Ok, so I thought I would try out Cubase as a new customer to see if I was at all interested in your product. Let me tell you…this process has been overcomplicated, buggy and extremely unintuitive.
Firstly, I went to the website to download the trial. I was met with registering my account straight away. Well, ok fine. I guess I will sign up with an account with you for no other reason but to test your product. After several emails and registration codes later (not to mention a required news letter signup) I was finally able to access your page with the trial download package. Great, progress was made.
Next, I downloaded the package. Download went fine, no errors there. After that was done, I installed. Again, no problems there, installation went just fine. However, the moment I launch your download assistant thats where things went bad. First thing it tells me “Oh, you don’t have the elicenser software, you need to download this.” Ok, well for some reason this wasn’t mentioned during the process of downloading the client, but fine i’ll bite. So, I go to the handy link the client provides so I can download the software I need. All seems fine, downloaded the exe, installed the elicenser, life is good.
Next, I’m met with an error, straight away with the download client for Steinberg. Tells me “an error has occured.” Generic error message with no other details. Super frustration, but there is a link I can use to go to your help articles on the website, so I head over there. This article tells me “Well, the client may not have downloaded these other files you need! Go ahead and download these files and install them.” Well, that’s weird considering how this all should have been included in the client launcher…no errors were indicated during it’s installation, so I have no idea why I need these files now. But, whatever. I download the files and install them.
Lastly, I see the activate link in the client window. Awesome, looks like we’re making progress. Click the button, it attempts to send the activation code to this elicenser…then the entire client crashes. NO error, NO indication of an issue, nothing. The client ceases to be responsive, and I have to force close the application.
This was all within the first 20 minutes of even thinking about trying the product. This is a terrible experience. I fully intended on purchasing the product if I liked it. However, the large cost involved made me want to test it out before I made any decisions. If i’m running into these types of problems within the first 20 minutes of the TRIAL, what am I going to run into when you decide to update the product after charging me hundreds of dollars just to upgrade? I can already tell that I will absolutely run into these headaches in the future, and that is totally not worth the price you are asking.
You have made it a very easy choice for me between Ableton and Cubase which product I should go with.
