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NI will no longer activate discontinued products from May 31st (NOW FIXED]

NI have responded to this again on their forums.
They are being a bit more forthcoming and investigating other options.
 
Hey Everyone,

Matt here from NI.

I'm slowly trying to address everyone on all the platforms.We sincerely appreciate all the feedback about this and want to directly engage with you all about it.
As a result of everyone's feedback, we updated our end of life article with some additional information but also went back to discuss this internally. As you would be able to read at the bottom of the page, we will spend more time investigating this topic and look into possible workaround to address the end of life of our old activation mechanisms.
https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... 0006053397

I hope this helps clarify a few elements and happy to answer more on here directly
 
I don't have time right now to write a proper response. What I can say is: No matter what technical issues created this situation, the way your company handled the situation has permanently and negatively changed the way we look at VI purchases and has caused a LOT of pointless anxiety.
 
I don't have time right now to right a proper response. What I can say is: No matter what technical issues created this situation, the way your company handled the situation has permanently and negatively changed the way we look at VI purchases and has caused a LOT of pointless anxiety.

There's also not a lot of different perspectives (as noted by NI)...only two; NI's negligence and the customers getting shafted. When I upgrade my Mac rig summer, looks like I'm officially screwed as I won't be able to reinstall all the libraries I own that fall under the redundancy category. Nice.
 
I don't have time right now to write a proper response. What I can say is: No matter what technical issues created this situation, the way your company handled the situation has permanently and negatively changed the way we look at VI purchases and has caused a LOT of pointless anxiety.

I think we have to hold fire on that. It's been alarming for sure, but if NI do the right thing here and come up with a better solution it will restore a lot of faith in them for me (and perhaps by extension the industry in general).

I now get the technical reasons why they made a bad decision, and I can well imagine the internal pressure on them to do this. I can't remember NI ever changing course after delivering public bad news, but it looks like that's what they want to do here. That would go a long way for me in believing the company does listen to their customers.
 
As I see it, the "bad decision" wasn't cancelling the libraries. That could indeed be forced on them by technical "progress". The bad decision was doing it via edict, without any form of explanation or consideration of how it would affect customers, how it would affect existing projects, what measures customers would have to take to make up for the missing libraries and how customers would respond. This is a wonderful, if salty, forum, dedicated to virtual instruments. They should have used it.
 
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As I see it, the "bad decision" wasn't cancelling the libraries. That could indeed be forced on them by technical "progress". The bad decision was doing it via edict, without any form of explanation or consideration of how it would effect customers, how it would effect existing projects, what measures customers would have to take to make up for the missing libraries and how customers would respond. This is a wonderful, if salty, forum, dedicated to virtual instruments. They should have used it.

Oh I agree. Not a good sign of a healthy corporate culture imo. But given that it happened, far better to row back and rethink than dig heels in or - worse - not even enter into any dialogue at all.

I don't want to start singing Kumbayah just yet, but it might just turn out to be a useful internal case of how to handle these things better in future. I'd say NI doesn't have a great relationship with Komplete customers (can't speak for the other sides of the business), if this helps readdress that then hooray.
 
As I see it, the "bad decision" wasn't cancelling the libraries. That could indeed be forced on them by technical "progress". The bad decision was doing it via edict, without any form of explanation or consideration of how it would effect customers, how it would effect existing projects, what measures customers would have to take to make up for the missing libraries and how customers would respond. This is a wonderful, if salty, forum, dedicated to virtual instruments. They should have used it.
Except for style points or something, I see the method of communication as trivial, and not what matters. IMHO the "bad decision" was to arbitrarily and artificially end the life of the libraries because they don't conform their new DRM scheme. If, on the other hand, they simply dropped support for legacy stuff when such time comes as they naturally won't work anymore due to hardware and software advancements, that would be fine.
 
As I see it, the "bad decision" wasn't cancelling the libraries. That could indeed be forced on them by technical "progress". The bad decision was doing it via edict, without any form of explanation or consideration of how it would effect customers, how it would effect existing projects, what measures customers would have to take to make up for the missing libraries and how customers would respond. This is a wonderful, if salty, forum, dedicated to virtual instruments. They should have used it.

I certainly agree and see now that there was better ways to address this topic from the start. I also totally see why we need to be closer to the users on forum such as VI and get different perspective on such matters.
 
So NI says in their terms:
As of May 31, 2020, a range of legacy products... will be discontinued. This means that already installed and activated products can still be used without limitation, but it is no longer possible to reinstall or reactivate any of these products on a new computer.

Since I'm newer at this there's nothing on the list that affects my rookie world. But the IT geek in me immediately thought of what others could do... I would say to clone the drives on your current working PC or Mac (with Acronis TrueImage or something like that), so you can always restore the hard drive image(s) if anything fails. That preserves activations. Acronis will restore even if you have to swap out a legacy motherboard, etc... you don't have to reinstall Windows or anything else when ghosting a hard drive and then restoring it. External hard drives to store the images are pretty cheap these days, even in the 5-10TB range, because mechanical drives are now just considered archive storage. THEN when you decide to build or buy a new 43¼-core i13 machine or fully Loaded MacPro ($60K, I worked one up on the site for fun), just use your old as a slave, with those libraries. It's kind of a big fuss, but a few of you mentioned ongoing movie scores where you need to maintain legacy VI libraries, so this is ONE way, to try and keep what you have.

I haven't read through all the pages so my apologies if someone already posted some similar solutions!
 
I think we have to hold fire on that. It's been alarming for sure, but if NI do the right thing here and come up with a better solution it will restore a lot of faith in them for me (and perhaps by extension the industry in general).

I now get the technical reasons why they made a bad decision, and I can well imagine the internal pressure on them to do this. I can't remember NI ever changing course after delivering public bad news, but it looks like that's what they want to do here. That would go a long way for me in believing the company does listen to their customers.

Thanks for this super valuable feedback!
I also believe that's a great opportunity for us to try and do right despite the bad start.
 
I would say to clone the drives on your current working PC or Mac (with Acronis TrueImage or something like that), so you can always restore the hard drive image(s) if anything fails.

Others have suggested that. Won't help with new systems or hardware changes since the newer NI scheme binds authorizations to hardware component IDs, and thus will become deauthorized.
 
This thread had a lot of value. I don't care if I have to sing a verse of Kumbaya. The name derives from "Come By Here." And guess what, an answer came. Somebody came by here and quelled the rabble with authentic information. The original plan might be modified to include the concerns raised from each home and studio here on VI-Control, each musical person who has at least twice been awed by good NI products.

Maybe somebody thought nobody uses this stuff anymore? Yes, lots.

I'm on the side of, "thanks" for some answers. Again, I think it's a framework for the future rather than an indemnification of the past. This situation is in flux. A few days. Spektral Delay? B4? Absynth 3? EWQLSO Kontakt versions? Maybe it was a trial balloon to see if anybody cared. How much did you care? I have some steak in the fire on this one. I'm sort of miffed, but then the sun came out a little.

Yes, we do. We saw quality and we bought it. Please, NI, remember that we were some of the first to take a chance.

These vibey beauties that NI had, tines, drawbars, synths, pianos. It was the first thing that did it for me for as much as I could afford on stage. That was a really elegant solution. It always sounded great.

Hope here. This looks to be a good discussion.

Greg
 
clone the drives on your current working PC or Mac (with Acronis TrueImage or something like that), so you can always restore the hard drive image(s) if anything fails. That preserves activations.
Maybe not. The experts are telling us that NI's activation codes use information about the hardware that is not captured in a disk image. For example, I believe that Intel CPU's have serial numbers embedded in the microcode. I don't know whether they are included in NI's activation codes but they would be if I were developing a DRM system.
 
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