Re: [LAD] [64studio-users] MIDI jitter

On Saturday 19 June 2010, Ralf Mardorf wrote: [huge snip] It has been my experience that such dongles have a lifetime of about a year. Or less. Story time: Years ago, we setup a graphics system that involved using the A&B Roll Editing (or something like that name) amiga software to control 2 editing S-VHS vcr's, Panasonic 7750's. That came with a parport dongle, without which it would not work. And it was a $25,000 package. They, after lots of argument, and receiving the old dongle, would replace it when it failed. eventually that program was sold to RVS, Ring Video Systems, some fly by night down in FL. The dongle failed again (there was no printer attached to its output port ever) and they screwed around for 6 months, finally going to the original authors house to get the last dongle in existence after we threatened to sue. It lasted about 3 months. By then the hacking business was running full tilt in the amiga world, so when they said no more dongle, we said we're gonna hack it, sue us if you dare. We sent it off to one of the hackers, and had a working system back on-line in 3 days. RVS in turn had one of their programmers try to take it out, and 3 copies later over about 2 weeks, they failed. And we laughed at them on the phone when the last one they sent didn't work. To this day, I believe we only have one dongle protected system at the station & that was because they said there wasn't one, but there was. We simply do not consider for purchase, any system that uses a dongle for copy protection. And we are not exactly silent when we tell some vendor, sorry, you use a trouble prone technology so we will not even consider your product/equipment. When we are writing checks for $100k and up for the new digital stuff, we are justifiably being picky. If the vendor doesn't like it, the exit door is that way, come back when you can offer us something that Just Works(TM). Its been remarkably effective at separating out the rectums in the business. > Cheers! > > Ralf >