Acustica Audios gracious RESET for idiots like me who tried out the N4 offered on the sister site and lost their paid for AA plugins and were locked out of their accounts only temporarily.

Why was I such an idiot? Well quite simply I had no interest in the massive libraries shipped with full N4 but did want to try out some Tim Petherick libraries, most notably L-Bus Comp 2, Opto32 and U76V3 which I then purchased legally that I had heard so many recommendations about. A stupid manoeuvre of course but there is no other way to try out such 3rd party libraries. This of course deserved to lose access to everything including the newly purchased TP libraries.

Anyway just wanted to post and unreservedly apologise to @giancarlo72 for my reckless stupidity and thank him for his gracious forgiving spirit for restoring idiots like me to normal status again, thank you.

On a small footnote if I could be so bold to ask maybe the full N4 could be offered for sale minus the massive included libraries for such use as this. Again thank you @giancarlo72

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 16, 2021

Acustica Audio's boss had one of the most intelligent reaction I've ever seen from a Dev seeing his material shar
Much respect to him.

 

@Olymoon I'm curious, how did he react and where was that? I think I've seen him on here somewhere giving explanations about his programming, sadly he got largely ignored

 

Yeah, it specifically said "Unactivated" on the header of the post. But maybe it would still be a good feature on the sister site to have a subsection "For Teams" when it comes to shares like that.

 

Let's keep this thread about Acustica Audio's boss reaction / policy.

I'll post a copy of his comment later.

 

Awaiting that teal deer post from Giancarlo. But here's the meat:

(changes the activation system to make it even less convenient for our legit users)

Compare. Contrast. The rest is just garbage tales about racist, imaginary lions attacking his racist, imaginary sister and also Rubik's cube. It's less exciting and more long-winded than that sounds!

Anyway, Aquarius has the distinction of being almost as awful and unreliable as Steinbug's hellish, sloppy, broken af API scheme. Quite an achievement!

In other news, Giancarlo single-handedly allows his customers access to the plugins they bought? What a champ! :D

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2021

I did the exact same thing, what an idiot I was, so I regretted it immediately my decision and sent a ticket to Acustica where I came clean. My account is still banned as writing this, but I do hope I get my account back as well and not getting sued. I'm all with you on the 3rd party libraries. I did this because I can't justify spending 399 euros on Nebula atm and I'm only interested in purchasing TimP, AlexB, Cupwise and some other really dope libs. So I do like the thought of just of a discounted clean N4 without all it's included libraries.

 

Manual activation of AA plugins should be an option simply because of global events if AA servers for some reason go down because of some global or natural disaster, in that case we are screwed.

 

They put N4 on sale massively discounted already, twice at least.

 

That's his complete message:
...........................
I am the developer of this plugin, and I finally decided to reply to your message, because I find it so wrong and in so many ways.

First of all let me make one point clear: I have tremendous respect for the capabilities of teams like R2R, who have incredible mathematical problem solving skills. At the same time I have no respect for a person who without understanding anything, takes some files and passes them off as a crack by manually authorizing them on the site, and exploiting a simple slot deletion mechanism, that is something that any user can do today, and not having understood that
1) we don't care if a user authorizes commercial products in this way
2) any user of our products knows that the problem is not to authorize once, but to fix things at the first operating system problem
3) it is not true that a compromised account only has problems in buying new products. Some have lost all their products (other products)
4) to think that we wouldn't have noticed such a simple ploy without wasting a few minutes to invalidate all accounts and prevent you from doing it in the future, making you look bad too

Some years ago we released an unprotected version of nebula, which ended up on this site as a "pirated copy", and it was simply a version we wanted to distribute that way. We don't care what a user does maliciously. You want nebula? Use it.

1) we've come up with a trial where you just bring the dates back and forth.
2) we are practically giving a way to delete slots manually

Why are we doing all this? Because we don't care if a user, within certain limits, abuses the system, we only care that he is happy to use them.
The only thing we care about is that the first user like you doesn't come along and pass off as crack something that is not crack, wasting everyone's time.
I don't care about putting doors in the house to prevent the Ocean 11 team from coming and stealing from the cookie jar. I care enough to put the doors in to prevent the first neighborhood thief from taking my daughter away while she sleeps, otherwise I would have decided to sleep in the middle of the savannah, among the lions with her.

Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, when I was very small and maybe 7 years old, I was given a rubick cube as a present. My mother was unfortunately convinced that I was a genius, but I wasn't and I didn't have the slightest idea how to solve it. Seeing that I could still complete a few faces, she began to tell people that I could solve it. This was not true, and I adopted the simplest solution to put an end to the whole ugly story. I secretly started peeling off the stickers on the cube and reattaching them to give the illusion that I had solved it.
I thought it would end there, but things turned out differently.
I became a freak, and the thing degenerated: every time my family moved somewhere, my mother wanted to show everyone that I solved that damn thing and gave me the cube, and I promptly hid somewhere removing and attaching the various stickers.
After a while I had gotten pretty good at this cheating and was able to do it in seconds.
Everything went smoothly until one day I made a mistake in attaching an element, and attached it crookedly. Unfortunately, I tended to hide in dark places, and I could not see very well what I was doing, and I came out like a little houdini with an object that physically could not exist, and where a keen eye could see very well that the stickers had just been removed and moved to other positions, and moreover reattached rather badly.
The magic was over. I was discovered, and my mother was very disappointed.
A few months later a friend of the family explained to me how to do the simple permutations to complete the last face, and I learned how to "solve" it the way everyone knows how and where no genius is needed. This story however taught me something: it taught me not to take shortcuts, not to pass off as having skills I don't possess, and to avoid cheating others. It's a story that taught me to work hard, and to always position myself at the lowest point of the Dunning-Krugher curve, always imagining that I don't know much. That's why I have a lot of respect for teams who solve key collision math quizzes like it's a simple problem, like R2R, because they're the equivalent of people who complete the rubick cube in 3 seconds flat in races, and not the guy who used to run and hide to peel and stick crooked stickers.

Sure, we'll put the locked accounts back and clean up this mess you made. In the end if you want products you often just contact support and if you bought a little something and aren't satisfied, they give you something else and give you something anyway. They don't even ask you to return a product you don't like, we certainly won't be the ones to create any problems for you.
Greetings.
......................

Note that, on the other hand, he also sent a serious legal threat to AudioZ Admin.

 

"Note that, on the other hand, he also sent a serious legal threat to AudioZ Admin"

Somebody warn Saint to pack his seagate drives and hide inside an old server where no one will see him.

 

Strange, he acknowledges that he has tremendous respect for the capabilities of teams like R2R, who have incredible mathematical problem solving skills. If he wants R2R to crack his software he better be nice to AudioZ Admin
On a more serious note he wasn't threatening, he was pissed off at the person who uploaded the files and then passed them off as a crack by manually authorizing them on his site. He said "anybody can do that". What impresses him are R2R's incredible mathematical problem solving skills. So the challenge is on, is it?

 

Sampling expensive Hardware from other companies feels a little bit like cheating too..

 

How do you know he didn't sent it to SAiNT in PM???

 

Well seems to me someone is mad at the moment, but do not want to admit it.
I do not get why Nebula is super cheap or the N4 player can use 3rd party libraries with a little upgrade (small fee).

Let's be honest since there are acqua plugins nebula became a way to dip your toes into the world of acustica audio plugins. I mean nebula is nice. But it is a lot more hasle than using acqua. I would use it for 1 library after checking it out TimPs L-Bus. For everything else, I go with an easier to use algo.

But After the experience with L-Bus I am pretty sure at the next sale I am going to purchase Sand.

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2021

Yeah, that post from Giancarlo comes across as passive-aggressive with a side order of interminable, corporate uHe

Spoiler

(Lego / danish)

baloney. He claims R2R are whiz-kid stamp collectors / Rubik's cube enthusiasts or something and contradicts himself as a "nice guy" who cracked Nebula himself; by using mafioso threats. Not a good look for a dev.

Spoiler

A lot of cracking is engineering / psych / logic as much as "maths", which is also used to diminish R2R.

In other news, I think that the only reason Acustica reinstated accounts was because those 140 people who tried the crack represent only about one hundred percent of their customers!

It certainly feels like far less effort than ripping the stickers off a Rubik's cube etcs, but I guess some people get lazier as they age? Or perhaps greedier? Or both?

Spoiler

meow!

 

Thank you for posting that @Olymoon
Very interesting story indeed.

 

So, you're saying that he really just he ran back into the closet and peeled the stickers off anyway.....lol

[I dislike the iLOK model, Arturia's model, or anything that requires online, dongle, or limited number of activations.]

 

Yeah, for me, dongles are literally disgusting. I shudder whenever I see the synchro one, having a red led on all the time burns more fossils and wastes more usb ports than humanity can spare. Fortunately my nephew doesn't make it his mission in life to break every USB port by "playing" with whatever is stuck in it, any more.

I kinda hope that Giancarlo's kid isn't responsible for turning his auth servers off and on, but it would explain a lot. Mainly that Aquarius is absolutely broken af, took hours before I could authorise one (indifferent) plugin.

 

TL;DR
You all seem to know this Acustica soft very well. Can someone pls explain (in simple terms) if I got what happened to OP right..
There is the Nebula (container?) part and the Acqua (more along the standard plugs) part, right? The OP had (legit) licenses of (some) of both. He also installed some non legit Acustica SW. "Acustica Audio" then, by means of some online installer that turns out to be a spyware tool found out about this fact and revoke all OP's licenses.. (..that were reset after OP showed his remorse for his wrongdoing)

Thank you for any explanation. It's helpful to know about a company policies before investing..