I'm using several DAWs and audio software, amongst which Max for Live and Max/MSP/Jitter (5). As such I became involved in many communities. And there's one topic which manages to surface in each and every one of them (though not so much here strangely ;-)): the quality of custom support. Some people love them, some people dislike them. Some times they respond blazingly fast, other times they are slow as heck.

It got a friend and myself wondering how good or bad the whole thing really was. So we cooked up a scheme: my friend allegedly borrowed my laptop containing all my audio software, and due to a freak accident the HD crashed. He managed to reinstall everything but for some odd reason there was no sound as soon as he selected the Asio4All driver. We made up a (configuration) problem in the Asio driver and simply sent in a report to the support desks of: Ableton, Propellerhead, Cycling '74, Native Instruments and Magix. So basically all the companies where I bought 1 or more products.

Our project started on Monday, it would end on Friday. Right in the very same week where C74 was preparing to close the office for most part of the week due to company-wide meetings. Yet C'74 support answered my friend Rob within the very same day while his e-mail address (nor his name) were known to C74 because he wasn't a registered customer. Something which stops other companies from helping.

Please let me stress out that we have a winner, but there are no losers or such. We should never forget that support guys are people with paychecks too and IMO one can only respect that other companies simply try to minimize their support costs so only addressing registered people.

Alas; you can read the whole story in this blog post. Its not the best I ever wrote because I managed to get sick in between, but even despite the fact its now somewhat dated I figured I might as well share now that I'm slowly recovering again.

And congratulations to Cycling '74; as mentioned in my post I think its quite an impressive feat to hands on 'beat' bigger companies such as Ableton & Propellerhead software.