Strata is available at a special launch price of US$25 during December 2025. The standard price will be US$75.
This page provides details on how Strata is licensed legally and technically.
The Strata user licence allows you, the Licensee of one copy of Strata, to use Strata in one of two licensing modes:
You must not use these two modes at the same time. Pick one! You can change modes whenever you like, and Crickets Audio does not require you to formally register which licensing mode you are using and does not track or enforce the mode. However, in practice most licensees will only ever use one mode.
These two licence modes are appropriate in different contexts.
An example of where Machine mode is appropriate is where there is a music production school that has a lab of 20 computers for students to use. In this context, the school would purchase 20 Strata licenses (just make the Strata count in the shopping cart 20) and install Strata on each computer. Strata on each computer could then be used by whoever sits down in front of the computer to use it. If the school increases the size of the lab by five computers, it should buy five more licenses.
An example of where Personal mode is appropriate is where you are a music producer who has a laptop and a desktop in each of two music studios in two different cities. You fly between the two cities using your laptop on the aeroplane and the desktops when you arrive at each studio. In this case, you would use Personal licensing mode and you would only need to purchase one copy of Strata. You would install it on the laptop and two desktops, but it would be for your sole use. No one else in the studio would be allowed to use Strata. If you hired an assistant in one of the studios and wanted them to use Strata too, you should buy a Machine licence just for that computer and use your Personal licence for the other two computers. The Machine licence would allow anyone in the studio to use Strata on that desktop.
The legal framework is supported, to some extent, by a technical licensing scheme. In order to understand this, we must distinguish clearly between two different things:
When you purchase a Strata licence, the Crickets Audio website creates a record to say that you have purchased Strata and now possess a Strata licence. This is a record of a legal right.
Because you possess a licence, the Crickets Audio website creates and issues to you a Licence Certificate which is a block of XML text that contains your name and other details and is digitally signed using an RSA-2048 signature. Strata will not run without access to one of these licence certificates.
When you install the Strata software, you run the Strata Vision plugin and enter your website username and password into the form provided. Strata Vision will then contact the Crickets Audio website and download your Licence Certificate and place it in your computer's file system. Strata Vision will thereafter run.
Here is an example of a licence certificate to show you what one looks like:
Note: For this example, the digital signature has been modified to invalidate the signature.
Here is a description of each field:
Note: The Licensee fields are mainly to disambiguate you from other users with the same name.
Note: In the music lab example cited earlier, the licence certificate would have a quantity of 20 and the same licence certificate would be installed on each computer in the lab.
Note: The VersionMaxUTC field is used to enforce the Crickets Audio policy of providing free updates for five years.
The following table shows where your licence certificate is stored. When you install Strata you are asked whether you want to install your licence certificate for all users of the machine (Machine licence mode) or just for you (Personal licence mode) and the certificate is written to the corresponding appropriate place.
One of the persistant annoyances of being a music producer is upgrading to a better computer (hooray) but then having to reinstall or relicence all your music software (boo).
From a software vendor's point of view, it doesn't sound like much to ask to get the user to re-enter their username or password or to go through a short re-licensing procedure when the user moves to a new computer ever few years. However, if you are a user with 618 plugins (cough cough), this can become such a time-consuming process that it might actually put you off from ever upgrading your computer!
I don't want to contribute to this problem, so I have engineered the Crickets Audio licensing system so that when you move to a new computer (copying over all your files), Strata will JUST WORK without you having to do anything at all. It will work because Strata only needs to see the XML licence certificate file to run and, if that file is in the same place in the file system, there will be no problem.
This machine licensing portability is likely to come at some cost to Cricket Audio sales, but I have made a policy decision that it is more important to look after our legitimate paying users than to attempt to reduce illegal copies by binding licence certificates to specific machines.
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