Music Software, Open Source, and Being Vice-Grip Held By the Cojones

[Warning: on my Open Source high horse from a recent viewing of Revolution OS, but this lengthy post is worth reading if you’re interested in music software, OSS, software piracy, and other such matters.]

Music software companies complain about piracy quite loudly, and rightly so: their expensive bits and bytes are some of the most sought-after amongst the pirate communities online. Krackers go to great lengths to circumvent the often complex copy protection measures on audio software, and warez couriers and crews dealing in such software are hailed and renowned (Radium being perhaps the best known and loved of audio warez crews). It’s a hard knock life for audio software developers. Why?

Their software is costly to develop, not unlike building a quality instrument. That high development cost dictates a high market price to recoup development expenses and nab some profit on top. Professional studios and musicians are willing to pay this high market price, but semi-pro and bedroom musicians either can’t afford these premiums or refuse to pay them. The instrument analogy holds consistent in this case: is an amateur pianist going to be able to afford a Steinway, or save every dollar towards one? Not likely. But whereas that amateur pianist can’t go steal a concert piano from her local symphony, she can easily steal expensive sampling software with a well-recorded piano.

Are audio software companies making enough from their paying customers that they can afford losses to piracy (free riders, essentially, as the developer pays nothing per pirated copy of their software)? It’s impossible to quantify, but you’ll happily be quoted figures into the millions if you ask a software developer. The truth, as in most situations, is probably somewhere in the middle: the companies are obviously making enough to get by and keep making software, but they could be making more in a piracy-free world.

This is nothing new, and the world of audio software piracy differs little from the rest of the piracy universe. But a unique situation comes up over and over again in audio software, one that I believe is a product of the passionate nature of musicians and the expense and specialization of the software they use (and pirate).
The stages of this situation go something like this:

1. Software company develops eminently desirable software that everyone wants.
2. People who can afford it pay for it, and help further the hype and reviewers’ cries of “you’ve gotta have this!”
3. Six months pass and now a large portion of users, legitimate and otherwise, are complaining of bugs and incompatibilities. Cries of “update, update!” replace the winning reviews.
4. Six more months pass. No update. Forums for this software are full of vitriol.
5. A couple more months pass and an update is finally announced but the developer wants to charge a handsome sum for it. Users react with mutinous threats to pirate the bejeezus out of this new version whenever it’s released.
6. Update is released. Diehards pay, but some previously legitimate users join the pirate camp.
7. Rinse and repeat, realizing that every time through this sordid cycle probably yields more pirates than new dedicated customers.

You can observe stage 5 right now on the FinalScratch message board. This combination software/hardware bridge between digital audio and vinyl has been near-broken on the software end since the release of Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” months ago. I just use FinalScratch for my bedroom DJ exploits, but serious club DJs have been tearing their hair out as the $500 investment they now depend on for their sites has gone crazy on their otherwise stable Macs. Now a new version of Final Scratch designed to fix these problems has been announced, but not without the nasty price tag of $50 for a direct download or $70 for a CD. Threats of piracy upon release abound, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one looking to bail out of my FS investment before I get slapped with yet another expense.

This isn’t the first time the company who develops the software end of Final Scratch, Native Instruments, has pulled these sort of shenanigans. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find an application in their product lineup that hasn’t at some point another been a point of much anger between developer and users. Their Reaktor audio design software was a battling point when users waited for literally years for the much-needed version 4, and their software-only digital DJ solution Traktor DJ Studio has been plagued by problems and crawling update schedules as well. But once you’ve shelled out for this software you’re in a bind: you use it, you like it, maybe you even need it, and you know they’ve got you by the balls.

So where does open source fit into all this? As a die-hard OSS kid I can’t help but feel like I’d be getting my money’s worth for that $500 investment if I got the source code to FS as well and could get together with other users to fix the software on our time. If you play an instrument, imagine not being able to tune your own piano, replace a guitar string, or swap mouthpieces on your horn and you’ve got a good idea of the frustration I share with users of audio software above and beyond just FinalScratch. As much as I love Ableton Live and feel that Ableton is a better corporate citizen than most in the audio software business, there have been plenty of times when myself and others have dreamed of the possibilities of an open Live (Linux ports! We’ll put in Audio Unit support ourselves! We’ll enable pre-listening on multiple output devices, damn the consequences and latency!)

I don’t see the audio software economy changing, however. It would be an enormous leap of faith for a company like Native Instruments or Ableton to “go open.” And, with respect to their programmers, they do turn out some impressive code. One might assume that given the difficulty of writing audio software that there aren’t enough developers willing or able to work on open source music software.

A number of projects out there are proving that assumption incorrect, foremost the Audacity waveform editor, rapidly rivaling its costly commercial competition. Nothing open has quite matched Traktor DJ Studio on the virtual DJ front, but DeKstasy is already a solid, straightforward, and more Mac-like alternative to Traktor’s over-designed interface and miserable music library implementation. I’ve used it before and was less than thrilled, but I intend to try the updated DeKstasy for my radio show this coming semester (more on that in another post).

There’s plenty more open audio software out there. My hope is that as OSS music applications mature they put pressure on commercial music software developers to do better by their customers. I believe open source software and proprietary software can coexist. I don’t mind paying for that Steinway if I get free regular tuning and maybe access to a sheet music database, but if all you’re selling is an expensive and maintenance-demanding piano I’m going to check out my alternatives.