MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
Apparently you and I and others of like mind appear to be less that appreciated for our position. FWIW, I really don't need a tutorial and could care less about that or a demo version.
You're already in deep with DP, there's no benefit to you understanding what DP can do.
Again, with no malice whatsoever DP is by far the least represented big DAW. We can say everything we want to about how there's no hard numbers, but a simple look at online forums, magazine polls and articles, chatting with people under 30 in your area who use computers to make or record music, walking into recording studios and just looking at what DAWs are there, and it's flatly obvious that Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic, Live, and even Sonar are more represented and understood.
I seriously do not think that the lack of tutorials is a deterrent for pirates, for quite a few reasons, but this isn't and never was my point, I wasn't even recommending in depth tutorials but more like extended DP overview videos, showing the uniqueness of DP VS Live or Logic etc. What we've got now is a few introduction videos on youtube that are at least 5 years old, and more of a deterrent from buying DP than a selling point. In fact the whole marketing of DP outside of MOTU's site is lacking in every respect.
The problem with this is I think obvious, DP is in the unique and dangerous position of being the largest and most complex OSX only DAW that has the duel edged sword of in house Logic and embedded in recording studios Pro Tools to contend with. In contrast Cakewalks Sonar has Cubase as it's main competition, which presents no direct advantage like Logic or Pro Tools do.
Companies do and have abandoned sequencers in the past. The simple fact is if MOTU do not get new people interested in DP, then there's no incentive for them to invest heavily into DP, which means eventually they see DP as a burden. While an established base of users is a great thing, every company benefits from new users, and to be so terrified that pirates might take advantage of your software that you offer little insight into your software is in my opinion absolutely counter productive.
In counter point to this is the way that Ableton handle pirates. They like MOTU have no iLock etc. they have plenty of tutorials and introductory videos readily available online along with a long slow key protection against piracy that renders the program useless after about 3 months. Long enough for the kid to get addicted to the program. Dozens of times on their forums people admit to being ex pirates who through the shear love of the program coupled with the crippling of it after a few months, learned to respect the developers and become paying customers. Ableton staff if they do comment on this are mostly congratulatory as in "Welcome back from the dark side" etc. In no way do I expect MOTU to adopt this attitude, but it's patently obvious when talking to young people that they think DP is some sort of failed Pro Tools clone only good for film composers.....
Also tutorial wise, there's plenty of help already embedded into DP's Help Menu, as well as a searchable forum or two out there. In fact in simple plain english if someone pirated DP they could if they wanted to get a whole hell of a lot of information out of the Help Menu in DP,
which of course an honest possible user interested in DP does not have access to. IMO the basic fact of business marketing is that intentional obscurity doesn't protect your product from being stolen, it just makes your product obscure.
aren't going away, but paying customers will if all they get online is forum posts about how awkward DP is on places like Gearslutz or KVR and the pretty much awful tutorials on youtube right now. IMO the inability to learn the basic features of a program pre purchase is not a great pirate deterrent but a great paying customer deterrent.
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I'm not saying they need to make the under 30 crowd their primary target, just make them a target, at this point DP mostly gets word of mouth from dedicated users and new customers from users of other DAWs, I simply do not see MOTU marketing in the least to new users, whether they're under 30 or not. The only reason to use 30 as a cut off range is because in all likelihood most people just getting into computer based recording and composing are under 30. 
My point was/is video overviews on youtube etc. would be a great marketing tool. look at any forum, people are more likely to watch a 5 minute video than scour through a great, but densely packed website like MOTU's own. Native Instruments for example have dozens of videos for all their respective products, and few do more than showcase the features. 