Concerns about Steinberg Licensing

You could reassure me by giving me a perpetual license lol

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That’s funny because reading this forum for a few years now, it’s true that many users are against the dongle. But seeing this thread, it seems to be the opposite :wink: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

Well, I still think that having the choice for a hardware dongle would satisfy a lot of user while giving the choice of a cloud or machine based option.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve thought about it in details. Though I have no problem with the dongle, I welcome this new system and will adapt to it. I trully respect the work done by any software developper and understand the need of protection.

I understand your point. You object to the fact that the software should ever need to contact our servers to renew its activation. Please accept that we have taken this on board.

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Well it could prove useful for a few years as I can use Wavelab and Cubase on different machines while using version 12 on another 2. I’ve seen so many mains about the dongle and now it’s gone mad with mains removing it lol. Personally I like the dongle but things always change in life so I will carry on with Cubase as I am used to it and like it.

I’m all for software protection - I protect my works too and loathe piracy - therefore I understand the goal of protecting the hard work.
The practically ideal situation IMO would be similar to iLok: the customer can choose between machine based, dongle based or cloud based protection. All is administered through a central software, therefore Steinberg would get its user information. It would even allow to implement a flexible pricing. Let’s say a user needs just a basic package, another needs a combination of two studio authorisations and one machine based on the notebook etc. I think of something like iLok with a flexible pricing, because this system would be in the hands of Steinberg/Yamaha.
At the moment the announced ‘necessary’ intervals of checking the user authorisations smells not only like deep mistrust, but also add additional layers of potential problems. I experienced this with VPS Avenger, as mentioned before and they have a three months re-authorisation cycle.
I wouldn’t also underestimate the psychological side. The feeling to own something, to have your studio, your tools as something ‘complete’, makes you simply more relaxed.
And … if this becomes a trend, the people like me, who bought and buy a lot of software are getting
‘punished’ more and more. Your, or Vengeance system may only work if there a few installations, but studios have often many hundreds of apps and plug ins, it will become a mess at a certain point: when is what to re-authorise again, what cycles, when, where? … Murphys law will kick in certainly.

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I would argue that historically Steinberg’s licensing solution has not been helpful at all to large facilities and enterprise customers, or indeed educational customers. No volume pricing, no central management, no network deployment, and so on. We intend to improve all of these things, and more besides, as we build on the foundations that Steinberg Licensing will provide. Our goal is to make it much easier and hopefully even cheaper for facilities large and small to manage their Steinberg products.

I also understand the psychological component that you want to feel that your software is under your control. This is not unreasonable, of course, and we would support that view. We are looking for the way to balance your convenience and your peace of mind with our own peace of mind and the ability to protect our mutual investment in our products so that we can continue to deliver more value to you in the future, in the form of support, new product development, and so on.

There is no chance that Steinberg Licensing will involve a hardware key or dongle component. But if we leave that aside it seems to me that your main objection, like others on this thread, is that you do not want the software to have to contact Steinberg’s activation servers periodically once it has been activated. Would you agree with my assessment?

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I was wondering with the new licensing will we need to install all of our halion sound libraries, groove agent libraries and other sound contents and will that mean if we want to still use our e licence, after the new license is rolled out that our sound contents will no longer work, or would we need to double install them? it’s just steinberg sound libraries already use 200 gig, would i have to re install them to a new location if i upgrade to cubase pro 12 but still want the security of being able to use cubase 11 and contents, if it is the only option , thank you.

We’ve worked hard to ensure that the content libraries are compatible and won’t need reinstallation.

The fact is that Cubase and Nuendo are the last two DAWs that were not breached yet.
E-Licenser, one of the strongest piracy protection tools available and you are just wasting it away to fit in with the Adobe crowd?
Companies pay millions for strong protection. This is crazy.
Also the 30 day or even 1 year renewal is a slap in the face to the thousands of loyal users.

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nope it’s not a slap in the face, it’s a gift for all thousands of us needing to multitask, like scoring or mastering on an other computer while doing large export jobs, being able to go out of the studio to record/score while doing the same thing or just not worrying about losing/breaking/getting stolen that key.

I’ve never in my life met anyone asking for a dongle for any other software in the world in order to be able to use it, that’s just pure nonsense, and as I said above I think people like you just developped a Stockholm Syndrom, no one wanted to get prisoners of that damn thing in the first place but now that we’re free and granted multiple licenses of our favorite softwares, still some of you want to go back to jail.
Thanks but no thanks, every other software company in the world that I use allow us to have multiple licenses and no dongle, it was damn time for Steinberg to move away from that crap.

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But will they still be compatible with cubase pro 11 after you have updated the system, for instance, say i upgrade to cubase pro 12, but for some reason i can not get internet access and i can not use cubase pro 12, then have to resort back to the e license dongle to use cubase pro 11, will we run into missing license issues because all our sound libraries are updated to only be used under the new license system and not the e licence dongle?

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Does the new system involve a driver or service running in the background all the time? Or is the activation service only running when Cubase is launched?

Yes, correct, that’s my main concern.

There is an additional process called Steinberg License Engine that runs while Cubase or Dorico is running, but that process exits when you exit the main application. It’s extremely light on system resources, and (as I understand it) runs only to provide vital functions for e.g. accessing content licenses while the host is running.

Great, then we understand each other. We have heard that feedback loud and clear, and you can be sure that we will discuss it internally.

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By requiring us to authenticate every 30 days we don’t really own the software anymore, do we? We rent it until you shut down the servers or revoke the license at your will. I’ve happily been paying for Cubase updates every year but today I installed the Studio One trial just to see my options in the future. Sorry Steinberg, it looks like this might very well be goodbye. Did you even consider iLok? You could even have a trade in program for the eLicenser and got some bonus points for not contributing to more e-waste.

Are you aware of any improvements in CPU performance without the overhead of a hardware dongle being polled?

I don’t have any hard data to share, no, but from what I understand of what my colleagues have said, as part of the eLicenser system certain audio processing calculations were carried out on the eLicenser hardware rather than by the computer’s CPU. With the removal of the eLicenser, those calculations will instead be carried out by the CPU. Whether this will make any real-world performance difference I can’t say – on one level I would doubt it, since the engineering team would have been very careful in choosing the aspects of the audio processing pipeline to protect using eLicenser to guard against any performance implications.

Excellent! Thanks for the info.

Thanks for your feedback, @newtype.

I don’t know how many of the 321 other posts in this thread (at the time of reply) you’ve read, but you are not the only person to have expressed concerns about the software periodically contacting an activation server to refresh its activation. If you use your browser’s find feature to search for “iLok” you will find several other posts relating to iLok in this thread, too, so you can find out whether or not we considered iLok by reading the thread (tl:dr: we did, it isn’t suitable).

As I have said to several other posters in this thread, we have heard the feedback concerning the periodic connection to the activation servers loud and clear.

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