What I have to give Steinberg credit for is that you get 60 days of full, unrestricted access to a demo—no white noise or beeping. You can’t conduct a proper test any other way.
And I’ll be honest—I’ve been making music for 37 years.
However, what irritates me is that it is not possible to remove demos from either my profile or the Download Manager.
“Trial expired!”
It would be great if users could delete these trials—or if they were removed automatically after a purchase is made.
On the website, WaveLab 12 is no longer there, and Cubase 13 and 14 are gone, yet the expired demos remain. In the Download Manager, they are all still visible, including every trial version.
I have an incredible number of licenses, not just with Steinberg, but this creates a lot of clutter.
Could you at least ensure that users can delete expired trials after a purchase? Or perhaps have the trials disappear automatically once the product is purchased?
In my profile, Cubase and WaveLab have vanished, except for the current version, yet in the Manager, everything is still there.
Which seems odd. After all, an expired licence surely means that it is no longer one of “my products”.
At least in the SAM you can select to view only actual “my products” ie activated licences.
@non_person The only way to get rid of these entries is to open a support ticket and asking Steinberg to remove the clutter. It usually takes a couple of weeks but they get the job done.
Good point, that doesn’t make sense.
And I’d like to add that whenever the red “Updates Available” button in SDA lights up I always struggle which updates are actual updates and which ones are not. Was there a recent content update I haven’t downloaded yet or is it just because I deleted the Steinberg Download folder?
Seems to be quite the Hercules task to synchronize the SDA with the SLM and there’s probably more to it than meets the eye.
Every time I update the application, it installs the ASIO DirectX Steinberg Low Latency driver, no matter whether it is a full, new release or just an update.
When I open a project, if I haven’t checked, the non-professional driver is chosen ahead of my professional, ASIO driver and if I change it, the latency figures are shown but the program crashes.
In other words, it should be optional as to whether Steinbergs’ own driver is installed because this is a holdover from the early days, where users were installing the application on non-professional systems and just needed something to start.
In all seriousness, people don’t use their motherboard “sound card”, anymore and we have now at least USB3 and even thunderbolt so I feel Steinberg should have a separate category in the SDM, to allow manual installation, not have it force installed on a system.
I doubt they will do it if you never bought the actual product.. But say you started a Cubase Trial, and then bought Cubase later, I believe they will.
There was another ticket with the same request a month or two back and one of the reps responded, if they were to remove all the trial licenses for people, you would be able to keep using the products for free endlessly by simply getting the license removed and adding another.. They kind of need to make some revenue from Cubase, Nuendo, Wavelab, etc so that’s going to be a no go..
I suppose the Steinberg Licensing server allows various license categories per Steinberg ID, with time limited trials just being another listed category. Neither one of these time-limited product version trials seem to be dependent on the actual purchase of a single user license (at least if I’m not entirely mistaken).
In order to make it impossible for a Steinberg ID to use a product version’s trial period again and again, the system somehow needs to remember an expired trial license.
I guess what Steinberg could do would be to create a "Hide expired Trial License* register card within Steinberg Activation Manager, and perhaps also in Steinberg Download Assistant (in the background). Any obsolete trial license entries could either move themselves there, or the user could be required to move them there by mouse click.
iLok do in fact use this method so that all expired 7- or n-day plugin and program trials can be put out of the user’s sight. This works great, no more clutter in the main licenses list.
That is a fair point but it’s definately a bad look having all of these old trial licenses, that are confusing to navigate, in not only the SAM but also the SDM so something needs to be created, i.e. an archival function, so that the placeholder is there for the used trials.
I would never be this desparate but couldn’t you just sign up again with another email address in any case, if you so wanted to keep using the application, and what about obsolte software, surely that cannot continue to be trialed over and again.
I wish iLok would let you remove licenses you transferred to other users haha. I still have licenses showing in mine (that are hidden now) that I sold to someone else years ago, like the few individual SoundToys licenses I had before I bought the entire bundle! At least you can hide them though. Thats where I keep all the crap that Inmusic gave me with my MPC I bought in 2019, that I never once installed.
@emotive Same here, never happened on any of my systems.
You should open a separate thread and provide more details like OS, Cubase version and audiointerface. I’d be really annoyed if that happened to me…
I am on Nuendo but naturally gravitate towards these kinds of threads because it is about the customer experience, as well as the software, and of course no one would want to go back to the eLicenser.
Basically, it installs the DirectX driver, even if it is not already installed AND updates it if it already is.
Very strange that no one else has reported this.
I am on Windows 10 ESU, and I will soon update to Windows 11 even though my CPU is unsuported.
My hardware is old but my Audio interface is professional (MOTU 8A).
Maybe if i had better system specificaitons, there would be no crash, when pressing Apply but still it is annoying, and only just with Nuendo 15, have I found that the audio connections reconnect, when switching drivers which never used to happen so something is going on here that needs to be looked at.
Thats where I keep all the crap that Inmusic gave me with my MPC I bought in 2019, that I never once installed.