Legally, yes, in most places this would be exactly as bad as it was 25 years ago. “Abandonware” is, as far as I know, not a legal term at all anywhere.
Morality is completely separate from legality, of course. And practically, there are many large sites that openly distribute old software, including serial numbers, from far larger companies that still exist, and while I think there have been cases of people asking sites to take things down, I haven’t heard of anyone getting into real trouble over it.
(Sidenote: software piracy is not legally theft, it is breach of copyright. These are quite distinct, the latter not even being part criminal law in some places in most cases. And there is a real & important difference between nicking your neighbour’s book and borrowing it to make a copy which is neglected when referring to copyright infringement as stealing.)
Looks like you can’t save setups in demo mode with LiSa. Here’s a page on archive.org that has more info about how you used to be able to purchase/register the software.
It appears co-author Frank Baldé might be still active. He’s got a YT channel here and there’s an email address on some of the LiSa docs, but not sure if that works. Might be worth it to try in get in contact with him.
I tried using the OS 9 version on my M1 mac with UTM … it loads but couldn’t get audio to work very well btw.
Sidenote - I was just looking at a YT video about how to get TurboSynth running and
Mark Jeffery (who wrote it) commented on it, excited about how people are still interested in the software.
two different sounds imho. The Fennesz is definitely a big timestretch to a fairly long (16x or more?) ratio.
The Hosomi background noise is similar, but reminds me very strongly of some of the older modulated granular plugins that you would get in the mid 2000s - especially Ioplong Sloper v0.9 by Andreas Smartelectronix - YouTube . I feel like there’s an even more obvious Smartelectronix one that does something like this but the name escapes me
EDIT: Ah, I was thinking of this one actually!
I used to use this for loads of things - it also can fairly eaisly make everything sound like Coil’s “The Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence” (not sure if thats a good thing)
This is always going to be a good thing! Thanks for the tip - will see if I can get this to work via Wine on Linux (update - works well with Yabridge).
Edit: I used the Wayback machine to find the demo zip file in the end as the download link via Softpedia seems to be long gone.
I loved these Tobybear plugins (mentioned above)…not sure if anyone posted a link. Idk if these work but they’re windows only anyway so no longer possible for me anymore:
got nuPG on the old macbook, completely forgot about it. I had more fun with that than I ever did trying the ogPG, which didn’t run too well on the Powerbook.
Also, I tried to get the Rehberg/Mego SC patch from the creator, but I never heard back when writing said person on Twitter. I’m just going to assume it was in purpose.
the pdf of phd paper way upthread about mego & technology is cool to read. after toying around with it a little, i’m pretty sure the source audio in the opening track of pita’s ‘get out’ is curtis roads’ ‘cloud generator’…! it spit out a sound file that was remarkably sonically similar for me on first try.
