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VSL instrument licenses vanished from e-licenser

sinkd

AARP Curious Member
Hi everyone,

I recently was having some trouble with one of my elicensers and decided to move all of my VSL stuff to a newer dongle. Worked fine--I have my template on a single machine. So VEPro, Vienna Suite, FORTI/SERTI impulse responses, VIPro, and all of my instrument licenses were together and working fine.

I launched my template a few days ago to find that all of the instrument licenses had vanished. Just the VSL instrument collections and downloaded instruments. About thirty instruments.

VSL support tells me they will give me a "good deal" on purchasing replacement licenses, but I cannot figure out how this is the fault of my hardware, since the dongle is still working. The other sketch elicenser has since failed more or less completely, but I thought I was good.

Anyone have a similar issue or any wisdom?
 
I think (my opinion only, and I don't own the business) that VSL is making some fairly grave errors in their licensing policies, specifically the replacement of licenses.

I like their instruments a lot, and I do depend on VEPro. But as much as I like their instruments I will not be investing in any additional instruments until this is resolved.

I'm all for developers protecting their intellectual property, but I am not a fan of money-grabs, and that's what this feels like to me. It shows a great lack of respect for their customers.

I am very sorry you ran into it, and wish I had a better answer.
 
That is very frightening to hear! I would like to hear if this has happened to anyone else. I truly love my VSL libraries, but if something like that happens I would be out thousands... In this case it doesn't sound like you can even claim use of the "insurance" that VSL sells since there is no evidence that the dongle has actually failed or been lost. I guess if you had their insurance you could report it lost and get everything back. I haven't bought the insurance yet either, I was waiting until the 2 year warranty on my new VSL dongles runs out first... but if its possible for this to happen, for licenses to simply disappear due to what obviously must be bugs in elicenser software somehow... Then the insurance might be mandatory...

don't get me started about VSL's license policies. They are nobody's friend there.
 
did you already try, I'm sure you did but just checking..the maintenance routine and clearing the memory and all that? I would assume VSL asked you to send a log file from your dongle or something of this nature? I'd like to know what process they went through trying to solve this with you before asking you to pay 50% of the retail cost to get your libraries back.
 
When you say "newer dongle" are you within the warranty of that dongle (2 years) or beyond that? I know it sucks, but this is why I spend 29$ every two years to buy a new dongle and move them every two years to protect the massive investment I have on it.
 
When you say "newer dongle" are you within the warranty of that dongle (2 years) or beyond that? I know it sucks, but this is why I spend 29$ every two years to buy a new dongle and move them every two years to protect the massive investment I have on it.
No. I am out of warranty. And the deal that they are offering is a lot less than 50%--I would be apoplectic if I had to pay that to replace 33 instrument licenses.

The other thing I can do going forward is to pay for their maintenance guarantee, which is 70 Euros every two years. But I guess I would be covered buying a new dongle every 2 years to keep it under warranty.

I still don't think this is an issue with the hardware, though. I will reply here when I get it resolved. Thanks for the replies and commiseration.
 
the two year dongle warranty does not cover loss. It only covers if the dongle actually fails, then normally you would have to send your dongle to them and they would try to recover all the licenses to a new dongle and send it back to you, for a fee. If you're still under warranty, then there is no fee.

The 70 euro insurance covers also if the dongle is completely destroyed or even lost. its totally covered. More expensive then $29 every two years...but that is what I will swallow my pride and do when my warranty is up..I think its a ridiculous license policy, don't get me wrong, but when i have $10k invested into licenses sitting on a $29 dongle that is capable of failing or apparently even capable of having licenses just mysteriously disappear, or possibly being lost... I guess its wiser to get the insurance.
 
Are you sure it's not a software problem? If you've got another machine run LCC on that to see what it sees. I vaguely recall having a situation in the past where the licences weren't found and didn't show in LCC but reseating the dongle and rebooting apparently reactivated the driver that connects the software to the dongle.

It's possible that a software update to the latest eLicenser driver package will help.
 
yea I would also think about doing a complete uninstall and reinstall of the elicenser software including after uninstall go find all relevant cache and preference files, etc..and get rid of them all, reinstall elicenser, and try again. I personally have had lots of problems with elicenser and VEP just because of upgrading and downgrading VEP while testing or if Cubase crashes, somehow it leaves licenser cache files in a broken state..or it might be the deamon process that is broken, I'm not sure...

but anyway, I would try all of those things before sending money to VSL.
 
That is such a garbage policy/response on VSL's part. You bought the licenses, they presumably have (or should have) records of you buying them, they should just help you out if the licenser fails with no fault from you. It's their choice to force their paying users to use this restrictive licenser -- they should at least support their paying users when it doesn't work.

Reading this, I don't think I'll ever be buying from VSL in the future. Totally unfair policy.
 
These VSL stories going around are pretty eye opening. I use VE Pro every day, but there's no way I could ever justify any greater investment into their products than that under the current policy.

I'm not anti-dongle, but the price of implementing dongle-based copy-protection is support for those who will inevitably have legitimate trouble with it. Customers are doing developers a favor, at their own inconvenience and expense, by abiding by any sort of licensing scheme. For many developers, I feel that this favor is reciprocated with a certain degree of trust, and I'm confident that they'd work with me if something were to go awry. VSL has been making it very clear that they will be doing no such thing.
 
These VSL stories going around are pretty eye opening. I use VE Pro every day, but there's no way I could ever justify any greater investment into their products than that under the current policy.

I'm not anti-dongle, but the price of implementing dongle-based copy-protection is support for those who will inevitably have legitimate trouble with it. Customers are doing developers a favor, at their own inconvenience and expense, by abiding by any sort of licensing scheme. For many developers, I feel that this favor is reciprocated with a certain degree of trust, and I'm confident that they'd work with me if something were to go awry. VSL has been making it very clear that they will be doing no such thing.
Extremely well said sir!

I too have stopped investing in VSL instruments - if I lose the SE volumes I own now I will not replace them. And I certainly will not make additional purchases.

I'm not even sure I'll be updating from VEPro 6 to VEPro 7.

There are numerous protection schemes in play these days. Dongles offer some benefits to users, but they also offer a benefit to the developer, and punishing consumers for a system that protects the developer is pretty sad.
 
I think (my opinion only, and I don't own the business) that VSL is making some fairly grave errors in their licensing policies, specifically the replacement of licenses.

I'm a fan of VSL. As I've posted before, everyone I've met from the company is extremely nice, and they're very serious about what they do - they take the high road. It's telling that a lot of people have been there from the beginning.

That's the preface - and it's sincere.

Now. To me it's wrong for a software company to charge its customers to insure the copy protection for licenses they've purchased - whether it's PACE Zero Downtime, VSL, or anyone else.

If you break a dongle, sure, charge to replace the dongle. Or if it wears out after years. No problem.

But then put the auths back on the new dongle.
 
Now, if they're worried about fraud, they need to figure out a way to deactivate old licenses if there isn't one.

But I can't imagine that a significant number of people who have paid for VSL or something PACE-protected (such as EastWest products) is going to be in a hurry to steal extra licenses and put them on a dongle they've paid for.

In any case, this should all be factored into the price of the license.
 
Well, this is making sure that i will not be buying any products from them unless they changes their policies. With so many other alternatives out there, i am not risking products from a company that can force me to re-buy because of errors with a dongle/copy-protection system.
 
The only way this dongle madness is going away, is if people stop buying stuff that requires them. There are enough alternatives nowadays imho. I choose not to support anything that uses dongles.
 
I've invested tons in VSL products over the years, and have almost everything they make. Their CP situation is truly scary for legitimate owners/users, though, and I would not recommend VSL to anyone buying new today, because there are a zillion other great options out there that will let you sleep at night rather than worry about losing your expensive licenses. It's really too bad that they chose the eLicenser path.
 
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