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The DAW Reaper also uses a similar approach and for that alone I would highly recommend anyone interested in audio production give it a try. Everyone else in t

The DAW Reaper also uses a similar approach and for that alone I would highly recommend anyone interested in audio production give it a try. Everyone else in the industry uses online activation. Whenever they take those servers down you lose your ability to install and use the software you bought. With programs like WinRar and Reaper, even if the company producing it disappears tomorrow and takes all their servers with them, you can continue to make full use of the software you bought in 'free trial' mode and that is huge.

mystifyingpoi 1y ago
Reaper does it really well. It's just a minor nag ("hey, you used Reaper for xx:xx hours, would you consider paying?") and a 5-second wait on startup (not on every startup even, I think on every system reboot or something).
- hdjrudni 1y ago
  KeepassXC nags me once a year to donate on the dude's birthday. DDU, WizTree, and Sublime also nag. And ShareX. I've donated to most of them now that I'm not broke. I only hope that other users do too so that the creators can be nicely compensated for their efforts.
  - arcastroe 1y ago
    I kinda like sublime's approach. It only asks when I repeatedly spam ctrl+s to save the file. But never on the first save. Only when I spam it five or so times. I like to think the developer specifically targetted this "redundant consecutive save" behavior knowing many users do this. But it's probably more like "every X saves, only after Y time period since last nag", which only coincidentally triggers for me when I spam the save shortcut
3036e4 1y ago
The Renoise DAW does that as well, except for two or three features that are disabled in the trial version (nothing too vital or that could not be worked around by anyone interested in not paying iirc). Just an offline serial number to unlock, good for an entire major version of upgrades (some 10+ years in practice, it seems). Otherwise, at least 5+ years ago when I kept up with this, music software without annoying drm was extremely rare, seemingly worse than any other type of software I encountered, yet almost everyone (unsurprisingly) seems to use pirated versions. A sad side-effect is that cheaper alternatives like Reaper or Reason (or any free software) are not as widespread as you would expect, since most prefer to just use a pirated $2000+ application.
squigz 1y ago
> Everyone else in the industry uses online activation. Whenever they take those servers down you lose your ability to install and use the software you bought. Pirates manage to work around this just fine, for a lot of programs.

mystifyingpoi 1y ago

Reaper does it really well. It's just a minor nag ("hey, you used Reaper for xx:xx hours, would you consider paying?") and a 5-second wait on startup (not on every startup even, I think on every system reboot or something).

hdjrudni 1y ago
KeepassXC nags me once a year to donate on the dude's birthday. DDU, WizTree, and Sublime also nag. And ShareX. I've donated to most of them now that I'm not broke. I only hope that other users do too so that the creators can be nicely compensated for their efforts.
- arcastroe 1y ago
  I kinda like sublime's approach. It only asks when I repeatedly spam ctrl+s to save the file. But never on the first save. Only when I spam it five or so times. I like to think the developer specifically targetted this "redundant consecutive save" behavior knowing many users do this. But it's probably more like "every X saves, only after Y time period since last nag", which only coincidentally triggers for me when I spam the save shortcut

3036e4 1y ago

The Renoise DAW does that as well, except for two or three features that are disabled in the trial version (nothing too vital or that could not be worked around by anyone interested in not paying iirc). Just an offline serial number to unlock, good for an entire major version of upgrades (some 10+ years in practice, it seems). Otherwise, at least 5+ years ago when I kept up with this, music software without annoying drm was extremely rare, seemingly worse than any other type of software I encountered, yet almost everyone (unsurprisingly) seems to use pirated versions. A sad side-effect is that cheaper alternatives like Reaper or Reason (or any free software) are not as widespread as you would expect, since most prefer to just use a pirated $2000+ application.

squigz 1y ago

> Everyone else in the industry uses online activation. Whenever they take those servers down you lose your ability to install and use the software you bought. Pirates manage to work around this just fine, for a lot of programs.