The Steinberg Media Technologies support team is committed to provide a comprehensive service. An important part of any support offer is the direct contact via email and telephone. Before getting in contact with us, we’d like to ask to check our other online resources for troubleshooting.
Often the experience as a Steinberg user is a lot like walking into a dystopia like “1984” or “Brazil”. The quote above comes form the locked support thread, and is possibly the most Orwellian touch so far…
What does the first sentence mean? We lack even a basic manual, have no functional tutorials for WL7. All we have is a non-linear, unillustrated help system, spewed out into a text file for offline reading (waste of time without illustrations and cross-referencing to conventional terms).
If one goes to the linked online resource page, they discover there is no direct email link whatsoever. In fact, the only way to get support is via a webform. But, a contact form on a website is NOT “direct contact” or “email”, it’s just the front end of a contact-manager. I don’t see any phone numbers either. Maybe I’m missing something.
The only time I attempted to use it, the site rejected Safari, and returned a 404 error. Firefox likes it more, maybe this is fixed now? At any rate, very little of the content on the linked site is specific to WL7, nor are there any addendums or appendices to the existing weak materials that I could find.
Anyway, I’m mostly laughing about the above, but if I were counting on WL7 to make a living I’d probably be crying. I bought/demo’d WL7 for a class I’m teaching. After devoting 3 months to this tool, finding a lot to like, I have to admit I don’t know it nearly well enough to use it as a teaching platform. It may be the perfect tool for the class, who knows? Lacking a manual, and any visible means of support, I can’t recommend the program to students at this time.
Hopefully this issue will be rectified by the time I start with a new group of students. I’m not looking for special hand-holding, just a manual and tutorials anyone can use to learn the app in a structured way. For whatever reason, The Powers That Be (Yamaha) seem decided to let us stew, and pretend that putting PG on a treadmill is a cost-effective replacement for real documentation. No one’s fooled by Orwellian marketing statements like the one quoted though. There’s very little evidence of “commitment” and aside from PG’s own definitive statements, nothing I’ve seen from Yamaha/Steinberg can be considered “comprehensive”.
Just as an aside, why do you refer to “Soviet-style” support in order to describe this? I personally find this type of “support” more and more common and peculiarly “Capitalist-style”. Have you tried to contact your bank recently?
At least if it were true “Soviet-style”, someone would feel the consequences of not doing their job!
I chose that description in direct response to the Orwellian Steinberg statement I quoted, and was specifically thinking Kruschev/50s cold-war mentality, but sure, the same thinking dominates corpocracy. The approach is very typical of big computer-oriented companies; the bigger and more dominant in a particular market, the more it fits. Try calling Google about AdWords problems, or Amazon or Ebay or MicroSoft. Apple’s maybe 10% better than the aforementioned outfits wrt customer support (you can call them and talk to people (and get help when in warranty or AppleCare), or email some actual address, or walk into a store toting your problem under your arm). But this is a matter of degrees: they have useless webforms too, and answers you get are often poor.
At any rate, I’m referring to the false leads/claims (e.g. that you can call or email someone) as well as the “one-size fits all” support, that lacks the basic elements of software support (manual, tutorials, illustrations, direct email link etc). There are other equally Orwellian capitalist operations, the Soviets certainly had no patent on doublespeak. Point taken.
As much as I dislike the general attitude Steinberg has shown here, I do have to say I only needed support from them once. I filled in the support form and they replied to me in about 2 days and did give me the answer that got me going again.
I did get a message telling me to click some thing in my profile to allow them to look at my profile or something like that, even though I had already done it. It seems that when you send to support they automatically make that thing change so they then have to tell you to click it again. Or else something else is wrong with it. Either way they do make it very difficult to get support but I did get support from them and it did help me. It could be improved.
We are thinking, all you need spend time on Gulag with Kometa 201M tape recorder and gun to head. Then my friend you understanding wonder that is WaveLab 7.
Phone support numbers are listed on the support page, but obviously not for all countries:
I used the telephone support once and it was fast and effective (I am from Germany).
If you are from the US, maybe you could also call the Canadian hotline?
