Am I missing something?
I wonder whether any of the advice in this thread will help:
It sounds as if the browser is blocking the prompt that should allow Steinberg Download Assistant to run. Steps are provided in the linked thread to reset that setting for Chrome.
Thanks Daniel. After much hassle. It’s installed.
Advice to those that come after: Reinstall Steinberg Download Assistant, Turn off adblockers and anti-virus. Expect many warnings. Expect manual intervention. If you’ve never installed a Steinberg product before, hah! Get ready for some confusion.
My Google Chrome “allow Handlers” was already enabled.
I also tried with Firefox as default browser. No joy.
I deleted and reinstalled the Steinberg Download Assistant. (No download link provided in the purchase confirmation email, but that’s ok, I Googled it. I thought the download assistant was self-updating? Maybe not.)
I also disabled all anti-virus and adblockers. (which have never affected legit installs before. But they didn’t do all this bouncing between browser and extra apps.)
The Download “Assistant”, after a lot of spinning, did logging in and bouncing to browsers, and warnings, and asks for admin rights, three times, and installs the elicenser, and now I’m ready to manually select and download. Multiple progress bars. This is like Microsoft Flight Simulator without the scenery! After the install, no message. Quit the downloader. Find the app, Launch. Sign in again! Left with activation success. Quit that. Launch Dorico. It worked.
Whoever “designed” this flow needs to attend day1 of User Experience school?
I installed Ableton Live yesterday. It was very straightforward. A dedicated installer. You login in directly to the app and it already knows you have bought a licence on the website. No codes. No handlers. No fuzzy little extra apps. It just works.
Good luck everybody! Hope you have time left to make some music.
Good grief is Steinberg Download Assistant really necessary? Seems to cause more problems than it’s worth. Please get rid of that junk.
Steinberg Download Assistant has been a cause of headaches for me as well. I successfully downloaded Dorico 4 without it, which was a headache and required separate installation of the Steinberg Activation Manager, but worked. If the two could be packaged as a single installer for direct download (as is the standard on macOS), it would certainly be preferable.
(And as long as I’m dreaming, it could not ask for root access when installing.)
A universal installer makes sense for a plug-ins vendor where users have many products, sold separately , and frequently updated. But with steinberg I imagine most users only have one or two products. (I have Cubase, Dorico, and Groove Agent and consider myself a heavy user.) So is it more for steinberg‘s convenience than ours?
Spectrasonics automatically detects updates and builds a bespoke single installer on the server for all your products. And their installer understands when you’ve moved large sample libraries onto an external disk and doesn’t keep writing duplicates to the system drive.
Waves knows what licenses you have and can install them and activate software with one click.
Logic Pro X silently auto-updates for free and has a download manager for instruments, loops etc built into the DAW.
I could go on … but something has gone wrong. Please try again later LOL.
All worked very easily for me, but I used safari. The one thing I didn’t realise to do was put my activation code into the download manager…
Yeah the whole download code / activation code thing catches me out every upgrade. It’s so daft.
And it’s damaging for Steinberg because for many users it’s their first experience of unfamilar software.
On more than one occasion I’ve asked a collaborator to install a Steinberg trial to open one of my projects (Dorico or Cubase). They reply “it says my elicenser is out of date. But I can’t find a newer one. I contacted Steinberg support but they haven’t got back to me yet.”
I’m pretty sure they just entered the wrong code in the wrong place because it’s confusing. I tell them. But at that point they’ve used up their motivation for dealing with unfamiliar, confusing badly-designed, stuff. They expect Dorico/Cubase to be similar. And it’s put them off Steinberg completely. True story.