Well, the title says it all!

For those of us with a fast, broadband connection, and that live outside of the US/Canada, it would save us big, big money!

All the best!

Antonello

Just checking, you do know it is over 1.5 TB for BIAB 2018, and it gets larger each year. That would be a huge download, totally dwarfing any other program.

I recently added a laptop to my collection of musical equipment. The download and install of the EverythingPak then PlusPak version took a full weekend. (This combination of downloads was suggested by tech support if I had high speed internet and it worked out great.)

A bit longer and I would have just bought the media versions and await their arrival via the mail.

I shutter to think how long the Audiophile download would be.

...Deb

Internet speeds are getting faster by the year, I am sure if PG music stays afloat for 3-5 years they might make it downloadable, it will probably save them some headache. I live in rural area and even here internet speeds went up 5x in the past 3 years.

I am more concerned about their spinning hard drives. I have buried 2 small sized Seagate internal laptop drives within past 6 month. One from 07/2011 and another 12/11 mfg dates. Given that 80% of time computer was"off" that correlates with conclusion that these drives live for 3-5 years.

Hopefully SSD prices drop significantly soon

As Matt wrote the Audiophile Version is some 1.5 TBytes. Even most fast WAN speeds are less than 100Mbits/sec. Allowing for protocol control messages the odd interrupt etc. you could multiply the 1.5Tbytes by 10 giving you 15 Tbits of data to be handled. Even at 100 Mbits/sec we are still looking at a huge download that will take considerable time. About 150,000 seconds or just under 2 days if you’re lucky (assuming no other traffic).

Now so far we have only looked at one client. Now imagine the position for PG. say they offered the service and 1000 people took it up. PG would be up for a huge communications cost let alone the servers to deliver it. Even if they could and had a 1Gbit link it would take at least 15,000 seconds of uninterrupted upload per Audiophile download at 1Gbit/sec. If you had 3 concurrent download sessions everyone would slow down.

Over my working career I had a number of discussions with people and companies that spent big money upgrading links only to find download speeds were often dictated by the other end.

The way I calculate it in a nutshell it would impractical to even offer such a service.

My thoughts. (I could not be bothered to calculate the delivery time as it would still depend on many other factors)

See this tool https://www.download-time.com/ it might help but it has no margin for error or link sharing.

Tony

If we can wait a year, a 2 TB flash drive might exist but at an enormous cost. In the meantime, perhaps 30 DVDs would be better. Or perhaps one external USB drive.

I think some of the concern is the additional import duty costs on the hardware. Downloads would avoid that, but the practicality needs to be taken into considerations, as others have already noted.

I don't understand why there is no option to download only the part which is needed to render a single biab file (or a folder of biab files). I am pretty sure that the size of the necessary data is small and can be done in reasonable time even for the audiophile edition. That data could be cached so that no further download is necessary for a rebuild.

There are at least two other reasons for such a feature. First, you don't have to fill your expensive SSD with data that you never need and second, BIAB can be implemented on devices like an iPad Pro!

I think it's because the Audiophile version includes everything. It doesn't incorporate selectable packages.

Yes, I do sympathize with those who have additional costs from shipping or taxes. As Videotrack said, the audiophile version is virtually everything they offer. It might make sense though to offer a downloadable package of only what is new (the base program plus the new RealTracks, RealDrums and styles). Perhaps the size of that wouldn’t be so staggering.

Hey, I did not talk of "packages"! Besides, that is a sales and marketing argument, not a technical one.

The partial download for a given biab file I am talking of is even much smaller than a "package" wich contains all chords in all keys. With other words, only the chords that are effectively used should be downloaded!

Thanks for the clarification. I guess that PGM will keep that in mind as they consider the request.

I'm not sure if this would work but maybe a cloud service is in order. Pay a fee and use your activation code as a password to the cloud. You would DL everything but the RTs and RDs. You would then use the cloud as you would an external HD. If you didn't upgrade the next year those RTs and RDs would not be accessible with your code.

This would help the user but probably be a big PITA for PGMusic! They would need to have enough cloud space and monitor it. But it is a thought. YMMV

I guess I still don't understand the request, not that it matters, but I'm only trying to help.

The technical argument against making the audiophile version downloadable is that it's too big, and all that that entails. Maybe someday...

But the request has somehow morphed. Jbox, could you please restate the request and give as much detail as you could? Specifically, what does this mean?

"The partial download for a given biab file I am talking of is even much smaller than a "package" wich contains all chords in all keys. With other words, only the chords that are effectively used should be downloaded!"

Sort of like and Audiophile PlusPak, where you just get the changes from the previous Audiophile.

+1 for update packages, not whole download.

Samsung T5 SSD (USB C 3.1 / Thunderbolt and backward compatible) drives are super fast compared to USB 3.1 flash drives. But 2TB cost a small fortune now.

I would imagine that by end of next year, 2TB would cost around $200. Would make sense for PG to offer optional upgrades to these (or similar SSD) drives for first time buyers and downloadable upgrade packages.