Activation Headaches

This is just a general rant. The Service Center is a good idea on paper, but man, I'm having a lot of difficulties with it "in general." Various problems entering keys. Having to type keys for GPO, all the NI products, Percussive Adventures 2, and some of my older East West software, it's really becoming tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

Challenge-Response is just not working out so well (and that's really what the Service Center forces me to do, EVERY TIME I upgrade my OS, my boot drive, or motherboard).

There MUST be a better way to make sure you all get paid, WITHOUT driving people like me absolutely batty (not battery; if only I had some time to play with beats).

I had to spend over 8 hours between reinstalling, downloading, and re-updating, and re-re-re-authorizing my Komplete 4 products after my upgrade to Windows Vista 64 back in March.

And even now in August, I still get licensing "nag messages" from the no-longer-supported Vokator from my Komplete 2. And poor old B4-II still can't find his tonewheels (they're right there in the dialog where he tells me to look, but the VSTi just doesn't see them).

This is just plain silly. And very very frustrating.

There HAS to be a better way. It shouldn't be so hard for me, an honest customer who pays my own way!

This, plus little action on the 64-bit front, has kept me from moving ahead with Komplete 5, and will keep me from buying Komplete 6 when it (probably) comes out later this year.

I just cannot justify it any longer, with the cost and the hassle of such a large yet limited library. It's limited because it always takes so long to fix things!

Later this year, I'm going to start bouncing my already-recorded stuff to audio files so that I can eventually just not install these products anymore someday in the future.

I don't want to, but I may be forced to begin looking for alternatives to (usually) great applications like GPO, East-West Orchestra, Battery, and Absynth. I already know of a couple of usable electric and acoustic piano instruments, as well as a couple of great alternatives for organ sounds.

It will be expensive if I have to split town, but I suspect that reducing my registration/activation stress will increase my music-making enjoyment and maybe even increase my life-expectancy.

Thomas? Or SOMEBODY at NI? Please pass it on to the powers that be. Tell them that this is a real problem. You're my last hope, man. It's not too late yet, but I'll be watching for peoples' experiences with K6. I'm getting ready to bail, even if I have to do it one product at a time.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening.

 

I hate grizzling but I have to agree with a great deal of this post. The last time I did a big update of my system, the Denial of Service Centre stopped me from using legitimately owned software for days. I'm not risking that again and I've already made contingency plans so that, at the first sign of a sulk from ANY of my NI products, I'll be off.

Like BIF says, this is going to hurt financially, but there comes a time when one has to stop throwing good minutes after bad and move on.

Musical problems I can live with. Synth bugs (as long as they're quickly addressed and sorted) I can live with. What I can't live with is a piece of software whose main purpose is to check my legitimacy, getting it wrong and stopping me from working. This thing does NOT stop piracy - in fact, the users of cracked software have it easy because they don't have to put up with this thing.

On a more positive note, all of my NI products,while installed, seem to be running beautifully. Should I say that? Isn't that going to make them all crash?

 

Mods, thank you for moving this thread to a more logical place. I only hope that this information gets to somebody of meaning and authority.

Otherwise, my concerns are all for naught. I want a better product, and I need to have fewer hassles. I don't like dongles, because they can be stolen, misplaced, and physically damaged. So that's not a good alternative.

It's the time-issue; that's the real problem here. I keep my NI libraries on a set of separate hard drive partitions that are preserved and carried forward whenever I upgrade my system. So the time involvement I'm complaining of does not include "recopying" from DVD to hard drive.

No, the time involvement is mostly this:

1. Having to re-install from DVD. Surprisingly, this can take an hour or three if you have KOMPLETE and three or four other products that use one of the Native Instruments players. It's not always clean, and not always self-evident what is happening and where things are going. For example, the library and VSTplugins prompts are too numerous (one of each for each product) and they often look the same.

1a. The libraries are huge, and have to be placed on certain partitions, and sometimes they have to be spread to more than one partition on different hard drives. Common sense dictates that not all VST's should go into the same folders. Splitting, organizing, and getting it right takes time.

This could be saved by having a "global library folder path" that could be used for all NI libraries, but the individual installers all handle things differently, and put out different messages.

1b. Each product has to be individually fired up, and have the sound card settings, MIDI settings, and library paths manually updated, or else you could end up with a VST host crash when you try to start that product up in your project as a VST. Click, look, click, look, this time adds up very fast. Add a couple hours to the install process for all of this tediousness.

2. Having to futz around with Service Center; getting it up and running. Sometimes it works, sometimes you have to "try again later." Maybe 30 minutes here; more if you have ANY kind of password problems.

3. First round of authorizations. Got to test them all out, and since the individual installers are all different, you can't just test one or two products and assume that your whole Komplete bundle will function correctly.

Plus, some of the products seem to require that you authorize before you can set the MIDI or ASIO settings, or before you can go get a patch.

4. Having to always use SC to manage and download the patches for Komplete and for any OEM bundles using NI players. This easily takes a couple hours, and the SC downloading process isn't always clean.

5. Having to authorize and re-authorize everything. This is the main headache. Managing individual product keys for each component of Komplete. Plus any third-party products such as GPO or East West Orchestra. Mistyping a key is easy to do. Some authorizations fail and you have to email customer service for a key. Sometimes authorizations just simply fail and there is no answer.

6. Invariably, there is always a problem. One (of several) examples is one that I mentioned earlier. B4-II can't find its tonewheels. Come on, folks, if the installer worked correctly, this should not have happened. This is just dumb stuff that lengthens the time it takes for the customer to get back into service. And since it's just a path issue, it "should" be straightforward to fix, but it never works out that way.

I am looking for a simpler way to have a studio. It's really just gotten too complex to manage my licenses and authorizations. I don't really have that much, either. All I have is two orchestra packages, Komplete, Percussive Adventures, and Vapor...not a lot else under the NI banner.

Thank you for letting me express my frustrations. Now please do something about it so that I can look forward to buying K6.

 

the on-line knowledgebase is your friend:

"Tonewheels not found message at start-up (Mac)"

http://www.native-instruments.com/k...Tonewheels+not+found+message+at+start-up+(Mac)

 

Something told me years ago not to mess with NI products. I'm not going to waste any more time trying to activate GPO. Some other programs like FL Studio may have a registration process that's a bit confusing but you get help right away from users and mods because they don't want to lose you and they offer something unique in their product. Not NI as far as I can tell.

 

Is there any BETTER FAST and EASY way to activate my updated Kontakt 2 ?

This Service Center thing keeps updating, I use 2 computers, and this is really wasting my productivity times.

Thanks !

 

I love the sound, ease of use, and the overall quality of NI stuff.

BUT, I am beginning to HATE the anti-piracy system NI use. To be fair, they're not alone, but I think it is a matter of time before all of this bites vedors in the butt. Some vendors will deal with it and keep their customers. Other Vendors will seriously screw it up and lose their customers? Which way will NI go?

I want them to survive since I've bought virtually everything the make!
I've invested hundreds and hundreds of dollars in NI products. If I had bought a hardware synth, I wouldn't even think about this risk.

There will be a tipping point and either NI will deal with it, or they'll lose it.

I hope you guys at NI are reading these posts. I condemn software piracy, but I'm getting sick & tired of paying good money, playing by the rules, entering the codes, and then having it NOT work at a crucial time!

The bean-counters are telling the executives how much money they're losing through piracy. The executives spend a lot of money of anti-piracy, but then piss off honest customers. This MUST be carefully balanced. The bean counters can show statistics of how much money they're supposedly losing, but this is false dichotomy, I think.

It would be better to think like this: DO NOT ADOPT ANY SYSTEM which runs a relatively high risk of causing problems for legitimate users.

It is better to err on the side of generosity, because if it means less aggravation for us legitimate users, it's a bad idea. No system is perfect, but what's the worst-case scenario? Everyone starts playing B4-II or Absynth and it becomes wildly popular? All you have to do is put out a sexy upgrade and you'll make bug bucks. Most people are honest and will pay a reasonable sum and most people will do the right thing.

OK, I'm rambling... sorry... I usually don't have problems, but when I do, I get pissed.

Tonight I had a package from NI. It's B4-II. I installed it and cannot register it. Service Center still doesn't quite understand which products I own and have registered. It can't be THAT hard to make this system work, can it?

Rick

 

activation nightmare

trying to activate battery 3 offline

downloaded activation return file imported it into my pc

say activation is complete

then i get an error message

when i try load battery is say i need to activate it from support center

i do not want to put my music pc online!

i have bought a product that i cant get working and i feel like ive been ripped off.

i hope someone at ni is gonna help me

this is the worst thing ive come across so far in way of software installation

i just want to play with the software and create, not go through this

help help help

 

take A Lesson From Spectrasonics! Flawless Activation Process!

 

Run Battery as a standalone. Reboot your system, open your host and rescan your plugins. Done.

ew