I’m not as uspet since I’ve retained plug and play images to take my entire system back to various points of ‘Cubase Evolution’. Still, I too would like a little better Legacy Support through major transitions like the Steinberg ecosystem is currently undergoing (hopefully for the better in the long run).
I’m all for progress, and I don’t mind sending Steinberg ‘support money’ for their efforts towards ‘now and the future’. They work hard…some are even ‘rock stars’ for the industry, and they do deserve a regular pay day (no sales/upgrades, and it’s hard to pay those developers).
Still, I tend not to upgrade my primary work-flow to the latest stuff until I’ve run plenty of tests (shove in a new hard drive as a test platform…OS and all…and piddle until I’m confident it’s safe to implement it as the primary workflow).
I don’t expect Steinberg support to ‘bend over backwards’ servicing the older versions, but it would be nice it were easier and more straight forward to ‘roll back’. Perhaps a ‘legacy support’ tab in Steinberg Download.
Some versions of various bits are nearly impossible to get [or quite confusing to locate and extract from larger installers] anymore unless you have ‘disks’ or thought to archive every little step along the way on your own personal media (update patchers, individual content packs, etc).
Example: What if there’s a need to roll HSSE back to the last Dongle/eLicenser version? I don’t see an straight forward way for HSSE to ‘take it back’ to given version. Only the ‘latest one’ is available as a stand alone installer, and to get back older version of the libraries can require grabbing a massive full installer for an entire version of Cubase! It’s possible to dig about and find a little more on the support web pages, but it’s pretty confusing to know for sure what’s the best one to grab!
Some sort of document showing the roadmap, with links to ‘every single version ever released’ would be very welcome.
Live support staff won’t have to do much, if the tools are online for us to ‘support it ourselves’.
So…you’ve managed to find the older version of HSSE or GA that you want, but now you also find a need to roll back the content libraries (or at least some of them) too! (I.E. The new activation system causes a 20 second ‘hang’ before the HALion or GA UI will open and display his contents). If only it were ‘easy’ to know exactly where the last dongle/elicenser based version of those library are stored, grab them, and replace things.
We fiddle and poke around trying to find a simpler solution to ‘rolling back’ (Try disabling all your network cards…maybe the UI will be snappy again? Or at least until the last key expires, and it takes you time to figure that out, turn the network back on, update the registration, and go back to work). Sometimes such fixes work, sometimes they don’t (or in the least, cause other ‘issues’ requiring a whole new set of hurdles to navigate).
Then there’s the whole deal with HSSE player ‘free keys’ for the eLicenser/dongle version no longer being distributed (click the link on the website all you like…no key ever comes). Why was that taken offline before this new system (which will probably be SUPERIOR once it’s refined and all the content is adapted to work with it…like the road map, it just wasn’t ‘quite ready’ to go taking down all the links to easily roll back to the stuff that worked before) was ready to fill the gap?