FabFilter

Hi David,

Our plugins do output noise when they detect that they have been pirated, but we significantly reduced the amount of noise back in 2010 precisely for this reason. We used to output it at 0 dB, but now it's at -20 dB.

Cheers,

It is staggering that you feel that this is an acceptable anti-piracy measure. There is a reason that no other company does this.

I will not be purchasing your plugins until you remove this inappropriate feature.

Surely it is enough that a plugin disables itself if it detects it is pirated. To emit noise like this is just vindictive, and the fact that it has the possibility of affecting legitimate customers shows a lack of customer empathy on your part.

Seriously, rethink this, and simply disable plugins that are pirated.

It's the same noise others put in as demo limitations and no one bothers, so why do you? If you feel it is inappropriate you're obviously not consider buying it, but pirating it. Shame on you, you miss something.

> and the fact that it has the possibility of affecting legitimate customers shows a lack of customer empathy on your part

It kinda shows a high paranoidality and irrational fear of a "posibility" on your part, dude. Never had any licensing issues with any of the FabFilter plugins, never heard of someone having troubles.

"It kinda shows a high paranoidality and irrational fear of a "posibility" on your part, dude. Never had any licensing issues with any of the FabFilter plugins, never heard of someone having troubles."

big +1, works like a charm, no issues, don't know anyone who had issues.

I've read certain forum posts too and the intention of hurting FabFilters reputation was pretty clear. Some of those creating the posts were also proven to be illegitimate users or fanboys of other companies...

I simply don’t want to support a company that thinks it is appropriate to blast people with noise. Even if it were only pirates that were harmed, it would be bad enough. But for the possibility to exist for regular users to have this happen and FabFilter to be ok with that? No thanks - not the kind of company I want to support.

It is no surprise that it is the “fanboys” on FabFilter’s site that are defending such actions. On less partisan forums, there are plenty of people who feel that FabFilter is wrong for doing this. When I read about this happening, I couldn't believe it would be true, so came here to ask if it was. Without shame, FabFilter admits to doing this - until 2010, blasting people with potentially damaging noise levels. That is borderline criminal, in my opinion.

Again, I would have been happy to purchase FabFilter plugins, but I won’t support a company that thinks this kind of thing is acceptable. And I’m certainly not alone in thinking this.

"On less partisan forums, there are plenty of people who feel that FabFilter is wrong for doing this."

A quick google search didn't bring up even one of these less partisan forums with plenty people feeling this is wrong... A single entry in a forum from 2011 or 2012? Sure.

You don't seem to use demos very often as you're afraid of those ear blasting, neverending noise bursts that leave people with ear damage, right? :-D

Anyways, that's okay, FabFilter will survive ;-)

“A quick google search…”
Always a good idea to do such exhaustive research before commenting.

“You don't seem to use demos very often as you're afraid of those ear blasting, neverending noise bursts that leave people with ear damage, right?”
My complaint is regarding the noise levels BEFORE 2010 and the fact that FabFilter EVER thought this was acceptable. They WERE damaging levels, hence why FabFilter reduced them.

Hope that was clear for you this time.

We are not "Fanboys" you silly Drama Queen!

We love Fabfilter and want to protect and support this great company and their hard work creating this innovative software.

I'm all for them protecting their software anyway possible against thieves!

I have never experienced any "Blast" of noise and neither has any "Legitimate" user. It's just a red herring.

Why don't you just buy the software instead of trying to steal it. It really is incredibly inexpensive.

i tolerate your post though i do not see the point of it being made. and it will also not matter the slightest to (potential) fabfilter customers. i think the fact alone you've posted it here in the devs forum and now are shocked wondering why totally satisfied customers come to their defend makes me question your intentions.

i too can only say i've not experienced anything coming close to the described "health damaging noise burst"and the probability i will is also practically 0. but i also don't care for pirates, they take the risc and have to live with it. i'd do more harm to them than just that XD

@Mike

One of the most moronic, useless posts I have read.

My point has been made. Obviously, the only people who read this forum are fanboys who think FabFilter can do no wrong.

If you think that blasting people with damaging noise is acceptable, you are welcome to think that.

But you are an idiot.

You seem very sure of confident of yourself when you’ve already admitted only having anecdotal evidence of “blasting people with damaging noise”.

Put up some evidence you can demonstrate or sod off!

@Jeff

I will happily "sod off". But before I do, why don't you scroll up to the first answer, where FabFilter admits to 0dB before 2010.

Read the reply again. It wasn’t an admission of anything other than a level. Where is your evidence of “blasting people with potentially damaging noise levels” has taken place?
You have nothing, you’re just sh1t stirring.
Put up or shut up!

@Jeff

From the FabFilter answer:

"we significantly reduced the amount of noise back in 2010 precisely for this reason"

What "reason" was that, Jeff? Remind me?

You came here saying “ blasting people with damaging noise”
Put up your evidence or move on.

If FF isn’t for you that’s ok. Nobody will lose any sleep.
Life’s too short to get hung up on something that might have been.

@Jeff

The evidence is, Fabfilter reduced from 0 dB to -20 dB. FOR A REASON.

FabFilter originally thought it was acceptable to emit a dangerously loud signal, which was not only damaging to pirates, but potentially to their legit customers. They then realised this was a scummy thing to do, SO THEY REDUCED THE LEVEL.

The level should NEVER have been “too high” in the first place. What sort of company thinks it is acceptable to possibly damage people’s hearing and equipment?

Anyways, it is pointless going back and forward with morons like Jeff. It is always amazing how “fanboys” will defend the most irrational of actions.

I’m out :)

Wow. Talk about anger issues!
Shouting is no substitute for evidence - which you’ve still not provided.
Make sure the door doesn’t kick your ass on the way out drama queen

Hi Frederic,

Could you suggest me what to do against this hurting "feature", if it acts accidentally, please?

My DAW often produces this loud noise - with a long reverb tail - when the processor load is above a certain level. After boot up, as long as the Qnap's Qsync.exe synchronising the directories, it always happens, but at normal processor load there is no problem.

I use legal FF plug-ins of course.

P.S.: I don't think if this "feature" is a good idea, because when it happens, nobody knows if YOUR software acts deliberately or accidentally, or anything else causes this kind of problem.

Feeling upset... no, make that absolutely butthurt... about something that happened in 2010, that he didn't personally experience.

So laughable... and pathetic.

Hi all,

I see there is some confusion going on here. To be absolutely clear, we just wanted to emit some noise to indicate that the plugin was locked. Of course we never intended to hurt someone's ears, that would be horrible.

In 2010, we received an email about the noise level and how it could potentially be too loud. We just didn't realize this possibility before so we immediately updated our plugins to reduce the noise level.

@Frank: the noise that you're describing is probably your host not able to keep up with the processing and I believe it doesn't have anything to do with this anti-piracy system.

Cheers,

I experienced loud noise bursts from Farbfilter ProQ and ProR a few times over the last two years. Everything bought legally. It was somehow related to another issue in Studio One DAW, where sometimes uncontrolled cracks and pops appear out of nowhere. Sounds like crashing audio driver or invalid signal values or whatever, sometimes triggered by faulty clip ends. But the thing is that sometimes when this issue happened this causes proQ or proR to produce very loud continuous noise. Are you 100% sure that this has nothing to do with your anti-piracy noise? Did you have all possible situations where bugs from other DAWs or plugins interact with your plugins on the list? -20 db can become very loud in the end when proQ is at the beginning of a long signal chain. When it happened to me it was insanely loud because I was waring headphones and mixing with a lot of headroom...

well, perhaps no answer is the answer in this case...

Hi Jonas,

One can never be 100% sure of anything. It's extremely unlikely, but not impossible that something like a crash could somehow trigger the anti-piracy noise. Without a way to reliably reproduce this issue it is impossible to tell. We will think about further lowering the level.

Cheers,

Thank you for taking this serious. Perhaps there are smarter ways of piracy trigger than noise... think about something that is as smart as your plugins are, while making them unusable when the plugin thinks it has been cracked. Last time when my pro-R produced this loud noise, it was during a recording session with a band, everybody was wearing headphones on very loud levels. It was a huge shock for everybody and I felt very guilty because I was responsible for the studio. I think nobody would have felt bad when there was some wobbling tremolo effect or the Simpsons theme or whatever instead of white noise.

thanks!

Jonas

It just happened again. I bought it on video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-U280yZan0

...again together with the Studio One 666 bug.

What the hell is that?

PUT THE VOLUME DOWN IF I SAY "ATTENTION" IN THE VIDEO!!!

there are many people reporting ear damaging noise from pro-Q and other fab filter plugins in this forum. one was from 2013!!! did you try to find the issue since then?

www.fabfilter.com/forum/topic/3004/very-loud-noise-pro-q-audio-suite#comment18090

www.fabfilter.com/forum/topic/6141/horrifically-loud-noise-produced-from-pro-l2-out-of-nowhere#comment18091

www.fabfilter.com/forum/topic/1764/pro-q-submitting-full-scale-digital-noise#comment18092

www.fabfilter.com/forum/topic/6470/pro-q-3-loud-volume-bug#comment18093

Hi Jonas,

Thanks for taking the time to make the video. If this is indeed a bug in Pro-Q 3, we really want to find out why this happens so we can fix it! Can you please send us a session that demonstrates the issue (simplified if possible) via email at info@fabfilter.com? If the session is large, you can use a service like WeTransfer to send it.

Also, I want to make very clear that the loud sound that I hear in the video is definitely not the "piracy noise" that the plugin emits when it detects that it has been tampered with: this is a soft white noise and absolutely not the high-pitched shriek in the video.

I see that you responded to any topic you could find on the forum that could be in any way related to this noise. I've removed these replies in order to focus our conversation on this topic (and preferably via email). Most of the other topics don't seem to be related and if you have a way to reliably trigger the problem, we'll find out very soon why it happens.

Cheers,

If FabFilter would have been adding a visual sign to the acoustic one, we might know if the plug-in makes the noise or not.
I don't know detailes how this function is implemented, but if this white noise added to the signal at the first FabFilter plug-in too, the compressors and limiters used in the chain can greatly increase the level of this noise.

“ if you have a way to reliably trigger the problem, we'll find out very soon why it happens.”

This is actually the problem. The Noise appears randomly from time to time. When it comes I am sometimes able to reproduce it in the open session as demonstrated in the video. But as soon as I close and reload the session it’s gone and I can not trigger it anymore. I saved the session when it happened, but can not reproduce the issue with it. Do you want to have a copy anyway? It happened to me on two different computers with two different rme interfaces.

I feared that this is the case. Can you try to keep the Pro-Q interface open while you try to reproduce this? It might be helpful to know what Pro-Q's spectrum analyzer and output level meter are showing when it happens.

It would still be helpful for us to have your session so we can try to reproduce it ourselves. We also use RME interfaces.

@Frank: again, our "piracy" noise has nothing to do with the sound that I hear in Jonas's video.

Cheers,

In response to Davids original message, I COMPLETELY agree.

First off, I'm not here to troll, I've been a long time fan and purchased my FAB products. I produced & mixed several chart topping records and been doing this for well over 15 years.

I only found this thread because I had the exact same issue as David earlier today. Fab-DS created a white noise within a split second that almost knocked me out of my chair. I couldn't hit the mute switch on my control station quick enough and it was brutal. -20db my a**.... my meters are blasting in the reds and I'm seriously concerned for my hearing based on today or future use of this plugin.

All that aside, the functionalities are impeccable and again, I've been a big promoter of Fab until now, but this is just absurdly unnecessary. Please change this !

Mark

Again, this noise that you are describing is completely unrelated to any anti-piracy measures we might be taking. If you can reproduce the circumstances that lead to the noise burst, we'd be happy to look into it to see if we can find out what causes it.

Cheers,