Why is activation so HARD!

[TalismanRich]

Tonight I decided to spend some time working on a project. I got to the stage where I thought some adjustment on the main bus would work for a better master. I have had a copy of Ozone 9 elements on my system since 2020. I don't use it much but I thought I would see if it gave me any "improvements". Sometimes a preset works, sometimes not.

Apparently when I upgraded my computer to Win 11, it broke the activation. All Ozone would do is run in Demo mode. I couldn't activate it. When I got this, I guess I set up an ILok acct, but I don't have a USB key. The activation was done to the computer. After spending a good 30-40 minutes trying to find my information (yeah I remember the username and password from 5 years ago), I get emails with them from ILok. Now I'm downloading the new ILok software only to find out that wasn't needed,

Now I go back through my emails and find the original Email from Sweetwater from 5 years ago with the original serial number. Maybe it pays to be a packrat!

Another half hour spent trying to get the offline activation / challenge to work. No go! Tried to run the Portal software, but it wouldn't show me anything. Another 20 minutes with the AI chatbot before it asked what version of the portal software I had. It doesn't say anywhere, so I go hunt down the latest portal software. It greets me with a "nothing found" screen until I find the secret "unhide" toggle.

After wasting darn near 2 hours, I finally get a screen with an option to activate it to the computer. I fire up Reaper, load the project and add Ozone 9 to the FX. It works! No more demo mode. If that had bombed I was almost to the point of hitting the uninstall button.

It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate programs like Reaper. Here's your SN. Build a new computer? Put in the serial number and you are up and running in 2 minutes flat.

I guess any adjusting will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm too tired and cranky to fool with it now!

 

[rob aylestone]

I suspect the first thing any new audio company has to do is build security systems nowadays. That said - some just go over the top and make life hell. I've had cubase dongles for years - blue ones, maroon ones, then two different USB keys and now it's online - and to be honest the best it's been ever. A few teething troubles shifting from the dongle licencer to the on-line at the same time I went to windows 11 on a new computer AND a different mac, but Steinberg sorted it pretty quickly. So did Native. I now have 95% of everything on multiple machines and switching authorisation from machine to machine now works really well on Steinberg, spitfire, crow hill, adobe and others. As for user names and passwords? Let's not go there. My system of writing them down in a 'code' failed miserably.

 

[Papanate]

It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate programs like Reaper. Here's your SN. Build a new computer? Put in the serial number and you are up and running in 2 minutes flat.

Yup. I haven’t had too much trouble with iLok - but I’ve always used the Cloud or Computer to register anything - I forgot my username once - but that was only a 2 minute procedure - I wonder if using a Mac simplifies the process?

 

[TalismanRich]

I don't know that it's a Mac/Windows thing. Other than the fact that I upgraded the OS, the rest of the system is the same. If the authentication is tied to the OS then upgrading can potentially kill it off. I had the serial number, but it said it was in use by "another user". No, it was one user, one computer, same hardware. Only the OS version was changed. The starting issue is that you don't know WHY it's not working. Then you have to work through the process.

I never had to use ILok for the Ozone. I should probably just delete it. Maybe it's because I didn't remember what the process was 5 years down the road. In any case, I despise those stupid dongle schemes. I had several programs at work over the years that used them, and over time, they would end up with issues. One would fail, another would get temperamental and work part of the time. Before USB, there were parallel port dongles, and the printer cable had to go into that. Recipe for failure! We had a piece of equipment sent from another location that closed, and all the disks were included. The dongle was left on the old computer which was dumped. Hard to get a $5000 instrument to work when you don't have a stupid little key.

We once had a protections scheme that was messed up by another protection scheme. After spending a bunch of time on the phone with the tech support guy, he sent me a disk with the protection scheme removed so that we could use their their program which was corporate mandated. "Just don't pass it around" he said.

I was watching a video the other day about the time a company announced an unbreakable protection scheme. It was broken 2 or 3 days after the system was released. So much for security, eh?

 

[PorterhouseMusic]

There's no trying to minimize the reality. It's can be - and usually is - a complete pain in the fucking ass.

I've enjoyed - and will continue to enjoy - learning Reaper. It's a fantastic piece of software. For all kinds of reasons. But dealing with plugins is a constant reminder of why I so appreciate my Tascam DP-32SD and outboard gear. <---- straightforward no dicking around

 

[Papanate]

I never had to use ILok for the Ozone.

I’ve never heard of that - I have the latest Ozone and there isn’t Ilok in sight.

I was watching a video the other day about the time a company announced an unbreakable protection scheme. It was broken 2 or 3 days after the system was released. So much for security, eh?

Copy Protection always hurts the legit people the most.

 

[Old Music Guy]

Having been through the same hell as everyone else, I have 3 comments: 1. Steinberg IS THE WORST!. I can't tell you how many times I've tried, paid for, and FAILED to install Cubase later than 12. I've followed your collective advice and installed Reaper. 2. I think that it's the old "razor/blade" marketing. They give you the razor for nothing, but then you're locked into their "compatible software" for life. 3. Software engineers don't talk to each other. Change one line of code, 10 functions will be affected. Those 10 functions will affect 1000 functions. Then customer support says, "It's a hardware problem".

 

[DM60]

Having been through the same hell as everyone else, I have 3 comments: 1. Steinberg IS THE WORST!. I can't tell you how many times I've tried, paid for, and FAILED to install Cubase later than 12. I've followed your collective advice and installed Reaper. 2. I think that it's the old "razor/blade" marketing. They give you the razor for nothing, but then you're locked into their "compatible software" for life. 3. Software engineers don't talk to each other. Change one line of code, 10 functions will be affected. Those 10 functions will affect 1000 functions. Then customer support says, "It's a hardware problem".

Let's say, after 30+ years in the digital industry, the people programing today have never done much of anything. So they just program blindly and have no intuition. Therefore, they can't program from the user experience. AKA, a bunch of shit script writers, very few programmers.

 

[TalismanRich]

Let's say, after 30+ years in the digital industry, the people programing today have never done much of anything. So they just program blindly and have no intuition. Therefore, they can't program from the user experience. AKA, a bunch of shit script writers, very few programmers.

It makes me wonder how they come up with some of the user interfaces. Microsoft's Win 11 menu system is a pain in the butt for me... more clicks to get to the same place I used to reach in one click and a quick scroll. Make sure you bury settings at least 5 menu layers down so nobody can find them (until they ask Google "how do you...").

I remember many years ago, I wrote an entire QC/Shipping paperwork system using the macro language in Lotus 123 for DOS. At the time we had newly acquired IBM PS/2 80286 computers. This would have been late 80s. That program ran our lab's product QC documentation for almost 15 years. It kept all the data in comma delimited text files which we could dump into a spreadsheet and produce our reports in a few minutes. I could keep a full year's data on a single floppy disk! Everything was menu driven so it was easy for the lab folks to operate. Printouts were customized for each customer. I could update product lists quickly by adding a few cells in a master worksheet.

It was YEARS before they managed to create a workable system that met our customer needs, and that project required a lot of back and forth before they understood what we required. However, customization was out. Luckily (or unfortunately) by that time, the customer base had shrunk (lots of consolidation of companies) so we no longer needed to have special data sheets for a bunch of different companies.

When I retired, we had moved to SAP. Yeah, it's capable, and it's so complex! If you didn't do something every day, people would forget a procedure. Almost everyone had a notebook where they had instructions printed out on how to do things, even a year later. That's not exactly user friendly, is it?

 

[DM60]

When I retired, we had moved to SAP. Yeah, it's capable, and it's so complex! If you didn't do something every day, people would forget a procedure. Almost everyone had a notebook where they had instructions printed out on how to do things, even a year later. That's not exactly user friendly, is it?

Companies like SAP was/is part of the problem. When you did your program, you understood the problem. People now doing the scripts don't understand the problem. It is very abstract to them. Like telling a blind person what you see. Something gets lost in translation.