I have to say this whole is issue is VERY worrisome to me as well. I have bought lots of VSL products through the years and would have my wallet fried if the dongle broke down and I had to pay these remarkably high fees per license. Just piling all the additional cost and hassle of protection schemes on top of us paying and legit users leaves one with a bitter taste in the mouth.

Reminds me of Waves' insanely unpopular WUP scheme of yesteryear, which they changed once custormers figured out what a moneyscheme it was and enraged customers hit every music forum around with cries of boycoting. Speaking of Waves, they will be changing their protection methods to cloud and/or personal USB stick and will be getting rid of the iLok, so someone has already started smelling the coffee. Punishing paying customers with expensive and user-unfriendly copyprotection schemes will bring diminishing returns in the face of quickly growing competition on the market. The alternatives are growing fast these days.

Personally I don't find their actual policy that bad, because if your dongle is less than 2 years old you pay nothing.

The BIG problem for me is that they don't make this policy clear anywhere and therefore people can get caught out. Just buy a new dongle every 2 years, and consider it to be fairly cheap insurance. You can use your spares in an emergency - they will give you demo licenses until it is properly inspected and replaced.

It surely is a huge farkup from VSL's side that such potentially high fees can go without any type of warning from their side. My point was, though, that it's bad strategy to burden your customers with high fees and the nuisance of replacing their dongles every two years (I mean, wttf?) because 1. will make your product look weaker in the face of mounting competition, and 2. make crackable alternatives all the more tempting, thus worsening the situation even further for us legit customers.

If we start to find the dongle switch every two years acceptable, then in my view we have become too complacent.

Agreed Vagn

I like that you guys are thinking of possible solutions, insurances etc... But I'm in a different camp. A customer of something as precious and expenssive as VSL (and who is in effect "renting" the samples) should never pay more than the absolute minimum possible, if anything at all. 

I have spent over $10.000 on VSL stuff and I love it. But I want premium treatment (which includes something as trivial as reponding to this thread ;))

I have sent a mail to support : NO ANSWER  !

And I think we never will.

A few days ago, I tryed to get there focus on this problem, but as I expected: NO ANSWER!

http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/p/31045/198094.aspx#198094

And this is, what makes me angry!

Ignoring us, there customers! No reaction, no offical comments, but still reading every post we are typing.

I think it´s there guideline, but with this behaivior there destroying the trust in there company!

So, I´m only a small user of VSL products at the moment (~2000 €).
At the moment I´ve stopped buying. Sorry about that, because there is much I would like to have.

regards

Torsten

Being an optimist, I think a reason for their silence is that this issue has forced them to think about a different strategy, and they're now remaining silent until they've made a decision and are ready to implement it.

I'm right aren't I Paul? ;-)

Dan

I

@dagmarpiano said:

Being an optimist, I think a reason for their silence is that this issue has forced them to think about a different strategy, and they're now remaining silent until they've made a decision and are ready to implement it.

I'm right aren't I Paul? 😉

Dan

They could at least answer, "we are working  on it "

Just by politeness !

@Cyril said:

They could at least answer, "we are working  on it "

Just by politeness !

I fully agree.

Over many years with VSL, I have experienced only the best of service from them. It's very seldom that so many staff members, including the CEO, will ever respond so often on user forums (sometimes never).

The fact that Herb himself, plus several others that we know so well, are so regular here is amazing - and very helpful to customers.

The lack of any response about this whole VSL key/licence issue is rather disturbing. I hope for some kind of official statement soon.

Respectfully, I disagree with the lot of you. I have pretty strong opinions about nearly everything. So please, don't misunderstand my strong will as being disrespectful of your own opinions. I just think you're all wrong. [:D]

I agree that dongles have their issues. I wouldn't discredit VSL for using them as nearly the entire industry does or is moving that direction. But foremost I believe that I have the right to protect my property. If any of you believe in the same principle, then I fail to see the necessity of this thread. In a perfect world dongles wouldn't exist- but neither would theft. If you have issues, email VSL and they respond. If something other than personal assistance, then this thread only seems to serve the purpose of VSL bashing, or at least public outcry to convince them to change their mind. In any case, I don't expect VSL to reply nor do I think any less of them for not replying.

They have a right to protect their financial security and the hard work they've put into this library. I have no business telling them about their policies. If you don't like dongles (again, what most the industry uses) then make your own private sample library. In the meantime I'm going to get back to work composing (aka, doing something productive) [;)]

-Sean

Sean - you're guilty of speed reading. The problem isn't exactly the dongles, it's VSL's lack of warning about the very high replacement costs, and their 2 year warranty, which they don't make clear.

VSL just need to tell people more clearly that's all. It's not a dongle moan.

I think most of us agree with you, that you have the right to protect your property. but, does that right include to take property from others away just to prove that you want to protect your property? 

for me, as a user a protection theme is good, if it does not bring additional costs, does not cause trouble and if I am do not have to take responsibility for malfunctioning of the copy protection. 

for the syncrosoft key in combination with VSL it is the opposite for all three aspects. Wow. So, as a honest user you have to take over responsibility for all the bad things that can happen - just because the world is not ideal for software developers and sound designers. If the copy protection is not as effective to have a reasonable replace policy for honest customers, My personal feeling is - there is something wromg with this system. (now, one can discussion what is reasonable, but, just count your licenses and multiply it by 20 and you can decide for yourself)

I also cannot see that the whole industrie is moving in that direction. Waves, Logic, Korg and Yellowtools got ride of a dongle. So do SPL, Brainworks etc, with Plugin Alliance. also PSP got rid off the dongle. If you refering to the Steinberg surroundings, ok, there you might be correct, but that is far from the whole industry IMHO.

The non-communication is just ... well, normally in such situation silence does not do too much good. we will see were this leads.

I just prdered a new dongle, the old one did not show any symptoms ... well, maybe Greempeace should send Steinberg and VSL some document for really wasteful usage of resources and energy due to such policies.

best

@dagmarpiano said:

Sean - you're guilty of speed reading. The problem isn't exactly the dongles, it's VSL's lack of warning...

I can appreciate the warning point completely. I prefer effective policy and to me, open, honest, and as informative as possible are the way to go. So VSL clarifying something in anyway that improves communication about dongles is a good thing to me. It wasn't so much me speed reading but I was referring to the statements of "they need to rethink strategy" or that it's "disturbing" that they haven't replied. To me, this is a relevant issue, but I think it's being dramatized just slightly. I also like to voice the opinion that "I don't think VSL will reply or necessarily should feel obligated to" in order to prevent a 30 page thread just about VSL not replying... I tend to find such threads unproductive. If this thread were more about actual suggestions that help VSL and users- I'm all for it. I'm not any sort of moderator obviously, I just think VSL has some validity with dongles and as they won't post their position... I just offer another friendly viewpoint.

-Sean

1. Make sure your keys with the VSL licences on are registered here at the VSL Website.
2. Make sure your keys with the licences on are less than 2 years old
3. Make sure you have insurance that covers software licences, should the key get stolen

This should cover all eventualities.

BTW you can't copy licences; you can only transfer them

DG

Hi Cesare,

What VSL product do you own ?

They did charge you 1500euro for a broken dongle !!!!

Take a lawyer, this is not legal in most of the countries !

I am with you, because with all the libs I own, the bill could be the same !

@Christian Marcussen said:

I too would be furious if I had to go through all the above and if I understand correctly - pay €20 per licence. Furious. 

When did the fee change to €20 per license? A few years ago I lost my USB dongle during a move. It just had the licenses for SE and SE+. I bought a new dongle and emailed VSL asking them to send my new licenses. They told me they don't have anyway to replace lost licenses, but out of the goodness of their hearts they would sell me new licenses for $500! This was half of the retail price. I tore my entire house apart and luckily after over a week found my dongle and it now never leaves my studio.
I think VSL just makes up their replacement policies as they go, and it's because of this BS that I haven't bought the cube yet. And, since it doesn’t look like they are going to be changing their replacement policy, I'm starting to look at other companies products.

@Cyril said:

Hi Cesare,

What VSL product do you own ?

They did charge you 1500euro for a broken dongle !!!!

Take a lawyer, this is not legal in most of the countries !

I am with you, because with all the libs I own, the bill could be the same !

It wasn't me it was dagmarpiano. I guess he probably owns (well... "owned"...or better "owns but cannot use") a lot of download librairies (he had 64 licenses in total). If you were to pay 20 euros per license, download licenses will make the bill explode! 20 euros is almost the original download-instrument price.

I am counting: with 8 licenses my bill would be around 200/250 euros once my dongle will die. Another hundreds of euros for not being prevented from using a software that I have already have payed for. Not a new version, not an update, the exact same one! And I know that the dongle will brake (mine has got a small crack already). All devices produced now days have a planned life-cycle (it's called planned obsolecence).

It incredible! This license system is just a very, very well planned policy to constantly get money from costumers by otherwise threatening them that they will not being able to use the products they've bought. It has got nothing to do with copy protection or helping users or bla bla bla, it is just a form of indirect tax that sooner or later every user ends up payng, unless he/she keeps the dongle in a vault.

I keep wondering how I ended up spending thousands of euros (months of wage!!!) to find myself in this outrageous policy. I was 26 when I bought my first Vienna Library and I got it with the money I save from my PhD fellowship. I was soo excited when it arrived, now I so regret it! Ok, it has been a lesson of life: now I am am extremely careful, before buying software, that it does not involve the use of a dongle. But you can never know all the conditions. In the case of Vienna they simply do not inform people. I just feel scammed.

Cesare

Mike, you are right it was andyjh who owns 64 licenses, I mixed the names. But imagine that you have 60 licenses on your key like he does/did. 60*20 = 1200 plus the price of a new key, plus the secured shipping etc. It's a month wage to replace a dongle which broke! It's not going on holidays because of a policy that you could not have known about because nobody informed you, it is not written anywhere. It is arbitrary and scary. It is like one month of morgage, that you have to pay just because otherwise you won't be put in the condition of using the licenses your already own. And note that the new product line (the many download instruments, the fragmented SE, which alone can include a dozen of license, i.e. around 300 euros of replacements in case of dongle failure) seems to go torward users having more and more licenses stored on their keys.

This is simply not fair.

Cesare