A few noobish questions about energyXT...

[Karl the Hermit]

I've been shopping for a new daw lately and came across energyXT. I've watched some tutorials and it looks very easy to use. I also like the fact that it doesn't look so "busy" and doesn't try to emulate the analog equipment that most modern, home muso's have never used before.

I've been skipping around this forum and on the energyXT site and can't for the life of me understand this whole memory stick thing I keep running across. Is this just what the licensing code is supposed to be on, or does the program run off the memory stick? The listing on this site says it does, but if that's the case, how do I demo it? And why would a memory stick plugged into a USB port be faster than my 8-core computer with a 256 gb SSD?

I'm confuzzled...

[ZonderP]

Hi Karl,
funny that you stumbled across this memory stick thing so often, because it is really only of little meaning.
It can be nice, but does not at all directly affect the speed of energyXT running (starting it may be a bit slower or e.g. rendering a track or project to a file on the USB memory stick instead e.g. a SSD), but its actual performance is always determined by the CPU, RAM on the machine where it gets started.
Also be assured it has nothing to do with licensing.
It just means that energyXT just doesn't write anything (like settings/configuration) into the registry of a computer and also not in some 'far' away folders on the computer (like 'C:\Users\[Username]\Documents' or 'C:\Users\AppData\Local\energyXT' and the like). All its settings are just stored in a file named energyXT.ini in the same folder where from energyXT gets started. Its installer also does noting fancy, it just unzips files into the destination directory. Programs with those characteristics are often called 'portable'.
About licensing and demoing: Just download it, install it and demo it. As far as I can remember the only restriction is that you cannot save a project then, all else is fully functional.
If you want to buy it, you'll just get a licensing file that you need to copy to the folder where energyXT.exe is in. That's it.
If you like how it works right now, just do not expect that it will see any 'improvements', bug fixes etc.
Development is basically zero since some time (years) and most probably will not start again.
I still love the workflow and ease of it more than any other DAW. Once configured properly it runs very well with most 32 bit plugins. It will not run with 'modern' 64 bit plugins. And it doesn't behave 'nice' with plugins, which crash, it will just crash itself. For me this is very,very rare. With version 3 there is multicore support and if you want to use old 32 bit plugins which are based on Synthedit, then energyXT will crash (at least if you use more than one instance of them). Therefore better not use those plugins or disable multicore feature.

Have fun with demoing it,
Patrik