If there's such a thing as a backhanded insult, I guess this post is it,
because my wife and I feel Absynth is compelling enough to -try- to use even
with the hassles we're going through to do so. Nevertheless, be warned!

First, we tried out the Absynth 3 demo from a magazine on our G5 OS X Panther,
Logic Express, and Pro Tools. The stand-alone worked, and the AU worked from
Logic, but when trying to start Pro Tools, the Absynth plug-in said the demo
period had expired (this was only about 20 minutes later?) and quit, taking
Pro Tools with it, so we could not run Pro Tools at all.

I tried to get demo support on the Web site, but the account setup wouldn't
work following their instructions. I spent 20 minutes finding a link to an
e-mail address somewhere on the Web site so I could tell -someone- at NI about
our problem.

I didn't get a reply back quickly, and Pro Tools was broken, so I had to
figure out how to remove the RTAS plug-in. None of the obvious stuff worked.
I finally had to just search the drive for anything related to abynth and
finally found something 6 levels deep in an unexpected area under libraries,
the deletion of which got Pro Tools to work again.

Several days later, I got e-mail back from NI with instructions on how to
remove the RTAS plug-in. Their instructions were roughly the first thing I
had tried on my own that had not worked. Also, they did not address my
additional points about the Demo support not working or what they could say to
assure me I wouldn't have Pro Tools crippled again in the future by installing
NI demos. I sent them another e-mail reminding them that I had 2 other
concerns, and they finally did send me e-mail back that the Demo support was
fixed, but never said anything more about my concerns with the erroneous demo
expiration message and crashing of Pro Tools.

In spite of all those experiences, my wife decided Absynth was a useful enough
creative tool that we should go ahead and buy it, and hope for the best.
After all, we're going to do a real authorization, so demo license issues
should not be a problem - right? We did that, installed it, went through the
lengthy registration and authorization process, and the license tool says
everything's fine. The stand-alone works, and the AU works (It didn't work
with Logic 7.0.1 right away - I had to search the support site and find the
download to make it work). Next - cross our fingers...

Doh! Again, when we try to run Pro Tools, we get a message saying the demo
period for Absynth has expired (remember, we're now using a fully licensed and
authorized copy), and Pro Tools again crashes. Yet again, Pro Tools is broken
until we can get the problem solved or remove Absynth, but this time we've
actually spent money.

Alright - at least this time we're real customers, have our Web account set up
properly, we can search the support database, and we can ask for help.
Unfortunately, the support database doesn't mention the issue we're having,
and after filling out the support request form, it has now been over 48 hours
with nothing but the automatic acknowledgement response, and being still
unable to use Pro Tools on our system at all. If we have no response
tomorrow, I'll once again have to try to forcibly rip the guts of Absynth out
of my Mac by until NI can respond to us with a solution to the licensing
problem.

I'll let you all know how this pans out.

On Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:35:54 -0700, Steve Jorgensen
wrote:

If there's such a thing as a backhanded insult, I guess this post is it,
because my wife and I feel Absynth is compelling enough to -try- to use even
with the hassles we're going through to do so. Nevertheless, be warned!

....

I still have not heard back from NI - damn them, but I did get my problem
solved. Somehow, installing Absynth must have magically recreated something I
deleted when fixing the problem with the Demo version install previously,
because when I searched the hard drive again and deleted everything with
"Absynth Demo" in the file name, the problem was solved. I can use PT again.

That's twice now I've had to solve the problem on my own because their
software made my copy of Pro Tools software fail to run, I couldn't wait long
enough for the eventual reply from technical support.