u-he License Cards

[Urs]

I have no idea...

[vitaminx]

So the image files serve an actual purpose for us, and in turn for many customers. You won't believe how many people forget which email address, user name or even which licenses they have on file with us. My team deals with this on a daily basis. We have high hopes that utilising a visual medium that makes these basic parts of the license clear, is going to mitigate a lot of stress that a surprising number of people have.

It really isn't just a gimmick.

OK thanks for the clarification, that makes sense then.

Ok, I see. This isn't much directly related to License Cards though.

Hehe, yea, my comments were not directly related to each other.

So the idea is that, with License Cards, any of our plug-ins can know what people have installed from us, and then any of our plug-ins can check for updates for all installed products online. So one does not have to go through each. And maybe it can initiate downloads for the latest installers and maybe launch a process that installs them all in one go - so one doesn't have to do it all manually.

That defo sounds useful.

nothing that changes how people can just download installers and put them on whatever medium to install them offline.

That's good to know. I found unified installation programs always a huge PITA, when no other direct install method is available. Especially those which always need to be kept running in the background for license validation or whatever reason, and are sometimes dangerously invasive to the system, for DRM reasons I guess.

Now I can sleep calmly knowing you have no plans to go down that route.

[Urs]

We don't do invasive...

[buckycore]

Always the inventive one. I LOVE IT

[Urs]

Always the inventive one. I LOVE IT

Thank you, but the basic idea was suggested by David from Plogue who have been doing something similar for many years.

[sl23]

Will license cards be portable? ie, do they save to the registry? You said you install one card for all plugins, but I am not sure if that means each plugin sees it automatically, ie, via registry, or each plugin requires manual registration. I prefer all my apps to be portable and only use portable software. Thanks.

[Urs]

Will license cards be portable? ie, do they save to the registry? You said you install one card for all plugins, but I am not sure if that means each plugin sees it automatically, ie, via registry, or each plugin requires manual registration. I prefer all my apps to be portable and only use portable software. Thanks.

By portable you mean for it to live on a USB-Stick?

So, if it's on a USB Stick you can of course just quickly pop it onto the software and register it for the user.

We'll over time be adding options and things to do. Like, we want to enable people to lock down a card to a computer, so that if it is shared computer, people can't just lift the card. For the temporary/portable case we can probably add an option to just create a link or something.

We do need input for all of this though, we can only think of options once people state their use case.

[sl23]

Well, no, not quite. Currently, your plugins are portable, where yes they can be used on a USB stick, though I don't do so.
I use everything on an internal D drive. All software is installed there, but by installed I mean with portable versions of software. So with your plugins, I extract the data from the installer, as I do with any app, I only use one PC so for me all I want is to retain this current portability.

But the most essential thing for me, is that the registry isn't used. Mainly because I don't know how to back it up and restore it. I use portable software simply for backup purposes. I can simply copy one single folder from my internal D drive to whatever drive I use for backup.

But also, and this is the main reason, when I need to reinstall windows, or purchase a new PC, I can simply carry on using D drive, or move D drive physically to the new PC, depending on the situation. Does that make sense? I may not have explained correctly.

It's just that if I cannot do this with any particular software, I do not use that particular software. So I am happy that the license is tied to a single PC, if that is the case, but really would like this license to be able to be easily backed up so as to be up and running more quickly when a reinstallation of windows or buying new PC.

When there is only a few plugins, reauthorising them is a simple affair, but when you have hundreds of plugins and other programs, this simple thing becomes a hassle. I get that devs need to protect their programs, it's just that more often than not, the customer suffers!

Thanks.

[midi_transmission]

Nice! I like how Plogue does that, too. I mean, I didn't even think about the usefulness or plausibility of it. I literally just thought it was neat.

Yeah, I also own Plogue's plugins, so I was already familiar with the licence card activation method prior to this being rolled out by u-he. Works pretty well. Perhaps, it will catch on.

Although, I believe u-he have taken the general concept and improved upon it, since u-he have managed to simplify the process further by consolidating all the customer's purchased licences on to just one licence card.

I feel that is more efficient than Plogue's current method, of issuing separate licence cards for each owned plugin. Albeit, both implementations are pretty simple and unintrusive for the end-user.

I note that some users may have expressed some reservations about their full name and email address being displayed on their u-he Licence card. I'm assuming those people don't own any Plogue software, since Plogue's equivalent displays not only those personal details, but also the customer's home location, country and even their telephone number (at least it does for my Activation Key cards)

But I'm not too bothered about it, since hopefully, I'm the only one who can see it.

In general it's a welcome change to get one file for all products.

Yes. Displaying my home address, phone number, and full name makes me very uncomfortable with Plogue. Name and email are acceptable I guess (would have preferred just email and customer ID or something to be honest), but exposing more and full contact details could be very harmful for some people if a data breach occurs, even if it wasn’t caused by you.

I read the entire thread but didn't see this addressed: how do you handle an email address change? Can you re generate them?

[Urs]

So the whole point of how we do not have online accounts to log into is for data protection. That's why we can't do online activation or any of those other things either. Your user information is not accessible over the internet.

Our License Card contains name and email, but not phone numbers, no addresses, no passwords. It's probably a lot less personal information than many other files on any person's computer reveal, such as emails, letters, photos, contracts, other key files and whatever else.

[midi_transmission]

Hope you didn't misunderstood my last post urs. It wasn't meant as criticism for the uhe solution to use name and email (that was also in the key file before I think).

The concern with having full address and phone number on it (that uhe doesn't have) is not having this file on the computer, but the transfer and creation etc.

[Urs]

I understand. Yeah, I know that Plogue add phone number and address, but that seemed more than we need.

As for transfer, we use email - so that means the medium of distribution *is* the actual mailbox whose name we print on it. The file is not stored anywhere on our servers, other than probably for a split second while the email is composed. The transfer back and forth between servers is encrypted afaiaa. I can ask the web team if needed.

[midi_transmission]

Again, no problem with the uhe solution as it does not contain super sensitive data.

I just wanted to explain the concern people have with full contact data in it. It's not storing at your computer (...because that was given as an example), but when such messages are sent by email and contain full information, you must trust that every mail server along the route has proper transport encryption configured.

[kingtubby]

I just purchased the Z3 upgrade and imported the license card. Initially it shows that it's registered to my name, however if I reload Z3 it reverts to the beta test license...any ideas?

[Urs]

I just purchased the Z3 upgrade and imported the license card. Initially it shows that it's registered to my name, however if I reload Z3 it reverts to the beta test license...any ideas?

The Beta License will disappear soon...