Ya, I compressed the contents of the USB drive and uploaded it for people to leech. There are people who live outside the USA who have to wait a long time for their shipment to arrive, and most people won't drop cash on a new product they've never even tried.
They have nasty anti-piracy software that installs a kernel driver and actively attacks debugging tools to try and prevent cracking. It has a trial period, so what I was trying to distribute is nothing more than a Beat Thang Virtual trial. But they freaked out.
I don't even have a serial. After paying, you wait days to receive what you could've downloaded in minutes. Then you have to install that anti-piracy stuff so it can fingerprint your PC. After you email them the fingerprint, you wait for a reply with your activation file.
They don't say anything about what you do if you change your hardware configuration. They don't tell you about all the horror stories and known problems the anti-piracy system has caused people in the past. There is a boycott of that system in place.
I've been following this thing since January, even sticking up for these guys when the public opinion was against them. I wanted the hardware so we could hack it and bypass Akai forever since their OS is buggy garbage. I definitely was on their side.
But I still haven't installed the Virtual, despite it sitting here for 4 days now. I have principles, and they conflict with their severe paranoia over intellectual property control. I paid a grand, and yet they want me to interlock my PC with them to run it.
I don't want to risk my multimedia workstation's integrity with a kernel driver that does nothing but treat me like a potential criminal, and I don't want to break my own principles by going along with something I believe to be a step in the wrong direction.
Beat Thang Virtual will be cracked*. It is guaranteed. This anti-piracy system has been bypassed many times in the past because it is used by many audio plugins. They don't seem to realize that and are going overboard on the intellectual property warfare.
Did you read the license? You can't even use the sounds without attribution credit to the Beat Kangz. It's like some scheme to try and market their music group. If no one knows who you are, sell a sampler and force people to advertise your name.
I still want to see this product succeed, but the Kangz are making that difficult. Hopefully there aren't too many other decisions that were made with the same poor judgment as some of these we see with the Virtual. Who knows though with all the secrecy.
Rather than spend all their time and money on all the hyped marketing with, "Yo yo yo were real independent company from the street yall power to the people **** akai lets battle CEO vs CEO!" maybe they could've been a little more real with basic facts.
I'm collecting whatever little data I find on the many sites they market on and publishing it on my site as a way to cut through the fluff and getting to the bone. But that pissed them off too apparently, as they wanted ALL references removed.
I'm not a hater or a fan. I'm just interested in the tools.
* No, I didn't say I was going to make and distribute the crack, just like I didn't say that on KVR.
