I love you Steinberg, I love Cubase. it’s a truly magnificent piece of software, and I’ve been a user for nearly 20 years.
But I loathe and detest the DONGLE! Taking it out and about with me is an endless source of worry about whether I’ll lose it, forget to take it out of my desktop to my laptop bag etc etc…
It also fairly regularly causes a crash when booting up, saying cant find authorisation etc etc…
I have to be honest, I prefer Cubase to Logic as a DAW and I feel loyal to Steinberg and the time and effort they put into their product.
But the dongle is something that often makes me think how much easier life would be using Logic on my travels…
Please listen to me and thousands of others Steinberg! We love you, but you’re driving us crazy with yer DONGLE!!
I dont care that much. Some kind of working protection is probably needed. But I would like to see options. A bluetooth dongle would solve some of the problems. A network solution would also be good to have. Or a dongle that you can remove after start and maybe need to “sync” ever second hours or so.
While this might be nice… I’d hate to think of all the possible bugs a new under the hood copy protection would bring. There’s enough already for such a big change introducing more.
Another point I’ve always wondered, why does Cubase take an extra 20 seconds or so (this is on NVMe) to load, scanning licences for packs that come as standard! We could see increased load times with a new kind of protection system, who knows.
re-authorizing all my plugins that aren’t iLok or Steinberg, is such a PITA when I reformat or build a new PC. Plus, I leave my studio PC off the internet… which means, I pretty much have to connect it to install and re-auth all these non-ilok plugs… as soon as it’s plugged into the net, a.) it’s exposed to security threats I haven’t patched because it has been offline and B.) it starts wanting to auto-update and all this bs.
Just seen this and totally agree!! I’m a music technology teacher and the Dongle is a constant pain! One place I work for recently upgraded 22 licences. In the past Dongles have been lost and damaged. I was planning to copy the the licences onto the hard drives but Steinberg have just said this isn’t possible. I know people who have avoided Cubase because they don’t want the hassle of using USB A connectors on their Mac’s.
Like you I have loved using Cubase for years, but the Dongle just doesn’t suit how I, my students or schools work.
Well, it isn’t at all likely to happen. We could compare Logic to Cubase/Nuendo etc, but this isn’t Apple.
All one needs to install and run Logic is the dmg installer. This is really nice for the end user, but if one feels it’s appropriate to share the .dmg, as widely as humanly possible, there is no protection. Apple must think they can afford it, as it’s the same for FCP-X, Motion and other applications. Other entities would prefer to have everybody buy their product or be SOL.
I have other things which require the “Steinberg” dongle, aka “Vienna Key”; ie., VSL so I’m going to have to have it anyway. I recently had to reformat my drive to move back one version number of OS and things non-syncrosoft key, eg., NI products authorized later than the recover image are no good, have to be reupped. It’s a good system and that’s not a huge inconvenience, but it may as well be all syncrosoft key in my life. And I have lost and broken the thing and had to recover.
Steinberg, keep the dongle, but make it small like a wireless mouse receiver. That way, we can leave it plugged into a laptop and there is no risk of it breaking off. I would gladly sacrifice a usb port to leave it always plugged in. I forgot to bring mine home today, and I can’t work on any music away from the studio. Not good! If my rig was stationary I wouldn’t care, but I’m on a laptop.
