About Mountain Utilities and its website
This website is the home of Mountain Utilities, a virtual, one-man company owned by Mark van den Berg, which has been producing software since the early 1990s and specializes in applications for musical equipment.
Some of these applications can be downloaded from this website.
They all work under Windows 2000 and later (e.g. XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10).
Recently some applications have been ported to Intel-based macOS. However, you may also try to run the Windows editions under macOS or Linux in a guest OS within a virtual machine manager like VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels, Wine etc.
Please check the latest news and the list of plans.
Registered users
Even anonymous users can access all content at the Mountain Utilities website: downloads, forum topics etc.
However, as a registered user you can do much more:
- start forum topics and post comments
- subscribe to individual forums (i.e. automatically receive all individual posts or daily digests)
- define (upload) your own avatar (the image shown next to all your posts)
- upload files to the B-Control and GS-10 user areas
- receive newsletters
- vote in polls
Creating a new account
To register, go to the login page, click "Create new account" and follow the instructions.
You have to provide a username (which can contain capital letters and spaces, but cannot be an email address) and your email address. (The reason you can't specify an email address as your username, is that every message you post in a forum exposes your username, which would be very dangerous if your username was an email address.)
Within seconds after you have registered, you should receive an email message containing a one-time login link.
Make sure your email server and reader don't flag the message containing the one-time login link as spam. (If they do, look in your spam folder.)
You should then open the received one-time login link in your webbrowser.
Beware: you can only log in if cookies are enabled for this website in your webbrowser.
Upon logging in for the first time, you are immediately forced to set a password.
After that, you can log out, then log in again manually.
Beware: you have to supply your username on the login form, not your email address.
Subscribing to forums
You can subscribe to each individual forum at this website: click "My account" at the top of the webpage, click the Subscriptions tab, click the Categories tab, enable the forums you wish to subscribe to, and click the Save button at the bottom.
You will receive email notifications for all topics and comments posted in the forums you have subscribed to.
Note that you cannot subscribe to individual topics. So if you are interested in only a particular topic (e.g. your own!), you should simply subscribe to the topic's forum for as long as the topic is "hot", and unsubscribe once notifications about other topics start to annoy you.
Forum topics and comments
- New forum topics and comments become visible at the site immediately after they are posted. However, it may take several hours before the email notifications are sent to the subscribed users.
- You cannot upload images (e.g. screenshots) to the Mountain Utilities website. (That's because the website is on a low-budget webhost with little storage room.) What you can do is include links to externally hosted images.
- Posts by trusted users can contain smileys, like , or even . As you can (hopefully) see, this website displays these smileys graphically. However, in any subscription emails you receive, the smileys may be represented by text (such as "happy" or "sad"), which can be confusing and doesn't look as good... This substitution may occur because the graphical images of these smileys aren't sent along with the emails: the emails only contain links to the images stored at this website. So to make the smileys show up graphically in the emails, you have to allow your reader to load the smiley images from the website. For instance, if Thunderbird shows To protect your privacy, Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message at the top of the message pane, you can press the Options button and choose one of the options provided. After that, any smileys should show up graphically. Now doesn't that make you a lot happier...?
Privacy
No information about users (such as IP or email addresses) will ever be shared with any third party.
Email addresses are not even revealed to other registered users (in forum topics etc.).
The website contains no third-party elements (such as trackers).
All elements of the website (including images and downloads) are served from the website itself.
Security
A lot of effort has gone into making this website as secure as possible for everyone involved.
The website (including all downloads) is only accessible via HTTPS (no matter whether you log in or not). When you try to access the website via HTTP, you are automatically redirected to HTTPS.
Furthermore, the website applies a Content Security Policy (CSP) and a "preloaded" HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy.
Advertising
The Mountain Utilities website contains no ads.
Forum posts advertising third-party products will be deleted and the poster's user account will be blocked without notice.
Downloads
All downloadable documents and applications by Mountain Utilities are freeware in the strict sense and contain no adware (such as bundled offers), spyware or malware.
Note though that the downloads in the B-Control and GS-10 user areas (made available by users) aren't necessarily safe, so you should be a bit more careful with those. However, most of the file types that can be uploaded to these user areas cannot contain active code, so the scope for malware is very limited.
No digital signatures
Since this website uses HTTPS for all communication, all downloads are virtually guaranteed to arrive at your side intact.
However, these downloads are not digitally signed.
One reason for this is that digital signatures are prohibitively expensive and hard to acquire for independent developers.
(For some background see this article: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/notepad-no-longer-code-signed-dev-wont-support-overpriced-cert-industry/.)
So if you use an anti-virus application that doesn't offer any way to run unsigned applications, you can't run these applications.