As of the end of March 2007, Audiotools, BandX and other Unrelated Inventions products are no longer available for download or purchase.

When I started Unrelated Inventions back in 1998, it was largely an accident. I wrote Audiotools as a favour for a friend and put it out more as an afterthought than as a calculated business move. When, two years later, I found I was happier working on my shareware than I was in my job, I took the decision to make the shareware my job.

It is no longer fun. The growth of the Internet over the last ten years has meant a dilution of the enthusiast spirit that originally drove it, and a massive increase in piracy, spam and other unpleasantries. When it becomes necessary not only to invest money in protection systems to make sure that you can continue to sell your software, but to spend much of your development time bolstering those systems against people trying to rip you off, you know the market has gone to pot.

Every day, I receive numerous key requests from Russia, Poland and other Eastern block countries from people who have never purchased the software. And it’s not just they who are trying to steal from me. Over the last year or so, I have several times found stolen keys and cracks circulating. These have invariably come from countries like America and Germany – countries which are wealthy enough that they, less than anyone else, cannot possibly justify software theft. With the music and film industries also under siege from piracy, I can draw no other conclusion but that the Internet is now the refuge for freeloaders and I want no further part of it.

It means that I am withdrawing it. There will be no further releases and the current version will no longer be available for download.

Absolutely not. Open source, to me, has always been a flawed idea. As long as programmers have a need to live in houses, eat food and do other things that cost money, there can be no justification for a philosophy that dictates they should work for free. Why us and nobody else? Not only that, but quite apart from the fact that I know others who have written free software and still found people expecting them to jump to attention when they ask for support, I think that converting Audiotools to free software would be analogous to responding to a burglary by giving away everything you own. It’s not going to happen. If you want a decent audio package from now on, you’ll either have to pay for it or write it yourself. End of story.

With Audiotools’ low price and free upgrades, I think users have done pretty well over the years. You wouldn't, after all, expect someone to be there at your beck and call when you purchased a CD or a DVD, which costs about the same. Nonetheless, I will continue to do my best to offer help and support, although I cannot promise as rapid a response as previously. I will not, however, offer support to unregistered users, so be prepared to prove your registered status if asked. Support will be available through the link to your left for the time being. Should this be abused, I reserve the right to insist all contact go through the support interface in the software itself.

Sometimes the software has been fun, and I’ve met some interesting people. Other times, I’ve had to deal with some real arseholes – people who expect the moon on a stick for $25, sometimes even when they aren’t even registered. As I move on, I have some regrets that it didn’t pan out, but I’m sanguine – I never saw Audiotools as what I would be doing for the rest of my life.