My only one concern about Dorico is the horror of Steinberg eLicenser (a dongle for most of Steinberg professional products and all of current Vienna Instruments): its shell is extremely fragile. (I hadn’t been using a desktop computer in the past 4 years due to my necessities of mobility.)
This led to my decision of staying away from Cubase since 2013 when Logic Pro X was available. I hope that Steinberg and YAMAHA will consider changing the material of the shell of their eLicenser dongle to make sure it is durable enough.
I don’t refuse dongles since it at least making licenses movable. I just want the eLicenser be more durable in portable situations. Otherwise I won’t be back on using Wavelab Pro and Cubase Pro. (I have an iLok holding all of my EastWest product licenses, and that iLok still works well by all means.)
My thankfulness to the availability of soft-elicenser with Dorico. I am looking forward to this great innovative app of miracle. But I still need to claim my following ideas. I am not mean to your Dorico team BUT to the entire marketing department of Steinberg because of their disability for reading the mood of their future market: just make some survey and you could figure that most future customers have donglephobia in parallel with their strong necessities of using their licenses on two computers at the same time. (I am pretty sure that the Dorico team had already talked to the marketing team a lot regarding the soft-elicenser, otherwise Dorico will have to be activated with an eLc in its crappy fragile shell.)
[1] Is the marketing department of Steinberg still refusing to think of selling licenses on STEAM after losing their market on STEAM from Cakewalk for already two years behind? // Any annoying special offer notification of STEAM could be disabled through its preferences, coping with people’s concerns of this. // I already came up with this idea YEARS ago, and people here are just laughing: Cubase could be sold and delivered on Steam Platform. - Steinberg Lounge - Steinberg Forums .
[2] Another approach: Just put the license on users’ MySteinberg Accounts; Offering the software download on both the Mac App Store and standalone download. When people want to use it, just log in with their MySteinberg Accounts and they don’t need to let the computer on the internet for the next 7 days. After the 7 days, they need to log in again for the next 7 days of offline usage. This would be okay to those people who have steamphobia. // Note that we still need to cope with some customers’s necessities of keeping their workplaces offline (e.g.: military institutions, etc.). In such case, an enterprise licensing server may be a good plan or you could still allow them to use dongles as their plan B.
[3] What about Bluetooth dongles? Just plug it onto an iPhone charger and connect it wirelessly to your computer through Bluetooth. This idea is to cope with the lack of USB ports on most MacBook models since the approach of using USB hub usually leads to the lack of connection stability.
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