This is not acceptable, no matter the corporate language used to justify it.
On my end, I use as less third-party plug-ins as possible, precisely to avoid this kind of intrusive hassles and headache bringing ‘registering’ processes, each of them being different than the others, of course : actually it bothers more the honest customers/users than the other ones…
It’s very difficult to avoid these days. And you won’t know until it’s “too late” as you have to load the plug-ins to analyze the network behavior.
One of the things I respect about Steinberg is that Cubase and Nuendo both launch free of analytics posting (other than if you’ve enabled the Hub, which is a bit different). UAD is constantly posting analytics to sentry_io from their console and from UA Connect. iZotope posts to google-analytics, mix panel, new relic, and others every time you launch the portal. NI posts to their ni-config analytics every single time you instantiate a plugin. Kilohearts, Vital, SSL, SoftTube, on and on and on do it.
What’s even worse, is that they do this even when you’ve opted out of analytics and behavioral metrics. When you click those “opt out” check boxes, it doesn’t mean “stop sending data,” it means “send my data, but tag is as being opted out so that it is ignored.”
I’m getting dangerously close to a rant here, and I apologize, but as it regards Steinberg’s ability to monitor or control this behavior, I just wanted to point out that it’s prolific, and there’s really nothing they can do about it.
Never happens on my Windows machines for the 3 UA ilok dongle products I own. Ua connect is disabled in both areas of windows startup.
Only starts up when I manually start it up to check for ua updates.
This was also my observed behavior after moving cloud-licenses to the iLok USB key. Except for Luna - if you launch Luna, irrespective of startup behavior it automatically launches the UA Connect Helper and UA Connect and there’s no way to disable that. If you uninstall UA Connect, you can’t launch Luna at all (which I couldn’t care less about as I only have it to test some plugins). At least, this was the behavior last time I checked.
I’m making a distinction between plug-ins performing license checks and plugins phoning home for marketing, analytics, and update checks in my statements above, FWIW.
I didn’t imagine the process to be so simple. I have to understand that the plugin is programmed to connect to the server to check for a license according to criteria determined by the company. This can be done elegantly or not.
So the idea of the timeout would be to allow Cubase to start by abandoning those plugins that take too long to connect and get permission.
If it can speed up the process and help find the troublemakers, I like the idea…
To get back to the subject of this post, namely ‘Can Cubase Pro 14 be used without network?’ I have my answer, it’s yes, but not necessarily with all third-party plugins, unless you have licenses that allow their ‘Offline’ uses without needing to access a server.
In this situation, I have to forget about UAD and Waves plugins, all the others work. I can still do a great job with stock plugins only.