i'm gonna buy Recabinet just as soon as Shane starts offering a free Mesa 4x12 cab with it,
Awesome! Where do I sign up? LOL
I hope my post isn't misunderstood. If everyone adopted a sense of personal responsibility for supporting the creators of the products you use, then we wouldn't be in the present crisis situation.
Obviously, you can't convince everyone to grow a conscience about this. Nobody is ever positively motivated to action by a "guilt trip." My hope is that perhaps, over time, a good portion,
maybe even a majority of people will realize the simple necessity that for quality digital products to exist, nobody can expect them to be free. In other words - while the actual intangible bytes of data themselves are inherently valueless by way of infinite reproducibility - the tangible, physical
service rendered in terms of creating these products through many man-years of R&D is of exponentially
massive value.
Take the monetary support system out from under the creators of these products - and you end up with the strange irony that quality digital products will become scarce, and therefore truly valuable once again. What you're really paying for when you buy a product like Waves, Cubase, Pro Tools, and even something much smaller in scope like Recabinet is a
service, a commitment to quality that is simply not possible without financial support.
On another note, my point about the dongle issue wasn't that dongles are bad, it's just that they're a boring necessity, and a possible reminder of the "guilt trip" of current anti-piracy rhetoric. My point was that other types of hardware tie-ins make customers happy. What Line 6 has done with Pod Farm, in terms of the licensing scheme, is ingenious - reward the people who already have Pod-compatible hardware, and charge extra for people who just want the iLok version. That is exactly the type of integration I think we'll see more of, and it's great.
