Agreed. All warez must be freely available to all.

Who is really going to know if you used warez to produce whatever it is you produce unless you blab it to everyone?

 

The NFO admits what has been written here from time to time.
a) The scene is in steep decline which is going to be even steeper before it (hopefully) recovers (remaining to see to what extent)
b) The scene is outgunned by devs

The a. is obvious to everyone even from the fact that the sister site changes the page concerning the Software/Win almost weekly (APU Loudness releases included).
The b. is logical and inevitable since NO team in the scene has time, money and human resources in their favor to challenge the software houses. The best days of the scene are behind us I'm afraid!

The only hope for the scene to survive is (many) new guns to enter and join the party. Otherwise the scene is doomed...

Personally in the past couple of years I've purchased serious stuff from serious plugin companies waiting each time for their very hot deals to show (and even freebies a few times) while feeling grateful for the free stuff provided all these years from the community but predicting that we've reached a saturation point.

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2025

the general consensus is that audioutopia was members from other groups just using that name as a one off to try to avoid negative attention that might come from cracking so many high profile things at the same time. as it's not a consistent group, they're not going to show up much in conversations about groups

 

I have no words to actually speak how grateful I am for those guys, like, manny of the key changing aspects of production under hip-hop specially between the producers I've been working with for the last 7 years were possible because of R2R insane releases, no idea where those people would be at without 'em. Reverse 2 Revolutionize is 4 real

 

Agreed and that makes perfect sense. I like how they say support the good developer which says to me that if you make money from your music and what they've done, give something back to the dev for their efforts, because what they've edited wouldn't be in existence without them.

 

Honestly, I do not think the intent of a very good inquisitive hacker is to challenge anyone other than other hackers who aren't removing the protection properly and a few say that clearly.
Some of them do it because some developers say their protection cannot be cracked. That's like waving a red flag at a bull. Others just do it like some who attempted to climb Mt. Everest, because it's there.
Some also like the way something works and want to see how it is done. I do not see them as competing at all. If they were, wouldn't they be selling what they hack or hacking it then releasing a similar product of their own in competition? Then they would be challenging them.

Several of us buy as well and yes, some of the deals are great. The economy worldwide with people being more discerning with what they spend their money on plays a huge part in the pricing of devs products' being lowered.
The saturation point is all on the devs not on the hackers and I agree there aren't enough hackers to crack everything out there because the devs have saturated the market, not the hackers. So they pick and choose.

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2025

You could have copied most of this post from the late 90s. After that, perhaps a short discussion of how Linux is finally ready for prime time pro audio uses. And pick any time period between then and now. Nothing they put in that info is doom and gloom, unless you really need every .1 update release of stuff a developer would normally just call "legacy" software.

 

Haven't heard that before but nevertheless AudioUTOPIA didn't disappear overnight.

 

There was no Logic on Atari, as far as I know; only Creator and Notator, by C-Lab. Emagic Logic came much later. (I could be wrong, though)

I used to have Creator, cracked. It was basically a tracker-style sequencer. It had a certain charm.
Notator was pretty much the same, but it also had scoring capability which made it very desirable at the time, so innovative. I never found a cracked version of it, so you may be right.

The point I was attempting to make is that music software cracking teams actually do go back very far, all the way to the times of Atari. The warez scene in general goes back even further, to the time of Commodore and Spectrum. We used to order these photocopied catalogs of cracked software via newspaper ads and then have the software delivered by mail, it was crazy times. On cassettes or cartridges.

I always thought how impressive it was to crack something like Cubase on Atari (which was not the most user friendly OS to begin with, let alone the shitty and expensive peripheral hardware you needed to pull it off), without all the fancy cracker tools people have these days. Even then, Cubase had a dongle. It was a big ass, ugly looking black piece of shit that everyone hated. Cracking *that*, on a fucking Atari, must've been quite a challenge.
With that said, even with the best sotware tools needed to crack things today, it's still not an easy task. You have to have good skills, a lot of time, patience and passion in you to endure various hurdles and eventually get there. It can be a tedious and very frustrating process, so having respect towards the great people that do this for us is the least that we can do.
It's a long legacy of teams who busted their ass throughout the last number of decades to deliver us the goodies to have fun with. Cracked tools have influenced the world of music more than many are ready to admit.
Hits were made with cracked Atari Cubase.
Most of the rave scene in the '90s too.
The music we all love and feel nostalgic about, in large part, was done thanks to our beloved teams. We are blessed to still have R2R and all the other teams sacrificing their free time for us.
Sure, the scene rarely admits they do it for the people, but we all know they do.

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2025

@ Somnambulist
Teams hack for one reason and one reason only! To crack and break challenging protection schemes that are thought almost unbreakable every time usually implemented to highly regarded software (don't forget video and photo editing software and videogames as well).

This has led to protection code becoming bigger in size than the protected software itself and many times than not making it slower and unresponsive for a few ms which is just enough time to distract you and start cursing.

When something good is finally cracked they send it publicly so everyone knows that it was finally hacked or if it's something truly special and high profile and real challenging to crack distributing it through their inner circles for security or financial reasons.

 

That's the official narrative, yes. They do it for the technical challenge. However, as far as I know, R2R is the first major team that broke away from that tradition. They started as Peaceout, then became Assign, adopting the slogan 'all the tools for all the creators' - or something along those lines - which made it clear that their focus was on serving musicians. When Peaceout evolved into Assign, they still weren’t recognized as a legitimate scene player but were instead seen as a P2P-level cracker. This legacy is still reflected in the R2R name, which pays homage to their origins in the P2P world before transitioning into a respected scene entity.

I could be mistaken in my interpretation, but to me, R2R feels like the first audio scene team that didn’t strictly adhere to the idea of cracking solely for the challenge. If other scene teams were truly only in it for the technical aspect, their releases would likely have remained internal or confined to closed underground communities, rather than being made publicly accessible as they are now.

 

There was a world before the invention of the internet and a world after the invention of the internet. The idea of the internet was to create knowledge and prosperity for all.

The internet created great profits for the few, but since the poorer population cannot afford software and thus cannot participate in technological progress, crackers/hackers were given a new task to regulate the imbalance between rich and poor.

Thanks to the work of R2R, for example, poorer people can also make music. If poorer people were given more money, they could afford software. If Bill Gates shared his wealth with the poorer, which he doesn't, people would have enough money to pay for software.

So the internet and illegal software contribute to a balance. We have the Chaos Computer Club, which hacks things to identify vulnerabilities and then makes them more secure. They even advise our government on making their systems more secure.

 

I hope, you opted out of the ePa, Genosse.

 

AudioUTOPiA continues to be after all these years a legendary Team and very dear to all of us users who are grateful to them. They brought something stratospheric to our homes, so precious that not even R2R could match in the iLok field. Pro Tools HD, Soundtoys, McDSP. All their releases were legendary. For me R2R and AudioUTOPiA are the cornerstone and the pinnacle of modern warez (2016-today)

 

While I never completely trust Wikipedia, here's the approximate history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emagic

 

Nope, Radium were first, then H20, Zone, AiR, O2 .... I think R2R (starting with Peace-Out then Assign) are probably the group that lasted the longest and released the most (for audio related stuff, of course).
It was not "late 80s" btw, first Radium release was july 23 1997. On PC "audio" really started around 1996 with Fruity, Rebirth338, CoolEdit, SoundForge. Before that Cubase was midi only.
I used to compose with the first Adlib soundcard for PC in 1987 using Visual Composer on DOS, but it was much a FM synth chip on a card, not really "audio".
Audio was more mainstream on Amiga with Soundtrackers at that time (1985-1988), my first hardware sampler was an UK "A.M.A.S." for Amiga, 8bits 25khz ... with midi i/o !

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2025

r2r is jealous ?

 

I can well understand this need to restructure. Above all, because different ways of acting always crystallize in larger teams without central control.
Nevertheless, I hope that this does not mean the slow departure of our friends from R2R. In terms of quality, they are simply in a class of their own.
Regardless of this: Thank you R2R! For the many years of first-class long-term trial software

 

The only way anyone will know is if they directly say that officially and publicly. Somehow, I do not imagine they would, and sensibly not.

Thanks for the timeline - I figure we were both around the same time... I had an ATARI 1024STE with a then massive 20mb Hard drive and a whopping 4mb of RAM - THEN - I stuck with ATARI until it was no longer viable and they shot themselves in the foot with the Falcon.
There were a pile of crackers before any of the PC audio too but what you have said the way you have said it sounds right and there was a lot of warez then from hackers not even listed. The number of hackers for ATARI and AMIGA were ridiculous, more from memory than on PC. Some of them probably transitioned into some of the groups on PC mentioned,

 

Last edited: Mar 24, 2025

Patience is a virtue, no more to say!