Digidesign (or Dodgydesign as we call them in England) rant.

[Jay_dammit]

I am fuming with rage, incandescent with anger, and shaking with a cold and unmeasurable fury.

I recently upgraded to PTLE, with a Digi 003+, Logic Pro 9, and an Octopre MkII Dynamic.

Guess which product took me an afternoon on the phone to Tech Support to install and configure? Yes, the Dodgy one. (And I'm not a novice: I used to demonstrate PT at trade shows.)

Guess which product had the authorisation keys in places other than where the instructions said they would be? Yes, the Dodgy one. (And yes, I ALWAYS RTFM.)

So having done that (which is OK; I accept that a new installation always has its technical issues) I set out to to a test session by remixing a recent project. The first 8 outputs from the 003+ worked fine, but no ADAT outputs worked (although they appear in the I/O setup,) and yes, I did RTFM and connect and configure everything properly.

Phone call to Focusrite Tech Support (and I used to do Tech Support, so I wasn't rude or angry with them, or Dodgy for that matter) and we established that the Octopre was fine. Swapped cables, jiggered and poked, still no luck.

Phone call to Dodgy Tech Support (may their name be forever damned) who advised me that the best thing to do was strip everything out of my rack again and (get this!!!!) TAKE THE UNIT TO MY LOCAL DEALER AND ASK THEM TO TEST IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
(And the Tech Support person sounded as though they couldn't give a damn. OK, I'm not expecting counselling, but some expression of sympathy would not have been out of place.)

What kind of shameless abdication of responsibility is this? What kind of help is this? I just paid nearly £1000 to Dodgy and they can't even be bothered to offer me a replacement while the unit is checked??????

If the software wasn't my preferred solution (and all my legacy material relies on my having a version of PT) , I would have binned the damned lot and switched to Logic.
As it is, I was amazed and inspired by what Logic Pro 9 can do (including 32ms latency; twice the best performance PT LE can manage) and will be using it to start my next project while I wait for Dodgydesign to use one of their dealers to do their own work for them and provide me with a working system for my £1000.

You at Dodgy should hang your heads in shame. What do you tell your kids you did at work today? "Oh, I shifted responsibility for helping a busy and long-term customer onto a busy dealer. Another buck passed."

Sorry; rant over.