Hi! Just noticed my MIDI generator plugin, Bassliner, is up as a request on the sister site. Let me tell you a few things. - I grew up believing that this interesting scene, mainly on the teams' side, operate on some ethical standards and a philosophy around why they crack music software. Such as: Heavily bloated security frameworks that cost a lot of power and storage for the buyer. Overly expensive price tags justified by shady claims re what the plugin does. Inability to try before buying. Devs being arrogant and unhelpful towards users, using suspicious data farming, and so on. - I want to say proudly that my licensing system is about a couple lines of code. The plugin costs €24 despite working on it for 6 years as part of my PhD, and I plan to run many more sales as people seem to always wait for them. There's a free-forever demo, and can provide trial licenses on request. My support is practically instant during working hours, or even at 4AM on a Saturday. Of course I'm not trying to justify why you shouldn't try cracking, but I'm just saying, because there is no ethical justification whatsoever to request cracking this. - Most importantly, I want you all here to understand that any new independent plugin business needs to battle inside an insanely oversaturated market, that recently became even worse due to an influx of infinite AI slop plugins. And no thanks, trying to hack our servers wouldn't be exactly helpful for our market awareness and growth. The project has attention already because I spent a lifetime studying melodicity and made something sick, it doesn't need sneaky ahh tricks that would potentially disrupt legit buyers and waste time that would've gone into development. Finally, because this forum is not like the two "official" ones, I'd like to be a little more direct regarding the topic: 1) The generator code is in a programming language that cannot exist as a plugin. Any bassline you "heart" is saved in your computer and is accessible forever, and every feature except live generation is also available offline. 2) When we say "we keep track of generation activity", it really is just the settings of the plugin buttons when you send a generation request, pattern info, time-logged and account-logged. How do you think the "create similar" or the "pool" feature could operate if you don't send that info? Some comments online act like we log your name or collect your childhood photos. They're dripping toxicity for a plugin that collects the state of its buttons for its features, while they literally have their phones record every sound they make 24/7 to throw them related ads. I would honestly love it if someone can explain what's the matter with this. Thanks for your time.
I looked and if there was any toxicity in comments there, they seem to have already been cleaned up by the moderator. Some people, you will notice, will not buy something with online-only activations or server communications for authentication, no matter what you do. Their option is to not buy the plugin just like it is, to not buy anything with iLok requirements. A vast majority of the complaining you will hear will be about things that do not assist in making shared copies easier, like offline activation methods. People will either buy it or they will not. Or it will get shared anyway. Worrying about communication from your little plugin with some web server beyond that is tinfoil hat time, or learning how to setup a simple firewall.
