Pirating DAWs

Thoughts on pirating DAWs? Any drawbacks? I've been wanting to get into music production, but the entry-cost for half-decent DAWs like FL Studio or Ableton Live are quite expensive (aside from the fact they don't work well with *NIX systems). Is piracy a good alternative? Where would I even pirate something without getting loaded with malware...

There are some very capable DAWs that are much cheaper than ableton, FL, etc. like Reaper which costs like $70 or something. FL is the easiest to pirate, you can just down the installer directly from Image Line and activate it with a key.

Reaper runs natively on Linux. They don't believe in anti-piracy measures, so you can download the full version from their website for free. At startup it will give you a five second pop-up telling you to buy it, but you still get full functionality.

>>9878 I use a keygened FL studio 20 over wine on peppermintOS and it works alright, alot of the labels for controls so i wouldn't do it if you dont already have a good work flow with it

>>9878 pirating daws is completely acceptable, since these things are expensive af >Where would I even pirate something without getting loaded with malware... stay away from pirate bay and you'll be fine. i once pirated ableton live 10 from rutracker. worked fine for me. i wouldn't recommend if you're on linux, since you'd need to do a lot of stuff to get ableton working on it. don't know about FL

LMMS is good enough for me.

>>9878 A reminder that luxury DAW won't help you get a good ear and style. Don't be like the people who want to be artists so they immediately buy a Cintiq Pro 24 before even getting the fundamentals down.

I've been running Ableton for about 8-9 years, always pirated. Works great, I like the user interface , though it took a while to get used to. >>9884 is right though in that tools don't make the artist- you can make great music with basically just Audacity and a microphone with some ingenuity, but I also think it's highly helpful to have good tools. Creativity is an endless pursuit that only takes practice, practice, practice. I've been having some trouble finding good torrents for VSTs and instrument packs recently, though. I know the sites exist, but I don't exactly trust a lot of them. You'll have to be a little critical. Fortunately, you can get a *lot* done with just the stock stuff in eg. Ableton- the new wavetable synth for instance is incredibly powerful.

>>9878 pirated ableton from pirate bay, PC still working. It's been two years. Just do it anon, and buy it if you like it.

pirated Ableton after I found a working key, but I lost access after a security update. Reaper is really nice so far, but I have yet to learn the ins and outs, so my work flow is a little off. Though I'd absolutely recommend it to everyone who wants a cheaper DAW. It's just as good (if not better sometimes, in terms of extensibility and VST compatibility) as the "premium" soykaf.

>>9878 Just use Sunvox it's free and you won't need any VSTs

>>9878 I was using a couple versions of FL when I was on windows. Worked just fine. The newer one would often crash a time or two on startup but I'd have it up within 10 seconds. When I moved to linux I decided to switch to reaper. It's a bit less intuitive and takes over my audio when it's running, but it seems alright and the license was so cheap that I had actually bought one back when I was using FL. My main problem now is finding instruments, like this guy >>9885 I want to use this thing called "the wildmother's dulcimer" on pianobook, but this site and similar seem to be extremely obnoxious about requiring registration to download files, plus most of the good stuff is for kontakt, and I haven't bothered trying to get a cracked player working. Why tout the open and available nature of your service if you're going to require accounts and bloat software to use it? Wanted to see if I could get windows vsts working with carla so I tried downloading spitfire labs with a burner email and it wouldn't even let me dl anything because it chooses the version based on useragent OS. This is as stupid as only letting you download an x86_64 distro image on an amd64 system. What if I'm going to install it on another device, huh? Big popular libraries I'm sure I can find from alternative avenues, however, this random new stuff, I'm not so sure.

To those running Ableton, do you run it under Linux somehow or under another OS? I'm too used to Live and I really like it, but it's the only thing preventing me from ditching Windows for Linux along with VST support.