Soundcloud at least pretends to listen; there's a cute animation. Thing is, during the setup operation, it does this for 30 second "preview" chunks you choose, and can re-choose if you want, and I'm not sure what the price is for choosing badly. It says to pick the part with the most dynamic range, but what if I don't? Do I get a terrible master because of that really noisy part I forgot about?

Regarding subscriptions: Yeah, there's some heinous stuff going on, but I find a subscription to something like EastWest's "ComposerCloud" really valuable as a source of bazillions of virtual instruments I could never buy on their own. Izotope gives a free week, which I went into expecting I'd pay $20 for the first month after that; I may or may not continue, but I don't know how else I could get to try out all this stuff.