kept an ilok2 MacOS vulnerability of whatever variety to themselves. That could easily turn out to be a foolish decision.

 

EL REY*

It's a tribute to José Alfredo Jiménez song with the same name, recorded on RCA gear. One of my favorites songs ever by the way. And for me the best plugin from this company, because it sounds the same as the records i love.

(i don't like those type of corrections, but it's just an oportunity to share the song and a bit of how RCA was impactful on the recording of early Latin Music Pretty much as EMI and Telefunken at Europe)

With you, the sound of majestic tubes from RCA at the voice of Don Alfredo:

 

Last edited: Nov 27, 2023

Oh, didn't know that, never heard of that song before.

Anyway, I have mild dyslexia, also bad at English. Spelling and grammar are some of the hardest thing in life. My native language that have everything the opposite of how English works didn't help. Am not that smart either. All I have is this good looking face and out of this world guitar playing. Sad.

 

Legend in the audio warez scene, a moderator assistant of Russian tracker says this about Acustica plugins (machine translated from Russian to English with Google):

 

its illegal in Americans and Europe, maybe not Iran but in Europe especially its illegal to forbid buying and selling used licenses.
what the victim of the abuse can do is file a complaint cause people some times appear to of mixed cracks yet they where copies of previously owned plugins clients or friends temporarily used on their computers with their own paid plugins.

 

why the compressors from all channel strips act so weirdly??? am i the only one have this feeling?

 

No one answered you because you are off topic, first of all, there is already a topic for help regarding AA products, doing a little research never hurts

Spoiler

https://audiosex.pro/threads/help-with-acustica-installation.72895/

I am sincerely surprised to see how much there is a flood of very unobjective opinions, R2R has opened a hell of a Pandora's box, all the internet wants to give its opinion and intervene to defend its camp.. A reminder who was present in all their NFOs a time,

Spoiler

It's not piracy, it's alternative solution, never do money with warez or R2R release,
You are pirates and you don't have any rights to claim!
- But you get angered when you find someone making money with your music.

It forces respect & humility, perhaps the opposite of some here.

 

Cool stuff!

Here are some settings for drums and acoustic.

https://ibb.co/cQJLHXM
https://ibb.co/wK047C8

I think they get pretty close imo. The black rooster 436C gets very close, in the 90% certainly.
if you use Bertrom Analyzer to get a peek at the EQ curve that's there by just inserting the El Rey and apply it to the 436C then you can get even closer. Just took 10 minutes, I guess a good pair of ears much better than mine will get closer still.

Watch out for the input knob that gives about a 2db boost when still at zero. A nice trick that certainly helps to boost sales, but quoting my GP "it's never a good idea to turn your knob upwards". I'll leave it at that

VERIDICT: I like the sound and quoting some guy at Gearspace "you can never have too many compressors". Metering still a bit laggy but with these plugins you know the drill.

If my settings are off don't blame me, I'm not using Sienna. I know "It recreates the very same listening experience as if you were mixing in top-tier, acoustically designed studios or mastering in audiophile-grade rooms" so maybe that's the problem...

In the end at 269 vs the Black Rooster All Bundle at 99 I know what I would get...

Lucky you. My guitar skills are at best passable, says my gran.

 

Last edited: Nov 27, 2023

Some astute observations from fellow members from old thread about Acustica Audio. Is Acustica incapable of fixing common problems users report or do they not fix it on purpose?

 

Well I don't claim to be a skilled engineer at all.
But one thing I've been noticing is the increasingly salesfication of all these things.
It's more about spiel than anything else.

Don't get me wrong I like nice UIs and if they resemble all the stuff from yesterday all the better, but all this "magic" is mostly either nostalgia or lack of knowledge of the hardware in the first place. Who knows what a Fairchild sounds like? Not me, I can barely work out how to use a toothbrush...

 

Yes, but only if you're gonna have Giancarlo on vocals

Those nfos seem like long overdue code quality audit...

 

Holy hell. I don't think I've seen any response from @giancarlo that has upset me more than this one:


As a fellow person in IT, what kind of response is this!? Fix the security vulnerability in you plugin! If your platform has the potential to be exploited maliciously, fix it. You make it sound like only crackers would do malicious things, but a rouge 3rd party dev could very well do it if they're having a bad day.

Just like that any respect I had for you, is totally gone. I was very balanced in my interactions with you, but you've lost ANY and ALL good will I had for you .

 

Latest NFOs from R2R releases of Acustica Audio products

 

It's basically a FU response in a form of usual wall of meaningless text.

 

it was buy a bigger screen before, now he upgraded to buy a Mac as a solution.

 

<<R2R Messages>>



- 20.11.2023 @ 01:58
Hi developer!
Finally you need to change the mind, after you found that current protection scheme does not work for R2R. You have serious misunderstanding about it.

* We showed we can reverse Virtual DLL trick and make valid keygen for RC4 Crypt for your products in 2014.
* We have shown that we can decrypt / unpack and emulate expensive commercial protections, which should be obviously more advanced than your homemade one.
We can't understand why you can believe in your super bloated multilayered protection. With the 2 facts above, there are no doubt that we can easily (at least should be much easier than paid protections) remove yours. As we stated in the previous section, it didn't even take 1 day for us.

Customer (incl. potential customer) are not blind. Please think about how they feel, once after we proved these protections are making your products really fat and decreasing the performance - and R2R ones are far better.

We saw you are saying that "legit version is better because you can get updates!" but these updates perform much worse than R2R release unless you change your mind.

Instead of threatening your customer, do the right thing. Make a statement that you will remove the shit and focus on the performance and quality.

We - R2R, customer, potential customer are watching you.

Don't let your customer selling your products and going to be R2Red.




-22.11.2023 @ 11:20
There are many duplicated files in their library. That's why R2R can compress well after the decrypting and decompressing.
We found some errors that some files in N2V are not decrypted as expected. There are too many similar issue in Acustica products. Some products do not work at all (try Crimson Trial and Pensado EQ 2 Trial if you have Aquarius, well, issue may be fixed by developer after reading this NFO).

In Acustica product, issue can happen only in specific sampling rate, because diffrent sampling rate uses different library files. This makes testing process hard for the developer.

Hi developer : How about encrypting SKIN only instead of encrypting all files? In the real world, the cracker who can decrypt one file can decrypt other files.

Bonus1 : Gainstation 1

Bonus2 : Proof that R2R release (Stereo Savage) is used in Studio DMI

Mr.Acustica needs to tell his business partner not to use R2R release in the commercial project.

Otherwise, the developer of Stereo Savage needs to put 10GB protection layer to his product, and post "we need to do this because of the piracy!" to facebook, then finally threaten the warez users.

Users and developers need to think about why many 1st class producers and engineers don't use his legit version even if they have license.
By the way, this release package (GS2 + Bonus) is still smaller than legit GS2



-22.11.2023 @ 12:19
Library is completely decrypted, decompressed, DRM related bloat removed, and built to the clean one.

Legit One : 3930MB (Per Plugin Format)
This Release : 140MB (VST/VST3/AAX)

Apart from the bloating (injecting SCORPION DLLs to any files), this data shows how the encryption kills the compression. Because R2R release is all decrypted and pure, 7zip-Chan effectively compresses them well



-22.11.2023 @ 12:20
According to the developer, the library of Ash Ultra is super optimized from Ash and bloating is solved. But you can see that R2R library is still 50% less from the legit version. The loading time is also better in R2R release, because there are no RC4 decryption, no GoogleSnappy decompression, no Virtual DLL loading, no NTDLL.dll scan, no RSA license decryption, no MultiLayered decryption by SCORPION.



-23.11.2023 @ 15:41
R2R - Acustica Side Story : Because there are too many human errors in their software (wrong file, broken crypto, broken TOC, non used files...) we had to code own verification tool for their products. While it really helped us rebuilding the libraries, it also annoyed us by finding too much errors made by Acustica.

Judging from their code, they hate to handle the errors. For example, if there were missing files in the user installation, it just crashes or shows null GUI without notifying the acutual error. Their activation can lead the crash when its license file is not for that computer (it fails decryption and program reads broken data). We assume they don't make verification tools for their products to assure the quality.

The developer is insisting they are caring the user experience and they are reducing the bloat. However, we know that bloating was already there in 2014. There were plenty of time to remove it, but they put more and more effort on the protection instead of hearing the users' feedback. No other developers put such amount of the protection. How do we know? Because we have reversed thousands software
It should be very hard to maintain more than 100 software for small company. Even the big companies do not maintain such number of the software. Something is being sacrificed to realize that.

There are serious security vulnerbility in the Acustica's protection. Bad hacker can put malicious code to the Nebula library. That malicious code will be run by Nebula / DAW. When DAW has admin rights, that code runs in admin rights, of course. There were similar issue in the Cherry Audio plugins, but they fixed it after we pointed out. To fix this issue, Acustica needs to update all related plugins. To make matters worse, library devs (their party too!) need to update all the library (with DRM) to be validated by new plugins. We are sure Acustica knows where to fix this issue, because that vulnerbility is not made by error



-24.11.2023 @ 20:30
Witch Knowledge : We recommend VST2 for Acustica Audio. Their AAX and VST3 are just wrapper (made with JUCE).
You can find ACQUA.dll or ACQUA.engine file in *.aaxplugin / *.vst3 folder. That is the real plugin (VST2).

- According to the developer :
> Our protection system WORKS. The
> crackers exploited an obvious
> vulnerability: ... It's not hard:
> the files all come out in the
> clear at the same time.

We are very sorry to announce that every single behevior of your DRM is defeated. Rebuilding the library is the hardest achievement for your protection, because we need to know every single encryption layer and Nebula2/4 Image structure which is not publicly documented at all. People can say it's fully reversed / cracked - minor DRM change can't stop us anymore. You need to change everthing from scratch

- Mr.Acustica says :
> they packaged the products the same
> way we do for testing.
Thanks for clarifying that our release is as pure as your developing version (without any protection).
> we've become disinterested in
> piracy.

As we explained in our AA Framework release, they continuously updated the DRM. (From NFO : Anyway, there are many small differences in the protection between product A and B.) We saw DRM update in the last month too. The new way of dual-scorpion definition : [1,2] But let's say, he can update his sweet DRM without being interested in piracy



-25.11.2023 @ 19:18
We can see users are really frustrated by seeing the "fact" and complaining to developer in some forums / SNSs. Funny thing is, many are asking iLok as a new protection. R2R users know that it's another bloating protection. Current Acustica DLL is about 4MB. WrapWarden (iLok wrapper) adds 10MB. If dev wants more, they put MetaFortress, which adds another 10MB. The estimated DLL size is about 25MB after protecting by the iLok. If there were 8 DLL in 1 product, WrapWarden + MetaFortress adds (10MB + 10MB) * 8DLL in the end. Need VST3 and AAX? It must be further multiplied by 3. Another big bloat for sure.

One of the typical mistake of Acustica, is mixing retail files and trial files. Since retail and trial files are protected by different licenses, it can't be mixed. When they mix, the product will not work correctly (file decryption will be failed). It crashes the host, or plugin will be muted. Sometime, issue happens only in one sampling rate. It is because Acustica product does not use same file. If you have problem with one rate, you can try another rates. Their mistake tends to happen in 48kHz and 88kHz. They should develop automatic file verifier to test all files at one. R2R actually developer it and it catches many errors. We fixed many Acustica Audio put many efforts to avoid hackers for [legit license + bypassing machine id check] attack. That attack tends to be used when the hacker failed reversing the main protection, and hacker does not care sacrificing the legit license (the license owner gets banned later). The famous example is reFX plugins released by VR and Chinese cracker. Both contains legit license with few-bytes-modified DLL. Mr.reFX obviously didn't thought that poeple would sacrifice the legit license. The efforts of Acustica does nothing to the legitmate attack : Patch+Keygen or library rebuilding. That is one of the reason why Acustica products are hard to be cracked from beginner crackers.


-25.11.2023 @ 19:19
R2R members think that Giancarlo is a cracker himself, after we reversed how he protect his software.

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=581638

Here he is talking about how AV and malware works, and Windows PE format. The knowledge of PE format will be needed when
* Cracking software protected by packers (like iLok WrapWarden, WIBU AxProtector, VMProtect etc).
* Reversing malware (for packers).
* Developing compiler / linker. Most programmers don't even know what "PE" means in the real world.
He is also saying that some advanced protections are effective but easily done by experienced people, which is correct. He knows too much about these things



- 25.11.2023 @ 19:20
0 nights after it's released. (Acustica Audio Midnight 2023-R2R)



-27.11.2023 @ 02:45
* Smaller is better? Here you are

* The developer explained that Virtual DLL trick is good to hide code from the cracker. However, for experienced crackers, it makes easier finding that hidden code. Because Virtual DLL always need to call some Win32API like VirtualAlloc or VirtualProtect.
That's one of the reason why their protection is really hard just for beginner crackers and easy for experienced.



-27.11.2023 @ 02:45
*There are no profit of using same encryption in one product. Experienced cracker is always able to code good tools to automate the procedure. For DRM, encrypt only important files.Because decryption always need extra CPU power, which makes loading slow.

*Witches' Developing Course :
Don't save setting files to plugins' folder. There are no guarantee that plugins' folder can be written without admin right.
%APPDATA%, %LOCALAPPDATA%, %PROGRAMDATA% %USERPROFILE%, and its \Documents
There are lots of valid place to save the settings.
Acustica plugins saves *.SER file to the plugins' folder for offline authorization. We are not using Windows XP SP1.

* Witches' Developing Course :
Notify what the exact error is.
In Acustica products, any errors (file not found, license expired, license not for this computer, license not found, decryption failure etc) lead "Not Authorized" message.
In R2R releases, there are no authorization related files. Yet it still cause "Not Authorized" error if you copy files wrongly.

*Acustica is using RC4 for encrypting Nebula2 image files (N2P, N2S, N2V). RC4 is outdated weak protection, thus deprecated in many software / libraries. Not good for both security and speed.
For the library encryption (used by software), simple XOR with key mangling is enough. By using SSE2, XOR crypt can process data by 16 bytes at once, which results good decryption speed. AES with hardware acceleration should be good too.

There are lots of better secured crypto. However, hackers can extract any crypto key in the desktop apps by using debugger. R2R has made tons of keygens for tons of crypto as you know. There are no good reason to use slow crypto in the audio plugins. Just use simple and faster one - or ditch crypto.



27.11.2023 @ 13:34

Mr.Acustica Said

> It's quite straightforward. Without
> any form of protection, products are
> lighter and perform better. That's a
> fact.
That's what your users care, isn't it?
> the way we can produce products is
> surely more optimized than how a
> cracker might randomly deprotect
> them, leaving them all decrypted
> without any logic, and not
> performing various types of
> optimizations, such as data
> compression.

Of course we can re-compress since we know it's Google Snappy. In our test, the decompressed one performed better. It also results smaller size at final lzma compression. That's why we didn't.

*The Acustica developer is repeatedly complaining that R2R de-GoogleSnappy-ed and that kills optimization.
We don't say their "optimization" (compression) is wrong, but we also don't say that uncompressed version is slower. It actually perfomed better in R2R members' computers. It depends on the spec of the computer and the way to measure the performance. Compression tends to result better performance when the file-reading is slow. HDD and NVMe can make significant difference.

Anyway, compressed or not, R2R image will be loaded while legit one is still being processed by RC4, VirtualDLL, AES/RSA crypto. No need to argue about the compression. The point is legit users are having much worse experience.

 

And only now they figured out the flat GUIs at 02:22 and the less CPU intensive Hyper3 technology at 03:00. :D They're doing the revolution over there according to Pearl Jam.