Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU.

Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals.

So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left.

I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use.

EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape.

Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.

csmpltn

Can anybody recommend an Audition alternative that does not require a monthly subscription to use?

seanw444

For simple audio track editing (not music production), use one of the forks of Audacity. Audacity started going spooky by adding telemetry and age restrictions. Good ones are Tenacity [1], and Audacium [2].

For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own.

Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW.

[1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html