Finally, the Ableton Live 7.0.3 is officially installed and running on my laptop. No, the package hasn’t come yet if you wonder, but they were generous enough to send the download link (for the app only of course) and a bunch of the serials along with the order confirmation to get me started immediately upon charging my credit card. So, I spent 10 minutes downloading all the latest while they packed the boxed version for me.

The Ukraine is famous for its unreliable postal services (well, as many other distant corners of the world), however, I believe UPS or FedEx (still not sure are we in the EU or outside it) will do its best to save some silver hair to me. Hopefully there will be no problems with customs and everything. Even 5%-10% tax would be a LOT given the price I paid.

You may wonder, why am I drawing so much attention to the fact of the purchase? It’s easy to understand if you are in a music geek circles, and almost impossible otherwise. Long story short, (a) it’s the best music production workbench with all sines and saws world ever seen, (b) the fact that you purchased any software product in this country (and bordering Russia) is kind of … extraordinary and deserves attention by itself, and finally, (c) it let’s me immerse deeper into the creative part without a stupid thought “do I deserve to use this, or am I a smelly thief”.

Happy.

Comments from the past

Andrew Dashin said at 16:11 on April 10th, 2008:

Is it really unreliable? I often recieve magazines from Ru. Time to time I recieve packages from US/EU and never had any problems. Only once a package was Fedexed to me, but anyway – Fedex seems to work fine in Ua.

Aleksey Gureiev said at 16:19 on April 10th, 2008:

Yup. I’ve lost several packages from the US including valuable ones, and there was not a chance to track them down.

As for couriers, like FedEx, UPS, TNT and others, they are very reliable, but have a substantial shortcoming (compared to the native postal service) — they pass ALL packages through customs, which means that if you purchase for example electronic components (like I do sometimes), you need to pay customs fee (of up to 30% of the declared cost) to get it. If it were a native postal service, you wouldn’t, but again there’s a chance of never receiving a package.

The dilemma. :)