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  • VI Pro and eLicense - does the nightmare continue?

    Now that VSL solves the interface problem in Logic with the VI Pro version how about the other VI debacle that affects everybody, not only the Logic users... The loooooong eLicense verification. Will that be solved in the PRO version too?

    VSL names this version PRO so maybe they can start treating their loyal customers as professionals and not as potential thieves that have to endure that ridiculous verification process day after day after day (and sometimes multiple times during a day depending on how often you restart your machine). Does anybody else in the business forces this nightmare on their customers. Why would a company punish their customer the more they buy their product, this is beyond me. 

    PLEASE take care of that situation once and for all. Does VSL know how many hours of lost productivity and lost money this kind of copy protection nonsense cost all of their customers combined. I'm not suggesting to jump ship to iLok, but at least it works in the background as do other products that uses the eLicense protection.


  • Dear Edgar Rothermich,

    I am not exactly sure what you mean by "loooooong eLicense verification", anyway problems with licenses and eLCC are completely beyound our control. eLicenser/Steinberg had serious troubles with their License Server lately, but the problems are being investigated and should be solved soon. The eLCC software will be updated and improved.

    Naturally there will be areas that need attention, fixes, updates and so on and we are always trying to find the best way to resolve issues.

    When you meet a concrete problem with eLCC, then please contact our support and we will respond to you as soon as possible.

    Best regards,

    Maya VINSON


  • I think that "loooooong eLicense verification" refers to the fact that not only does the checking licences take time, but the scanning content files is rather long on some OS. for example I know it takes anything up to 4 minutes on OSX, and although in XP it takes my just over 1 minute, in Windows 7 it takes over 4 (just like OSX).

    This is not a big deal for me, as it takes another 20 minutes to load the template anyway. However, I can see if you are one of those people who likes to load patches as the project progresses, it could be a real pain having to wait 4 minutes just to be able to load a piano sound, for example.

    DG


  • I have a problem by downloading the Licens for apassionate strings 2

    Help


  • Please send an e-mail to and include your Vienna Key number.

    /Regards,

    Maya


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    @Maya said:

    I am not exactly sure what you mean by "loooooong eLicense verification", anyway problems with licenses and eLCC are completely beyound our control.

    Your quote is really frightening me!

    I'm not sure at what position you are working at VSL but to be not aware of the long verification explains why all the complaints of VSL users are falling on deaf ears. Here is what you should do:

    1a) Install Logic on the fastest MacPro with the latest OS

    1b) Install a couple of plugins: Kontakt, Play, Omnisphere, Trilian, etc

    1c) Install the complete Cube collection of VSL

    2) Now load any of the third party plugin in Logic  (just the plugin no sounds), they will open in seconds

    3) Now load the Vienna Instrument plugin in Login, it will take a few minutes !!! Remember just the launch of the player, not a single sample has been loaded.

    Now you are telling me that you or VSL is not aware of that problem? I'm not talking about a problem with eLicense itself which has plenty. I have other plugins that use the eLicense and they don't need minutes to load. The only finger pointing towards eLicence is in place for what happens when the verification process get stuck. No feedback or error message popping up in the foreground to alert you. Just freezing in background and wasting more of the valuable production time.

    It seems that VSL made a decision to use the verification process not only for the VI plugin but check the library itself. It almost seems that VSL wants to verify every freakin' sample after every restart to make sure that a customer who paid +10K didn't turn into a thief the last few hours. 

    This is what's wrong with the VSL authentication and I really really hope they get rid of that practice with the PRO version. I understand that developers have to deal with piracy one way or the other but it has been proven that most of the time the honest user get punished where the pirates find their way regardless of any clever mechanism. I'm ok as a user to deal with some inconvenience (dongle, authentication, challenge-response, etc) to make sure that the company and their product can survive, but what VSL has implemented here is plain outrages and even more outrages that they didn't bother to fix it for so many years.

     Maybe on the PC side, at least XP, it is a less of an issue as DG pointed out and the complaints are not so loud but  even 1 minutes to open a plugin is still too much.


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    @Edgar Rothermich said:

    [...] it has been proven that most of the time the honest user get punished where the pirates find their way regardless of any clever mechanism. [...]

    As by now, our copy protection is intact. Your investment is safe.


    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
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    @Dietz said:

    As by now, our copy protection is intact. 

    Exactly what I'm talking about. 

    Every company has to choose some sort of mechanism that provides a balance between most locked down vs most transparent. VSL chose a system that favors their company (most locked down) and penalizes their users (least transparent): They assume that their customer is a thief who has  to prove constantly that he is not.

    "... Yes you just proved that you purchased the Library for 10k but now you restarted your computer which is suspicious. You have to prove again that you didn't move over to the dark side. And don't forget tomorrow morning when you restart your machine we have to check all over again that you are who you pretend to be...."

    Do you guys understand the ridiculousness of that paranoid scheme?


  • While I understand you anger, I don't share it. As a professional, I would be p*ssed-off more when the guy next door has the same high-profile product for "free" on his PC, when I paid some serious money for it myself. In the end, _this_ is what drives you out of business, not some minutes of licence scanning.

    ... and don't get me started about "paranoia" ... ;-)

    Kind regards,


    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • Dietz,

    Sure we don't want the VSL to fall into the wrong hands, but surely there must be a better way to protect this software than to put the loyal financial supporter of the product through so much pain. Other software seems to have done it. Surely the whole library content does not have to be verified so often. It is after all the one aspect that is easily pirated. Why not simply protect the tools that enable the actual use of the library. Is this not enough? And if it is not enough then at least change the interval of checking the library content to once a month or so.

    There must be a better way.

    Tom


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    @Another User said:

    As a professional, I would be p*ssed-off more when the guy next door has the same high-profile product for "free" on his PC, when I paid some serious money for it myself

    As a professional I AM p*ssed-off that VSL is the only company that punishes their loyal customer with this authentication procedure where any other company next door found a more or less balanced way of a copy protection scheme that protects their product without assuming that their customers turned into a thief since the last boot up.


  • Hello Edgar,

    of course we are looking at solutions to improve the license and content scanning process, but these processes have to be 100% safe, simply because we do not want to have 1000s of "unloyal customers", accidentally.

    I´m very sorry that you are so upset with our products. I have not seen 1 positive sentence in any of your (so far) 36 comments (and I hope I have just overlooked it).

    We are listening and doing our best to improve our products. Everyday. Some changes are simple to implement, others are hard. In any case, if our copy protection does not protect our products anymore for any reason, there is no way this company can possibly exist. It´s as simple as that.

    Which does not prevent us from looking into better solutions - and these solutions have to be better in every aspect.

    Best,

    Paul


    Paul Kopf Product Manager VSL
  • Just wondering about a licensing scanning issue I've currently got. My licence scan currently takes between 2 and 3 minutes (OS 10.6.3 / Mac Pro with the latest Vienna and licence software ) However I have a number of projects that are using both the Vienna Instrument and Vienna Ensemble. The big nuisance now is that since installing the latest Vienna Instrument software the licence scan is happening twice. Once for Vienna Instruments and then a second time when VE loads - both as plug-ins.

    It is the same deal with stand-alones -  launch Vienna Instruments - 2/3 minute scan delay then once the app is running launch VE and the licence scan starts all over again. So double the already long and frustrating scan!!. Any ideas for a fix?

    Thanks

    Julian


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    @Edgar Rothermich said:

      Maybe on the PC side, at least XP, it is a less of an issue as DG pointed out and the complaints are not so loud but  even 1 minutes to open a plugin is still too much.

     

    I don't mean to be argumentative because maybe you truely are having some serious issues but have you considered maybe changing your workflow?  1 minute to open a plugin is still too much?  We're not talking about a video game here, man,  we're talking about a professional orchestral software application used to produce professional scores.  I just don't understand what the fuss is all about.  

    Let me tell you how I work.  I turn on my machine and start the project(s).  During the authentication process and sample loading I check my e-mail, read up on the latest music technological developments, maybe go over some of my software manuals, maybe pour myself a glass of juice, etc.  It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for my machine to be ready.  All of my instruments are part of templates that I prefabricated with VE and all of my settings are already set up the way I like them.  For the rest of the day, I don't shut the VSL server down unless I'm working on something that doesn't require VSL and I won't be coming back to it.  Just leave it on all day or 24/7.  Create templates with VE and load them instead of individual VI instances.  At least that's how I work with my PC.  Is it that drastically different on a Mac?  Thank God I stuck with PC.

    Until those genuises at MIT perfect MRAM (when your computer will work just like a TV) then this what we have to do to work.  So multi-task.  Again, I'm not trying to be a jerk but I think you need to improve your workflow before you start pounding on VSL. 


  • I can see both sides of this argument. However, to say that this is a problem for everyone is just not true. For me it's a very minor annoyance. It's true that I don't like waiting 4 minutes for content scanning, when it used to be 1 minute, but this is a small price to pay for the continuing existence of VSL. After all many iLok products are cracked within days of being released, and even ProTools HD has been cracked, so it is getting harder and harder for small companies like VSL to protect the huge investment they have made.

    DG


  • Although the loading time is an annoyance, an even bigger annoyance for me is projects not opening up at all if you don't have the dongle in.

    Let's say I want to change my workflow from 5 local instances of VI software to a VE Pro setup.  Now I open up Logic and open a song and go OH SHIT!!  The dongle is in the other room with my VE Pro setup and now my machines forever loops and locks up and I have to force kill all processes.  Other vendors will keep loading to the project but they just don't work.  Which is fine since I will be removing that channel strip and putting one in place that does work.

    It's a pain in the ass having to open them up and get the dongle from the other room, then save them as a new project, unload the old VI's etc and then go put the dongle back on the other computer and start creating VE Pro tracks.

    Is this a possible programming change that could be done?  I don't know what it would take to accomplish but sounds like a wonderful thing to me.  I have done this many times in the past when I switched from Kontakt to VSL.  Logic would open all my Kontakt projects just fine.  It would one time ask me hmmm..  Where the hell is the kontakt player and its instruments?  I would hit ignore/cancel and boom.  Project loaded, I removed that channel strip and put in VSL and done.  Songs ready to go in 30 seconds.

    Maestro2be


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    @jasensmith said:

    ... maybe you truely are having some serious issues but have you considered maybe changing your workflow?  1 minute to open a plugin is still too much?

    Thanks for your insight in your workflow and the PC side of life. But you are missing the point. There are two things here:

    • A) time to open the plugin
    • B) time to load the preset/samples

    You are aware of that, right? I'm not talking about loading the preset/sample, of course that takes time if you load thousands of samples and your instrument is 1GB big. If I wanted to speed that up I would stuck 4 SSDs in my MacPro in a RAID0 configuration. All I'm talking about is to just open the freakin' plugin that usually takes from instantly (most of Logic's plugin) to a couple of seconds (Omnisphere, Play, etc). Which of your plugin on your PC takes 1 minute to open, I don't know any on my Mac.

    I'm a a huge proponent of workflow that's why I'm so bitchy about the two issues with VI that stop my workflow cold dead, the VI authentication and the implementation of the VI interface (Mac only). What you are talking about has nothing to do with workFLOW, they are a "workAROUND" for a problem. You are not optimizing your workflow, you are minimizing the damage to your workflow.

    Of course, loading gigabytes of samples into your RAM takes time and you start that and then doing something. There is no way around that. When you put on the kettle to boil water for the tea, you don't stand there, staring at the stove and watch the water get hot. Of course you get your other stuff in the kitchen ready for the breakfast.

    But what would you say if you buy yourself a Ferrari with a keyless entry like many cars have nowadays. The only problem is that the Ferrari company is concerned about auto theft so they came up with a brilliant idea. Ever time you want to get into your car, the car key sends a signal to some third party that does a background check to see if you are the rightful owner of that fine piece of automotive. Great idea, not a single Ferrari theft since then. However imagine you pick up that hot girl at the club, get to the car, beep-beep, now you stand around with her for 5 minutes until the background check has cleared. Of course you can change your "workflow" and while the girl is waiting you can polish the hood, clean the mirrors, etc...

    Now replace the Ferrari with VSL and the hot chick with the producer sitting in your studio who says "oh, I understand you have to load the samples" and you say "no, nothing is loading yet for the next 5 minutes"

    Do you understand what I mean? I don't have an issue as you suspect in form of getting it fixed with troubleshooting, I have an issue with the form of authentication that is implemented by VSL. 


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    @Edgar Rothermich said:

    But you are missing the point. 

     

    No, I don't think so.  It's just that it only takes me 1 minute (not even, more like 30 seconds) to get that hot chick in my Ferrari and it takes you 5 minutes.  I then leave the engine running until I'm done with the hot chick (windows fogged up) or the end of the day.  I do it one time during the day and that's it.   

    But, OK Edgar, fair enough.  I can see that 5 minutes would be a lot of smooth talking, to use your hot chick/Ferrari analogy, and an annoyance but only a minor annoyance if you do it just one time a day.  Maybe the point that I am missing is how often you, and other Logic users, are having to experience the VSL authentication process. 

    I'll grant you that, of all my plug ins, VSL does take the most time to authenticate.  However, I look at it this way, if I were a car thief and I was standing in front of three different sports cars; a Ferrari with it's doors open and engine running, a Corvette with doors locked, and the Porsche with doors locked alarm armed wheel booted, and steering wheel clubbed.  Which one do you think I'm going to take?  Oh damn! Another thief just drove off with the Ferrari!  Of the two that are left, which one is going to be the easiest to take?  I know it takes time to disconnect the boot, take the club off, and disarm the alarm  but I'm willing to pay that price to keep my property safe and I guess that's how VSL sees it.  It's unfortunate that Mac and, Windows 7 users have to wait that extra time but I sympathize VSL's position too.   


  • After reading back through this thread I think the point I was missing was Edgar is talking about VI where as I'm talking about VE.  Since I rarely ever work with VI I'm not aware of the authentication process.  VSL scans your licenses ever time you open an instance of VI?  If it costs you 5 minutes every time you start a VI instance I guess I can see where that would be a royal pain in the arse rather than just a pebble in your shoe.  


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    @jasensmith said:

    ... maybe you truely are having some serious issues but have you considered maybe changing your workflow?  1 minute to open a plugin is still too much?

    Thanks for your insight in your workflow and the PC side of life. But you are missing the point. There are two things here:

    • A) time to open the plugin
    • B) time to load the preset/samples

    This is for me not understandable.  I understand you have seen a distinction on your system between security checking and sample loading but I don't see that from where I'm at. The VE window says " I'm scanning", but I can't tell what it's scanning. And is it loading stuff into memory while it says 'scanning?' Seems to me it is 'cause when the plugin window opens with the presets,  the instruments appear and are ready to play in about 1-2 seconds, like a slow screen draw. 

    I just happen to have a largish template for chamber orchestra, winds and percussion with 4 instances of Vienna Ensemble loaded each with seven instruments ( about 30 instruments so far). Those instruments are pretty fully loaded with lots of patches (oops, I mean presets). Thirty seconds or less for Cubase 4.5 to open. I can't really tell what's happening next after I select my template from the menu to load but yes, there is about a 30 second pause while all four Vienna Ensemble instances scan and load as plug ins. A group of Kontakt instruments load in a few seconds-total time just now was all of 1.5 minutes including a pause while I looked up which file to load. At the end Windows task manager says VE.exe has 2.91 gigabytes loaded into memory and Cubase 4.5 has .575 gigs (575 megs) loaded. Other programs are running as well with lesser amounts loaded into memory. I can't see that VE is scanning or loading cause it seems to be doing both.

    Suggestions. Are you using VE or VI?

    I have found VE manages the memory (I have 12 gigs ) on my system much better than Cubase 4.5. And when the sequencer  is loaded with a bunch of instances of VI you may be getting a slow down. . So,

    1. Group all of your instruments together (strings, woodwinds I and II, brass I and II and  percussion) into various instances of VE and do not use any VI instances unless you have some over riding reason (although I can't think of one)  I believe this will be a possible solution.

    2. I had a terrible firewall program on my computer that almost killed my computer. I am now using Zone Alert but that might just be the issue as both VE and VI force a connection with the VSL server to check your license. Try shutting off the firewall.

    3. Also, may I suggest that any time VSL stuff is loaded up these days-at least since the new 24 bit samples were published 3 years ago, that memory configurations should have been published to upgrade as well; anything less than 8 gigabytes of RAM these days is simply not enough. DDR 3 memory is out and on the PC side Intel's i7 technology really rocks. Again, on my side, when VE says it is 'scanning', I'm almost 100% certain it is also saying  'Loading instruments into memory'.

    4. Try setting Logic to open as an empty shell (force it in preferences ) and then select your project. Sometimes getting the sequencer up and running before a big memory draw is made seems to work better for me, if the memory draw is really the issue for you which I am beginning to feel it is. As I say, from where I sit.