i got the whole bundle

 

Urs confesses explicitly (many times) that Tone2's anti piracy is a result of them working together ("crack teams are pissed off enough with us... to info dump"); given how he says that (paraphrase) other devs are surprised at the lengths he will go to, and that he's the expert in cryptography; I would say he's the one leading the supposed "collaborative" effort that gave us all that Tone2 malware / "invitation". At very least, he seems proud to be involved in writing it, and supports it more like a proud parent than collaborator. It's all there in black and white.

I try to be as fair as possible to Urs, but when an expert in cryptography says his intent is "sadistic" and speaks of "exploits" to suspected pirates, there is only one fair, logical conclusion to draw. It is not that it is a sadistic, stressful "invitation"! XD That I got caught up in his AP is prolly irrelevant. Urs sees things in black and white terms: you are either a customer or not. "Fair game" for his measures, or not. On a blacklist or not. That these measures have needed ppl like AiR to expose them means we might never know precisely how / when suspected pirates' machines are exploited by his AP. The fact that Urs says that he relishes running such exploits, and that they are a fair balance in the "war" against suspected pirates is a risk I'm not prepared to take as a consumer. Buyer beware, as a far wiser person than me said.

In conclusion, there are lots of softsynths around nowadays, and I'd argue most of them do a better job in terms of sound, and all (?) do a better job in terms of efficiency than those made by uHe. I guess the former is subjective. But Urs says that he is the expert coder, it seems strange that Legend outperforms a softsynth made with 6x the manpower, and many, many times the budget. Most ppl will notice for themselves how many more CPU cycles (for instance) DIVA uses than Legend. I was joking about bitcoin mining, but after reading that Urs wishes to run "stressful.. exploits" on suspected pirates, now I'm not so sure it's quite as absurd. Anyway, it's up to you whether you think the soundwaves produced by a softsynth are worth your machine being "exploited" or not, and whether or not merely opening a pop-up can be described as a "sadistic", or a "stressful" exploit? Or even that it is an exploit? I won't say it's naive to think so, but I am tempted to.

I certainly didn't attend these meetings, but Urs and Markus certainly put their heads together. Here's what Urs said about his intent: "You should see the twisted expression on my face when I tell fellow developers about my latest sadistic ways..."

 

Last edited: Oct 7, 2021

I haven't used Air stuff very extensively because it's not really my thing, but I'll tell you what I know. From my limited experience, Air instruments seem to have very large, very good preset libraries. So if that's your thing, go nuts. The synths themselves generally sound pretty good too, IMO. Loom is a little weird in that it's got its own sound that's hard to deviate from but whatever.

My only real problem with Air (aside from their nonexistent support) has always been the modulation systems in their synths. Like Loom has this brilliant XY morpher but you literally can't select ANY of the parameters it modulates. There's just sort of a built in one size fits all macro system. That's a sort of a microcosm for the whole philosophy behind their plugins that makes me not so crazy abou them. In Loom only one parameter on each module can be modulated. Or in vacuum you get like... idk.. three or four modulation slots and a limited number of mod destinations that you pick from a menu. Lot of wasted potential because otherwise they're pretty cool synths.

But yeah, that's my take on it. Cool synths to grab a preset and go. Good librarys. Decent sound. Questionable design choices.

To be fair, I have similar issues with u-he's Repro plugins, but they sound so good that I'm willing to forgive it and use a workaround or whatever.

 

Anyway, apologies in arrears for that wall-of-text hobby horse / mania =). I was just surprised when loads of ppl at the sister site never knew about Tone2, recently. I guess it's even less common knowledge that uHe are tied up with it, too. Although I was far more shocked to find that calling urself Donald Trump caused someone's dick to grow by a measurable amount! XD

I honestly thought Urs was Danish, the amount he goes on about Legos & pastry etcs =) I had no idea that NI was anything other than Mortal Kontakt style Americans, although it does (might?) explain a lot about that weird K fetish now :D

 

Lol,
i had to replace my first name and serial number by something else, the first thing that came to my mind was the most powerful man in the planet that does everything he wants (...after the elites surrounding him have told him exactly what he is allowed to say, go, do, etc etc). Really powerful man, in deed

About the 2cm growth. ..it was unexpected! Good things happen to those who go legit, i guess

 

I got mine last night! I mulled it over so much before I pulled the plug. But after reading all the comments, and researching these plugins for a long time I am glad I listened to to my own gut! These Plugins are truly incredible and to me Analog as best as analog can be and worthy
of 3 times the price.

I tried it out on my MacBook Pro 2013 and it game me no issues...even Diva in Devine mode with Satin, Color copy and twang on the inserts.
Wow! Is all I can say.

All the complaints hardly even seem worthy after staying up all night playing with this bundle of joy.

I hope the ones on the fence got this great deal!

 

As I said, the collaborative effort started years after the "Tone2 malware" whatever that was.

 

Last edited: Feb 18, 2019

I strongly disagree with that. Diva doesn't use every kind of synthesis, only VA. And most of where programming gets interesting is in the architecture, the routing and modulation. For what it is, a high-end VA workhorse, it seems really good. But no synth should need to be everything to everyone, that kitchen-sink approach gets unwieldy.

 

GOOD GRIEF, D00D... That's not just Urs, that's like 99% of software companies. Just because what he said rubbed you the wrong way, doesn't really make his opinions or practices special. They are really commonplace. The only logical conclusion is that I am a 50-foot termite named Napoleon and everybody else is a sentient Jell-O sculpture made by aliens. But only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

 

A good thing with diva, I'm my opinion, is the fact that the room for improvement is almost unlimited.
With it's modular structure, all uhe need to do is adding 1 or 2 oscillator types, 1 or 2 additional filters, 1 or 2 extra effects...+ 200 or 300 new presets that use those new modules. .. and there they have it, their diva 2.0 is ready.
There are hundreds of different hardware analog synths, with different filters... with different oscillators....
... what sounds could diva make, if we can select,say, a buchla module... or some Sem filters... or a dx7 module... it could be crazy.

So the big question is, which new modules will diva 2.0 get... also, some stuff being made for zebra, might as well end up in diva...
how cool is that...

 

Agreed, though it is a bit of a "yes" and "no" situation.

I think we have been through a "golden age" of piracy - the "Wild West" age of the internet is coming to an end. The greatest thing about it (piracy) is that millions upon millions of relatively poor folk can get their hands on the capital previously denied them - the tools of the trade. This will likely spawn an explosion of new talent, from the bottom, because it has democratised (socialised) digital production (in audio, in video, in programming, in design, in....whatever).

This is undeniably true yet orthodoxy (and self-interest) prevents its proper cultural acknowledgement. No matter - because it is inescapably real. It has already happened.

OTOH, this can only work if people that can pay, do pay. If there isn't sufficient income for those that are developing all these tools then those tools will not be made......at least not so quickly, not in such variety and multitude.

Piracy of "tools" (and education) is undeniably a good thing - so long as it does not undermine the legitimate market (which is the actual source of the product). If everyone pirates then there will be nothing to pirate. That's obvious?

 

have you had any fun with it? was it what you expected?

 

On the other hand, we can't really compare apples to oranges.
If we take the company 1, who must have a store, warehouse, employees, must buy raw material, like wood or steel, must design and build the object, store several copies in the warehouse, must find new customers, must spend a ton on advertising, must not waste material, by breaking something, must pay a ton of cash to export stuff, must hire someone to handle all the vat stuff, employees taxes and fees, must have several cars/trucks to deliver their stuff, must have drivers ready to run hundreds, or thousands of miles/km, etc etc.

And we have the company 2, 1 or 2 guys, that coded a few plug-ins, re-used 95% of the code that is available for free, all theorems, formulae, etc, oscillators, filters, pretty much everything has already been invented, and is known by everybody, they code those plug-ins, create a PayPal account, setup a nice webstore with one of the hundreds free solutions, create a little adwords campaign at google, with a budget of 50 or 100 bucks max per week, create some free ads on many music forums, uploads their plug-ins, set their price, and 5 minutes later, a guy located 12'000 miles/km away, order their $129 plugin, and 3 seconds later, the money is available in thepaypal account. If there are a few bugs, they might only fix them in an update, 3 or 4 months later.


now, let's say we steal a chair and a table from company 1, and we download the plug-in from company 1, from a warez website or torrent.


can we agree on saying both can called a theft ? More or less. is it the same, for both companies , impact on sales, etc etc ?
i don't think so.

That's why when a uhe guy says something like , if there are 5'000 uhe plug-ins being used, we want to get the money from 5'000 sales, not 4998, not 4999, but 5'000 ! We want ALL the money.

We can't compare both things!
That's why when these companies don't understand how lucky they are, to have such tool as internet, to reach the entire planet, and sell 100 times the same item, for 0 extra cost, all that while sipping a nice beer, and they are ready to persecute a 14yo guy from a '3rd world' country, sue him and even put a bullet on his head, just because the kid hasn't paid the 150 euros for the plug-in, that mentality makes me sick...but maybe that's just me...

 

You did say that. But you also said: "there's enough public record of openly fought out fewds between Tone2 and u-he, there's no way they'd ever worked together on copy protection". I'm prolly quoting you out of context, however.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter what you or I say. Since there is someone with greater knowledge and insight than both of us. When Urs was talking about the info dump that AiR famously did on Tone2: "crack teams are pissed off enough with us... to info dump" and that "we put our heads together" (to code common AP measures). Both of these quotes let slip that he indeed helped to create the malware. (He did not say "we'll put..".) The first quote, in fact, directly connects him to Tone2's malware. The collaboration started well before the AiR exposé of Tone2 - from the horse's mouth.

It might be worth having a refresher course on what effects the Tone2 malware had. Interesting to note how much blacklisting and obsfucation is a feature. I think that calls to (for instance) shut down suspected pirates' PCs might count as the "stress" Urs seems so proud of. Amongst other things.

 

That's not what we are talking about, is it? I don't think many software developers want to shoot 14 year olds for downloading their plugin. :D

I did raise the idea that there is a public and private side to all of it - from developers and the (digital) 'industry'. They cannot say - or allow it to be known - that they don't care (much) if (a few) people pirate their stuff. They know it happens. Nevertheless, intellectual property holders have their legitimate "rights", as things stand: they do need to be paid. Those are "da rulez". If they can't make money to get food and stuff - by developing audio plugins - then they will do something else which is more likely to get them food and stuff. Right? And it's their decision to take: Uhe didn't have to make Diva.

Piracy has a lot of unacknowledged benefits but it can't be the basis of an economy. About a decade ago whenever I would look something up in Google it would spam Warez and it was (a little) difficult to find legit sources to buy anything. That's changed, seemingly. It's good, it's bad. [I think a "golden age" (of piracy) is coming to an end. For good or ill]

 

As it was mentioned earlier - Vacuum Pro on sale again - only £12 (Usually £100)


https://www.pluginboutique.com/products/1558

Certainly worth it, imo.



---------



Also Air's Hybrid 3 is also on sale - £12 (Usually £100)

https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/1545-Hybrid-3

 

In the beginning of this thread, it was all about sound right? Was the 270$ bundle worth it synth quality wise?
Just before diving deeply into the political arena...
BTW i also decided to buy the whole bundle at tone2 as these synths fit perfectly to my type of music. And each time they release a soundset, they send it to me. Free of charge. So my bundle price keep lowering down with more products added. Never had a problem on my system. But i'm legit so that's the minimum to ask for right?
In my computer, I can own U-He, Tone2 and many others too without having to "choose" one over the other...
I work in video so i have only a few hours left per day to make music. I prefer to use presets 99% of the time and tweak them. I have no time to start from scratch like i used to on my jupiter 8. So i load anyone of my synths and here i go. MAKING MUSIC.

And guess what, none of my synths fight or argue like that. They behave.They're all "competitor synth friendly"

 

Liar. I was using Tone2 Gladiator and Diva together in the same project, and when I ducked over to switch something in my patch bay the Gladiator was raping that poor girl. I had to shut down the computer because the DAW was frozen in fright and so I was helpless to pry him off of her. Now I have a bunch of little Divettes and Divos running around my screen that completely get in the way of my work flow, and they take up valuable CPU recources that impact my work. You're such a sack of balls!

#me too

 

Last edited: Mar 3, 2019

I heard differently... Diva was consenting to everything at every step... A SJW on the late aren't we?

 

Even so, you're still a sack o'balls.