Song Protection

Ideas & suggestions
21

When I say protected, I mean protected. If that means a restriction, that’s a sideeffect. I’d not be restricting users from being creative with the stuff I sold them. They’d be restricted from being creative with stuff, that’s intellectual property and wasn’t part of the deal. With your attitude any software had to be open source software, because people might also be creative with routines and subroutines of software, for their own use. Is Renoise sold as open source? Why is it not? Because a coders work is better work than a musician’s or producer’s work?

Sorry, but your argumentation is pointless.

22

It gives me another idea that I find better than the previous one (ability to protect songs contents from modifications).

Let’s see Renoise as a “sampler” with multi-layered instruments, and a few built-in native DSP procesings (the common filter envelopes).

What about the ability to convert a multi-layered XRNI instrument into a Sampler-type VSTi instrument ? Imagine that Renoise could export VSTis.

Imagine, the produced VSTi soundbanks could be strongly encrypted for the distribution, and decrypted on the fly by the VSTi sampler.

And imagine that those produced VSTis could be visually customized and sold.

What do you think about it ?

23

People should rather make videos to teach things than building upon protection schemes that are only destructive by nature. “Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”.

24

But when we’re talking about business, the attitude is not “Make the world a better place.”. The attitude is “Earn money.”. That’s what you work and invest time for. How to sell fish to customers, you taught to catch their own fish?

Protective schemes aren’t really destructive. They are protective. :) Protecting content doesn’t destroy anything at all. It makes sure the content is used for the purpose only, that was part of the deal.

When buying a car, you usually don’t try to request its construction plans, engineering studies, case studies, prototypes and patents at the automobile manufacturer, do you? You bought a car to drive and you got a car. Period. Why does anyone seriously think, it has to be different with content for a special purpose? When I offer an instrument and you decide to buy it, then you might play the hell out of it and everyone would be fine. But please don’t come up with the serious request for the right to be shown how it works, only because you bought it to play. That’s complete nonsense. Your car dealer / manufacturer would have a good laugh, when you tell him, it appears destructive to you, when they don’t open the whole development process, construction plans and competence library to you. It’s not their intention to make you build your own car. The intention is selling cars, so you don’t need to build your own.

25

From a content developers point this is actually the best and most important argument for the need of protection. Because the success of your content development depends on how many users make your target group. When talking about nearly 200,000 customers it doesn’t really matter, when your content gets spread illegaly, after 2.5% officially bought it. Talking about 2,000 customers only and 2.5% of them official customers, that might make a huge difference.

Do the math. Welcome to real life. :)

Why should a content developer choose Renoise as his development platform, when he is the one bearing 100% of the risk of serving a small group with unprotected work? Again, content protection for Renoise imo would be a well placed investment into the future.

26

Haha. ;)

27

Sorry for citing you a bit out of context here. But when I saw the numbers and did the math, I immediately asked my self: Yes, why would they choose Renoise, with such a small user base? A very creative user base that survived fine without custom made “protected” content. Wouldn’t I as content developer target a larger user base in the first place?
I doubt that inclusion of a protection scheme into Renoise will magically double or triple the user base. To do that there are many other lower hanging fruit, the Renoise
development team could rather start a big advertisement campaign for instance.

28

Are we talking about the same user base? ^^ I guess we have a different understanding of being “very creative” then. Comparing the output of the Renoise user base to other DAW communities, I can’t see anything special here. As much as I would like to. Sorry. In best case it’s the same as anywhere else.

Talking for myself I can say, the primary target is the DAW I can handle and know best. And the second target then is the user base. Wouldn’t make much sense to work yourself deep into app A to develop stuff then on the completely different app B, right?

You are the first one talking about “magically” multiplying users. Things rarely happen magically.

I don’t get the problem you seem to have with protected content. None would or could force you to buy it. So what’s your point? That everything has to be for free, because we’re on the internet? The first question that in fact comes to my mind, when I read your Halleluja on the Renoise user base, is: If you are that creative and generous, where is your free output then?

Edit: And before you get it wrong. YOU means “the community”. Because it’s usually always the same people providing output. And not the community.

29

Yea, it’s probably the same everywhere :) I also have had the tracker/demo scene
a bit in my head here, but they are of course not “the Renoise user base”.

Yea, coming from that perspective that might be right.

Well, I might exaggerated there, but you said earlier in this Thread:

And I think, there are many other chances to be taken before this possibility
should be explored.

My main problem is just that I think that other features are way more
important, and that the developers should concentrate on those first. Then on
lesser important features. Then a long time on nothing, and then maybe on these
protection schemes.

Heh, thanks for the edit. I guess I would’ve understood that the wrong way. I
have no satisfying answer for that, I just see many tools being written here
and provided for free. And I see others creatively bend the limits of Renoise
for music creation.

30

Agreed. :)

Not agreed. ;)

I guess there’s a kinda misunderstanding anyway here. I’m not voting/requesting the implementation of protection schemes as an urgent required feature. I just say, it’d make sense to have it and try to explain the reasons.

31

I don’t understand, why would you want to share uneditable work files? In the graphics industry we have nothing like this. I’m not arguing for or against it, I am just a bit baffled.

32

In the graphics industrie you have exactly the same with Photoshop plugins for example. Or plugins for After Effects and all the similar stuff. People sell plugins, not their source code, right?

33

Yes, with tools this makes 100% sense but the suggestion was for .xrns files to have protection and encryption. You cannot lock .psd or .aep files in this way.

34

What I am talking about, is to protect and encrypt partial content of an XRNS in closed containers, like instruments & DSP chains, maybe even notations/sequences, related to the personal Renoise license and/or the origin XRNS. Protecting just a whole XRNS itself of course doesn’t make any or at least not much sense.

35

You can sell XRNIs and XRNS files, yes, but “with something else”.

  • a “tutorial based” product (a DVD or an interactive PC/MAC compatible software) where people “learn advanced electronic music composition techniques (with renoise)”, filled with examples of XRNIs and XRNS. That kind of buisness model should have some chances to work. It works, for After effect, it works for Photoshop, and many other professionnal tools whatever they are.
  • an album. (you probably know some artists that sell their electronic music with the XRNS as a BONUS content, and all the “making of” their music).

However if you want to reach a large consumer base with your work on chains and samples, you’ve got a solution, but it requires from you that you convert your instrument files to a more ‘popular’ format. Since renoise has a small userbase, selling a content in a file format (XRNS, XRNI, DSP chain) that is not popular enough, isn’t realistic, it won’t probably make it, commercially. Because it could only be bought by a small market, it’s logical.

Today people are searching for virtual instruments that could be loaded into their DAW whatever it is. BTW there’s a software that understood it, it converts multi-sample libraries to VSTi plugins DLLs that contain packed sample data. It’s called : Maize sampler. Let’s take some inspiration from this software. If renoise users could “convert” their XRNIs+Chains to the VSTi popular format, they could sell it more easily than a protected XRNI/XRNS. It would require from the devteam to create a “light” version of the renoise playback engine, included in a VSTi DLL, that reads XRNI+DSP chains packed in a zip-encrypted file format (for example).

36

I don’t get it at all. Why do you even need to “protect” your xrns? Why make renoise’s xrni’s to vst format… this seems like an overkill to me. I think it’s just better to stay focused on improving existing features (like instrument window with bigger envelopes or pattern zooming in and out…).

Just my 5 cents.

37

carmazine we’re talking about money,

you’ll find some rare people in the world, that make a relationship between sound/music, and money

they are trying to buy or sell music, or buy/sell sample sounds (for those who make music with samples and samplers), or buy/sell music tools/instruments

maybe you’ll think it’s completely outdated but those people exist

since electronic musicians use samplers that need samples, or software instruments, those musicians could buy libraries of pre-made samples/instruments

think about all those gigabytes of sample libraries (sounds, loops, breaks, percs, …) that are sold and ready to feed your sampler

think about the Native Instruments Kontakt based VSTi Samplers

check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it, check it,

this is the buisness

then, some people could consider renoise as a good sampler

and try to sell properly libraries of sounds produced with it

I proposed a VSTi (not VST) export (because a large base of musicians in the world will use it easily) but it’s just an example,

if renoise could natively export XRNI to the NKI, Halion FXP, or SF2 format…it could be also very interesting.

38

Now… hold on just a bit! Why is everyone all of a sudden more interested in business plans and money making than improving our own user experience!? We are the user base; not co-developer! We should not concern ourselves with what we think other people may or may not want in order to increase sales. It is absolutely none of our business to tell the authors how to handle their commercial enterprise. If had a client who would start telling me how to run my business rather than the work I deliver I probably wouldn’t work for them again.

39

I’m not going to go into my views on the whole DRM thing but the comment above about somehow using a light-weight version of Renoise embedded in a VST did make me think of Stillwell Audio plug-ins where you can buy a cheaper version which is Reaper only.

I haven’t looked into how or why they do it, but some kind of licence to build third party applications/plug-ins on some Renoise core could be very interesting, if at all possible :)

40

This would be nice indeed. FL Studio also provides an interface for coding native FL plugins. But the license has to be bound to open source then, pls. We don’t want to destroy creativity by closed content… :D