Crash wrote:The level of insight, practical knowledge and professionalism Matthias and Noel put into a discussion while staying downto-earth guys is astonishing. In contrast to those helpful but sometimes lacking Ableton support guys they don't keep telling me about how I don't know sh*t, but discuss and explain things and come up with solutions pretty quick once an issue had been tackled.
You will never stop, will you? This is really going to bother me now.
I can't comment much on Cakewalk, but I know RME support for a long time. They really do a great job. An exceptional good company. No doubt. Matthias Carstens who is the chief tech support guy at RME since day one, is incredibly knowledgeable - at least in terms of hardware and driver-related questions. The other RME support staff is doing a good job as well, although I also had mixed experiences with them, but nonetheless, they are certainly one of the best out there. All your applause is legitimate. However, RME's job is to code and support 2 (!) drivers - one for Macs, one for Windows PCs plus the firmware for their interfaces. As they are a hardware company, they are obviously more familiar with hardware dependancies and know more about potential hardware-/driver-related problems than anyone else, so if you have a hardware problem and like to chat about it, they are just the right address for you.
So let's look at your friends, the Ableton tech support staff, whom you constantly blame for their inability to help and lack of knowledge. To give you a little insight, the Ableton tech support takes care about approx. 1000 emails a week, the forums (at least as much as possible) and provides daily phone support for Europe and the US. The questions we receive are ranging from "I can't get a tone out of my MIDI keyboard", to computer hardware / driver / OS problems, setup problems with any kinds of 3rd party hardware and software, software crashes, hardcore Live-specific problems, Mac stuff, PC stuff and whatnot. If you consider the aforementioned facts, I am confident that we do quite a good job. Blame us for whatever you want, but you are certainly wrong if you say that we are doing a bad job or having a lack of knowledge. We are not perfect, we may do mistakes sometimes or even fail to help people with very delicate problems, but that's how it goes. We can share our knowledge and experience, but we are certainly not the magic oracle which has all the answers for your questions. And: we are humans after all. But this is obviously something you do not understand, can't accept or never learned. Looking back at your 3000+ (?) forum postings, you really have taken the word "arrogance" to a whole new level. Nevertheless you seem to be very talented with computers in general, perhaps more talented than me or others in the team, but that does not give you the right to blame our company or the tech support in particular in a public forum. Not only here on the Ableton forum by the way, but also on all other music software related forums. Looks more like you are "on a mission" to prove how bad the software is and the people behind it.
As YOU are bringing this up over and over again, let's look at one of your bad experiences with our support team, which resulted in YOU blaming ME in person in this public forum:
You, dearest Timur, reported your RME problem to us, begging for help as you failed to find a solution/answer yourself. I haven't been able to reproduce your problem at first. The Fireface ran just fine on my testing machine (at least on normal loads) and as I couldn't think of any known issue or strange behaviour in the current Live version which could have caused the described problem, my first assumption was that the driver of your RME interface does not work properly. You completely ignored this theory from the first moment on. Nevertheless I was kindly asking for various things to isolate your problem a bit, just so that we could look into the right spot or successfully reproduce your problem. You haven't been very cooperative to say the least. I contacted RME to find out more about their drivers. They literally left me alone in the dark - all I got was "our drivers work fine. must be a bug in your software" (it wasn't MC, though). We then did some more tests on other Vista machines and eventually found various problems indeed, but still didn't had any clue or an exact explanation of what's going wrong, so we forwarded everything to our development for further testing. As you can imagine, our developers are busy with writing software code all day long, so it is not easy for them to find a few hours of time to test a user's specific hardware problem. However, thankfully they took the time and looked into your problem. In the meantime you were spamming the forums all over with your crap, claiming that everything works perfect in Reaper, whereas I found various problems with Reaper and other hosts on the computer where we have been reproducing the problems. You totally denied this, which kinda turned this into a completely counterproductive support case. Our developers looked into your problem, and eventually found out that - guess what? - something was wrong with the priorities OF THE RME DRIVER. So my inital assumption really must have been wrong an incompetent. The story continues: our developers even coded a test version just for you Mr. Timur which would have solved the problem with the RME driver, but could have introduced different problems with other audio hardware, so we were holding it back to give it some thorough testing. However, I emailed you our findings about the driver priorities which was on a Friday afternoon if my memory serves me well. When I came back on Monday, I found a response from you, where you claimed that YOU already found the cause of these problems, that YOU had been "faster than us", because you couldn't wait any longer for our slow and incompetent support. That same weekend you posted your bullshit into the forums, explaining to all others that YOU are such a smart guy and that the Ableton support was too slow and too incompetent. You also provided another lengthy and detailed report showing screenshots of the thread priorities and all that. The funny thing, dear Timur, is, that your screenshots show a date on your testing tool which clearly states that you were doing these tests a day AFTER you received that email from us. A funny read on a Monday morning! Even worse than that, you even continued to discredit the support team and me in person in the further outcome of this thread. Not very kind of you, indeed, esp. if you consider the amount of time we wasted on your problem. A "thanks for looking into it" or at least some more cooperation would have been nice, but that's obviously too much to ask for.
After all this, I seriously question your credibility and highly doubt that you are really here to "help" any users, yourself or Ableton for that matter as you pretend to. Even though some people may benefit from your computer skills and even though you found some real bugs in Live indeed, your claims are questionable.
Regardless of what you really want here (I couldn't care less if you weren't spamming this forum all over), I kindly ask you (once again) to stop your insulting posts towards Ableton employees in this and other public forums and to stop alienating Live users who just come here to have a talk about music software or seek for help. If you have a bug report or a problem, send it to us (if there is still anyone left who is willing to answer / help you) or post it here on the forums, but stop your stupid comments. You seem to receive mean applause for them anyway, so why not change your strategy?
To add a final word on the actual topic of this thread, the OP obviously forgot that he needs to pay for the software for one simple reason: to be allowed to use it. This is not a question of your own moral or if others are using cracks or not, it is simply illegal to use pirated software, period. There is no discussion.
As far as bugs are concerned, I feel the frustration of the OP and I certainly agree that waiting a year for a bugfix is not very nice indeed. However, take my word that we are doing our best to make the software as good as we can. His complaint is valid and shows that there is much room for improvements here at Ableton. It does not justify his abusive language in his recent postings, though, or a discreditation of Ableton employees or a forum thread like this one.
Best regards,
Nico
lord knows how i feel about timur, and his neurotic ways, i think i covered these bases months ago. lol, but it's really better not to argue with him, and ignore the stuff you don't agree with... although 
), afa scaring away potential new costumers...
most of us have more than one internet connection... of course crash does, he just got his new mac! maybe now, he'll bother apple/logic, esp if you all just ignore him. but hurting his feelings doesn't work. trust that.