X-Form & The Lack Of Understanding Marketing

[25ghosts]

Digidesign just released their new "Borrowed" plug-in X-Form...

We thought : Wow - Lets give it a try...So we downloaded it. As Protools booted we got a great splash dialog saying that we had to authorize... Thus, no TRY button...

Then we called digidesign Germany: Their office has mysteriously vanished from the face of the planet or rather say face of Germany, cuz the UK support answers the phone after having to spend like 5 minutes of pushing hash keys etc...They stated that digi had no demo of their new plug in but that they would be happy to deposit a demo license on my ilok account - we waited for 3 hours and nothing came (Still didn't- 8 hours ago now) then we called the US main office of digidesign.... After having pushed even more hash keys and numbers we finally landed with a support agent... He confirmed that "CURRENTLY" we don't issue any demos of TDM plugins.... I reminded him that "CURRENTLY" is a short time based terminology and 7 months ago digidesign then also CUrrently did not support demos....He said : YES... THen I asked him if he could deposit a demo license on my ilok account : He said : this is not possible and that digidesign would do no such thing, as I told him that digidesign UK promised me to deposit the license he merely implied that I had misunderstood the British agent...

After this point everything just seemed tooooo stupid for me so I decided to BUY the plug in (I know stupid not to test it first) but I thought what the heck - if I dont like it I'll just ebay it....

So know I went to the beloved digistore with the intention of buying this new and supposedly fine and pristine plug-in:::: Guess what : in wasn't listed in the digistore: Even a search in the digistore rendered "NOTHING FOUND"

My My Digidesign - where did you learn that? In Business College for advanced Marketing?

some of you may wonder why I take the time to write this letter - as I wrote it I really had to fight my own principles a couple of times since this is actually a WASTE of time....by all means I could just lay down N say - Hit me again Ike.... but I am getting tired of the way digidesign maltreats their customers....

1) website :: this is a total chaos - recently I had to download the Space Lib and hat to re-enter every time I wanted to load a specific package as digidesign did not feel compelled to combine the whole installer package...Not to mention having to choose a country each time having reset safari and re-entering the digi web site - Digi why dont u listen to the people having to use your website - dont be like apple "Only caring about the looks"

2) Customer service : I'D rather call it "customer hating" trying to get thru' to a support or sales agent is more time consuming than doing a mix in Logic PRO... If one writes an email - one has to wait for days before getting as answer and that being: Did you repair your disk permission or try deleting : Digidesign Databases

3) No demos on plug-ins....digidesign seem to be on a quest of buying all third pty plug in manufacturers - I dont care about that but what I do care about are the marketing strategics behind digidesign that seem to find that supplying a demo of their plug-ins may lead to a NO BUY of the plug-in.... Why else would they not support a demo...and since they sell 2 days licenses on the digistore dont tell me that it's a technical problem

4) BUGS - so many bugs still not fixed in PT 7.2 - bugs which the digi support have even confirmed - bugs which have been known since Protools 6.9 -


I dont understand how a company that makes such a great app like protools can have people in their marketing and customer service departments that obviously have no CLUE of what they are doing nor do they seem to have the "Pulse" of their customers...In a CPU world moving this fast I dont see how this is gonna work

[Pirate Post]

By the way...my demo version of X-Form works amazingly well. Called Customer Service and they deposited an iLok auth in my account in minutes.

[25ghosts]

that is great news - since all digi's numbers are public anyway maybe you'd care to state the number you've dialed))

How does the plug compare to the rest of the pitchers out there in your oppinion?

[Pirate Post]

that is great news - since all digi's numbers are public anyway maybe you'd care to state the number you've dialed))

How does the plug compare to the rest of the pitchers out there in your oppinion?

I've only tried it on dialog and its the best I've heard.

The phone number to call is posted. I spoke with someone in pre sales and they directed me to the right person.

[blairl]

I've only tried it on dialog and its the best I've heard.

I agree.

[AvidCS]

Hi 25ghosts,

I'm sorry to hear about your issues trying to get a trial authorization for X-form. The Marketing group launched the product release info a few days early in error. As a result, news to customers got ahead of the support and Digistore group by a few days. It's an error we certainly try to avoid because we like to have stuff to sell to our customers after we hype it, but basically we screwed up. My apologies.

On the positive side, I think we have that sorted now, and additionally do now offer trial authorizations for a good deal of our software products. Despite what you might think, this took awhile as there have been a few technical hurdles that we had to sort out with trial authorizations, to avoid some, uh, lets just say, less than scrupulous downloaders. We apologize for the delay.

DigiCS