New licensing system, PITA

At the risk of seeming redundant, I’ve had no end of flakiness with the new licensing system.

  1. The startup seems -interminable- now. It goes through exactly the same ‘phases’, but they take longer.
  2. On day 30 of updating, it promptly told me I had no licenses. I do not think this was a coincidence. I uninstalled, re-installed, re-activated, etc. No idea which of these ‘did the trick’ but I seem to be OK. For now.
  3. It occasionally hangs during startup, telling me that all the ‘content’ is unlicensed (Verve, Padshop2, etc.) This does not thrill me because I have no idea how to fix it. If I’m licensed? I should be LICENSED.

So startup now gives me this bit of angst… will it? won’t it? That I never used to feel before. Other than that… C12.010 seems to peform no differently than C11.

I’m not trying to troll here. But I gotta say… it seems as though the new licensing scheme was a solution in search of a problem. I used the dongle on -hundreds- of gigs and never had a single licensing issue in a decade… and then none with the older dongle a decade before that.

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I experience this exact behavior as well and I agree with the op’s conclusions.

Just out of curiosity, do you have anything installed that could interfere with the new protection ?
I’m thinking anti virus or some other low level stuff. ( Windows can get flaky when a update is downloaded and waiting for install)
I haven’t yet had any problems, but I have had very little time with Cubase 12, so I might just be lucky.

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My Cubase 12 is now running great over the last few weeks , but just of late i had message box say when i opened up Cubase 12 that something was wrong with licence and another light grey box appeared with a list of vst instruments missing or not working.
I restarted Cubase 12 and all was ok again.
This sort of thing happens now and then when switching between Cubase 11 and 12 or vice versa.
I tried to get a Cakewalk Drum Strip Px64 into Cubase 12 says it is 32 bit , so i put it in Cubase 11 where it used to work, but it does not now. I thought Px 64 was 64 bit.Oh well!!
The reason why i said that is that i found out about the above problem when switching between daws

Specifically, I’d like to know:

  1. How to speed up the overall startup (if possible)

  2. Can the programmers put something more helpful in the error dialogue when the ‘Content’ licensing is a problem? (ie. what to do about it?) Or at least something in the on-line help?

The 30 day expiry means that your Cubase was running on a trial license, which implies that your initial attempt at activation was unsuccessful for whatever reason. The re-install and re-activate presumably cleared that problem.
The Activation Manager should tell you the current license status.
With regard to content: products like Padshop and Verve are separate installs from Cubase and have their own licenses. These licenses still reside on your dongle as the products have not yet been migrated to the new scheme. I vaguely recall a Steinberg rep saying that all such products should be updated to current versions, but I might be making that up.
Base on the long thread elsewhere, it appears that Steinberg has some issues to resolve with Cubase license validation at startup, and you may be experiencing some of this.
It’s also possible that your long startup is due to hunting for the content licenses which can’t be found.
For my own part, the C12 startup is quicker than C11.

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