Hi Jendrik.
I’m not sure who to direct this to, but I have a suggestion. Like many (all?) users, I greatly appreciate the move to soft licensing. However, it would be great if Steinberg could be a little more generous and helpful now in helping current licensees migrate to a dongle-less environment while Steinberg updates its products.
For example, why not provide a “dongle-free evaluation period” for all existing licensees today? Maybe provide 1 or 2 years of dongle-free use to existing licensees of a given product? The evaluation could end at a pre-determined date in the future or whenever the licensing has been updated for that specific product, whichever comes first.
Maybe that sounds preposterous to Steinberg. I respect the need to protect the product licensing and the work of the company, but I also want to be able to use multiple products with fewer restrictions.
In my case, I’m using Cubase Artist 12, which thankfully no longer requires the dongle. However, my old Absolute 4 license that I of course use with Cubase still needs the USB license. So even though Cubase doesn’t need a dongle, I still need to carry the dongle everywhere. And Steinberg doesn’t provide the option to change the licensing for Absolute since I chose to license it on the USB licenser, back when Cubase also required the USB license, which to me made sense at the time. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. And I recently learned that even if I upgrade to Absolute 5, the original license for Absolute 4 still has to be on a dongle, since the product I’d be upgrading from was originally licensed that way. Another Catch-22.
Anyway, yes, there would be a risk of unauthorized use by giving existing users an evaluation period, but that could be mitigated with an expiration date when the “evaluation period” expires. And, again, I’m only suggesting providing such a solution to people who already paid for a particular product license.
So that’s just one idea. My main point is that Steinberg should look for a creative way to balance its needs with those of its customers. As much as I like Steinberg and Cubase, any time (months? years?) that Steinberg spends updating licenses across the product line is also time that I can spend evaluating other DAWs and plugins that are easier to work with today.
Thank you for listening! : )
