When the new licence system was introduced Steinberg marked upgraded elicences as:
Nuendo 11 (upgraded to Nuendo 12 with Steinberg Licensing)
This meant that a valid licence still existed on your elicenser.
More recently Steinberg have been upgrading elicences with:
DELETED Simon Phillips Jazz Drums (upgraded to Steinberg Licensing)
which, annoying, removes the one from your elicenser and on some upgrades leads to problems with things missing from earlier hosts (there is a Steinberg knowledgebase article about it)
Has anybody done the Absolute 6 upgrade from 5 ? When āverifiedā what does this leave on your elicenser ?
It says āAbsolute 5 (Upgraded to Absolute 6 with Steinberg Licensing)ā
The problem is when you want to sell your license, especially for Groove Agent 5 which was just āmodifiedā without any version upgrade
āGroove Agent 5 (Upgraded to Groove Agent 5 with Steinberg Licensing)ā
It means that you must ask Steinberg support to do some dark chemistery on your GA 5 using Steinberg licensing and the one still on the e-licenser. I think they have created a total mess with this situation. No way to simply sell the e-licenser with the GA5 licenseā¦
It seems the rule is that migrated or updated software licences remain active on eLicenser for use with legacy eLicenser versions, but content licences are disabled after migration to Steinberg Licensing. I know of one exception to this: Video Decoder for Avid DNxHD, which I would classify as software, is disabled on eLicenser after migration, apparently at Avidās insistence.
There is some logic to this position. Obsolete software versions can be important for revisiting legacy projects, though they are of limited interest to those who do not already have the software. Content rarely, if ever, undergoes a paid update. Steinberg will not want people like me who have thousands of pounds worth of content licences (including Iconica Opus in my case) to be able to migrate those licences to Steinberg Licensing and then give their USB eLicenser with usable content licences to someone else.
As you rightly note, this creates a problem that migrated content is unavailable in legacy software. I have yet to migrate any of my content licences, but my personal need for legacy support is very low and I think the convenience of having the licences on Steinberg Licensing will win over legacy support for me.
I want to sell some of my content licences because I have landed up owning that content as part of a larger product. I have been holding on to these licences until they were on Steinberg Licensing, because of the hassle of having to sell eLicenser licences on a USB eLicenser and how unpopular USB eLicenser licences were. Steinberg has said that Steinberg Licensing licenses should be transferred along with any migrated eLicenser licence for the product, but bearing in mind the eLicenser licence for migrated content is a useless placeholder, I presume they will be happy for me to keep it. Iām still not sure what to do with my Backbone licence (which I own as part of Absolute 6) - it probably isnāt worth enough second-hand to be worth the hassle of transferring the migrated eLicenser licence if I sold the licence.
Another issue is that you cannot get reactivation codes for software licences on a soft eLicenser that has been migrated or upgraded off eLicenser - or, at least you couldnāt when I reformatted my computer for a clean upgrade to Windows 11 last year. I realised this before I reformatted, so I moved my existing migrated/upgraded licenses to my USB eLicenser and have moved all newly migrated/upgraded licenses to my USB eLicenser.
As @csurieux says, an update to Absolute 6 leaves āAbsolute 5 (Upgraded to Absolute 6 with Steinberg Licensing)ā on your eLicenser, which will work for legacy versions of Absolute components.
There are lotās of edge cases where this causes a problem - and itās not just for ālegacyā hosts. And thatās assuming C11 etc is now ālegacyā - which strictly speaking it isnāt, itās still a supported Steinberg product.
The total lack of transparency is also part of the issue - there is no indication what will happen when you transfer your licences to SAM - and as you have found, it varies.
anyway thatās probably best left for another thread.
