So what is the purpose of this? It only shows Cubase 11 Pro Update for me. I own a number of different registered Steinberg products. Is this supposed to indicate which products have an available update that isn’t currently installed.
I’d like to indulge the fantasy that this is the case, but given the history of the Steinberg Download Manager I’m more inclined to assume it’s another useless/broken feature?
Some of the Steinberg folks posted when that first appeared that it was a work in progress and would be more fully functional in a future version of the Download Manager.
Thanks. Well, it’s a start. I’m generally not in the habit of bashing developers, but the Download Manager is a shocker and an unfortunate example of not doing what it says on the tin.
Actually, it does…to an extent. It just says Download Manager. It does that. Would be nice if it found your current installs and showed if there were updates available, like some other vendors do.
The idea of a manager though is to typically make your life easier and streamline the download process. Unfortunately, the Download Manager really doesn’t do those things:
What you suggest is what is standard in pretty pretty much any download manager by any plugin or DAW developer out there. As it stands, if you really want to know which of your products has an update, you gotta go through all your products locally and manually note what version you have and crosscheck it. That should not be the goal of a download manager. Steinberg’s version appears to be a perpetual WIP.
What you’re describing is an Update Manager, and yes I would like to have that for Steinberg.
A Download Manager, manages downloads. I’m guessing you have a fast reliable internet connection. People that don’t have fast reliable internet connections often have a LOT of trouble downloading large files, such as the content libraries for a lot of Steinberg products. A download manager assists in that it can save partial downloads and resume them at a later time if a connection is lost, instead of having to start over again…
Well I kinda feel that the distinction is a bit of semantics in that an Update and Download Manager are pretty much interchangeable in the current climate of audio software. If an update isn’t a download then I don’t know what it is. Spitfire Audio’s Download/Update Manager is a good example of how this works, and with large file sizes. Also NI Access - there is no extra usage of bandwidth/data in these scenarios. You only download what you need to, or update what you need to, in one convenient place. That should be the function of any of these managers.
I wouldn’t suggest the method of Plugin Alliance or others for Steinberg products, whereby it creates a custom installer and downloads and installs all your stuff, because of size reasons.
But Steinberg is really behind the ball on this one. The Download manager has been around for awhile now, and it feels very much a half-baked attempt. To have separate update and download managers for this sort of thing would be completely redundant.
Its gonna be dead soon anyway since the new LM will be coming online
I’m not entirely sure that’s true.
Maybe someone from Steinberg could clarify?
by far the worst example for such kind of tools…
what has license management to do with downloads for software installers?
I just bought Cubase 10.5 pro and Halion 6, but inside in “my product” I still have only Cubase element 11 demo expired (and removed from my PC) as my only product. SO I have no idea what I need to download, plugin components sound etc… and where. SO I canot install the software that I just bought. I write to assistance and they canot solve this problem. With Studio one, when you launch the programm it manege in bacground all downloads. I thinks the solution is resell the license. If they dont help to manage all download components included in the two software.
You might need to drag the bottom of the DL down some (depending on your monitor/screen) to see.
Cubase Pro 10.5
HALion 6
The Steinberg Download Assistant won’t become obsolete with the release of the new license management, as it is mainly used to provide downloads.
I - and everyone at Steinberg - agree that the Steinberg Download Assistant needs to be improved.
The “My products” can be convenient for some users if the product Download Access Code has been redeemed through the Steinberg Download Assistant.
However, it cannot show any products for which the Download Access Code or activation code has been used elsewhere. It also cannot show products which are not featured in the Steinberg Download Assistant, so most older applications.
We also need to make more information more persistent and visible.
Thanks for explaining how that section worked. Not possible to tie it to our account and read from the MySteinberg database then? Or is something like that a work in progress?
Not at this point. What you see in MySteinberg is very old technology we want to replace rather sooner than later. It wouldn’t make much sense to try to include that too and add more old products to the Steinberg Download Assistant in its current form.
It’s been a year now since you wrote that and nothing has happened. The other day I routinely updated Windows 10, which, thanks to the incompetence and indifference that has ruined Microsoft for decades, froze and crashed my Windows installation, rendering me at the start of a week of downloading and installing software and finetuning the registry etc, and here I am with the Steinberg Download Assistant and I have no way of knowing what software and VSTs and addons I’ve bought the last couple of years, all I can do is hope I find most of them in emails from Steinberg, which is going to take forever to find out, and when I have found out, I’m going to have to look through a billion Steinberg products that I DIDN’T buy and pick out the ones I bought and download them one by one, except in the case of Cubase 12 Pro, I can just click “download all”.
Please realize that making a download assistant like that and then not fixing it after God knows how many complaints, and not even a year after a Steinberg employee says “everyone at Steinberg are aware of this and want to fix it”, is catastrophic, pathological behavior on the part of the managers at Steinberg. It makes me wonder what other disasterous decisions Steinberg is making that I’m not aware of because I haven’t paid close enough attention to what your competitors have done with their software the last couple of decades.
Please copy this message and send it to whoever it concerns.
Wow.
Just in case you didn’t know, you can find a list of the products you purchased here:
https://account.steinberg.net/products
No, you can’t.
Yes, you can. If you’re having some kind of issue, please be more specific.
