I think I know the answr to this, but I’m hoping I’m wrong…
Long story short, I bought a laptop so I could use HALion live with my band; using the Multi-Chain option it’s like MainStage on the Mac.
I bought HALion Symphonic Orchestra some time ago, and just assumed as it was another HAL:ion library it would just work. My guess is I’d have to remove the dongle from my main DAW and bring it with me if I wanted to access these sounds?
Am I missing somthing, is there another option or am I screwewd?
According to this list, HSO now uses the new licensing system which allows three concurrent activations and no longer requires the dongle. Have you already redeemed your HSO voucher that should be located in your MySteinberg account? It updates your HSO license to the new licensing system. The license on the dongle will still be available afterwards but it’ll be marked as not upgradeable.
If you already redeemed the voucher, you probably just need to activate the license on the laptop via the Steinberg Activation Manager.
Most, if not all, content set licences are disabled on eLicenser after migrating the licence to Steinberg Licensing. Application licences remain active on eLicenser after being migrated/updated to Steinberg Licensing, but cannot be upgraded for a second time, as you note.
You should expect to lose the ability to use your content licences in non-Steinberg Licensing-aware applications if you migrate the licence to Steinberg Licensing. Though I still have an Absolute 5 licence on eLicenser, which allows me to use HALion 6, I cannot use my HALion content that has been migrated to Steinberg Licensing with HALion 6 because HALion 6 does not understand Steinberg Licensing. If I want to use my HALion content, I must use HALion 7 (via my Absolute 6 licence).
Personally, I can’t confirm this. All my content licenses are still available on the dongle after the migration and they can be used with HALion 6 as well.
The list linked above also tells if the eLicenser license is retained after migrating to the new system. This is actually the case for most of the content licenses. However, the entire Absolute 6 bundle seems to be treated as an application based on the new licensing system so that its content libraries no longer work with the dongle.
The “eLicenser still supported” column shows which content packs were once available on eLicenser and can be migrated to Steinberg Licensing via the voucher system. It does not guarantee that the eLicenser licence is still usable after the migration.
That said, plugging in my USB eLicenser for the first time in many months and running Maintenance in the eLicenser Control Center suggests that Steinberg has backed away from disabling migrated content licences on eLicenser. Several of my migrated content licences used to say “Disabled” at the beginning of the description - now they do not. The only migrated licence that starts with “Disabled” now is the DNxHD decoder - this is rumoured to be a restriction imposed at Avid’s insistence.
I am not going to bother to downgrade my system to test whether these migrated eLicenser content licences have started to work again, but, if this is a permanent change of approach by Steinberg, there are now no drawbacks to migrating content licences to Steinberg Licensing.
I suspect Steinberg’s plan to make the migrated licences useless (and therefore stop people selling or lending their USB eLicenser to someone else) is to remove support for migrated eLicenser content licences from future versions of the instruments.
The Absolute content works using the Absolute 5 eLicenser licence - that always was the case, even when Steinberg was disabling migrated eLicenser content licences.
Ok, then I must have been lucky as all of my content licenses still work with the dongle. The following statement is given on this page:
After the upgrade, the license will have the words “(Upgraded to Steinberg Licensing)”. It can still be used, but can no longer be upgraded or updated.
There’s no information that licenses are invalidated on the dongle in some cases. Maybe a Steinberg employee employee can provide a few more details about this.
Yes, that was also the case with my content licenses. All of them were restored some time later, though, and they now work again with the dongle.
