Where is the new licensing system going to leave me?

This has been changed so only needs a single activation for perpetual use - absolutely no day limit, see here:-

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Heck. Life was so much easier with a couple of dongles

Now I’m just hoping Steinberg don’t get sniffy with me for de-authorising and re-authorising on an almost daily basis.

Sigh…

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Read what @skijumptoes has written above …

There’s going to be someone more clever than me to say whether maybe creating a new profile just for you on those other machines with associated password’s etc, might prove fruitful… Sure, some initial pain getting stuff installed/associated under the new profile… but could be a route to consider…

Firstly though, it is brilliant they’ve made these changes - has to be positives in it for you…!

Thanks @skijumptoes… just seen it myself - goodness, I turn my back for a second and they go and change things up massively for the better :smiley: Nice one…!

No positives for me at all. I like the hardware dongle and it makes my life easier. This new system only brings hassle.

I doubt that very much. You are jumping the gun with your judgment.

Then I’m keen to learn. At the moment I have zero problems with dongles. Come the new system I have work to do to sort it out. Where is the positive?

@skijumptoes put it quite well.

Did you read the latest announcement? It’s clear to me they doing a lot to make sure users are happy.

Just wait a bit, and make your judgment based on what your actual experience is with it, rather than falling prey to the negativity that pervades the Internet

The positive is not having to carry around a dongle and being able to simultaneously have machines activated on the same license enabling you great flexibility. Activate once, and you never need to do anything after that but use it.

Another positive is that if you have further additional purchases you can activate those without taking the dongle that it contains. i.e. as this progresses you could technically have 2 licenses of Cubase, but only 1 license of Absolute/HALion/Groove Agent but still use it across those 2 licenses as long as it’s for your personal use and in use on one machine at any one time.

If none of those are advantages to you, then the alternative before this was only 2 activations per license and a 30 day offline clause. I know what’s most appealing to me.

Perhaps it’s time they ponied up for a Cubase licence.

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They don’t use Cubase. I do.

Going to just add an update to my original post here - pointing out that Daniel @dspreadbury has now said he’s going to take a look into the whole ‘User Account’ handling issue… Here’s his response from the main Licensing update announcement thread:-

More news will be posted there I’m sure… my main take-out from this is that ‘User Accounts’ - which you set up ONCE and forget - may hold some solution to ease your future situation @The_Elf

I have divided all my steinberg programs over two computers, each with their own dongle. Will I be able to combine all these steinberg programs under one license ? they now have diffent dongle numbers

Agreed. Are you familiar with waves authorization? I actually really like it because it gives me flexibility. Your license lives in the cloud. You can download it to a dongle and use it that way as long as you like. You can also keep it in the cloud and download it to a machine when you need it and upload it again when done. So downloading to machine or dongle is easy, and uploading to cloud also really easy.

Fantastic! Soon my stage backup MacBook Pro will be a true backup.
Love that!

Whenever I work remote I bring a laptop with me or I just work on the in-house rigs via portable drives. I’d never leave a temporary setup up and running on a remote machine with or without my dongle. Having my DAW license there is one thing but then all the plugin licenses too? No way I’d leave any of that on there, even if it were locked by a hardware key. License managers for plugins sometimes hold more personal info than you’d realize.

In this scenario (in lieu of using a secured user account on that computer that would lock anyone out of my licenses and projects) I’d either ask the studio to pay the relatively trivial $600 for their own Cubase license for that machine (though most any studios would already be equipped to that capacity) or I’d sell my second license to them in case I was worried about being tied to a potential bad actor and continue to use that computer with my projects on a removable device.

Unfortunately none of that works in my scenario.

I still lament the loss of the dongle to a certain degree, and yeah there are definitely scenarios like yours and tons of different setups out there that still benefit from it, but in this day and age the new licensing system is a huge gift to 95% of us. That doesn’t make it any less difficult for the remaining 5% though.

My mediated wish is that system link could be updated to feature single license authorization, so you could bring your laptop which is already authorized and connect it to another studios DAW via ethernet and verify, and then you have an effective system link setup.

Or, similar to above, doing a system link auth like above, would grant a 24hr use on the studio computer.

Personally not upgrading until all the Steinberg stuff i use is moved over, otherwise whats the point.

If that takes two years, then I may just move over to DP or S1, depending on how they develop during that time frame. I’ve been trying the latter lately and kinda liking it.