Not too long back I purchased what seemed like a good deal: a new version of software I'd been using to compose music, bundled with a MIDI-to-USB cord so that my new, MIDI-port free computer could talk to my old, clunky synthesizer keyboard.
The new software is decent, but exhibits a strange bug, time-shifting the notes I play in record mode slightly. (That, or my sense of time has suddenly gotten significantly off.) Grumbling to myself, I manually shift the notes into place in editing.
Fast forward to today, some six months after my purchase or so. Needing to compose some more music, I decide to deal with this annoyance. I don't know whether the problem is with my computer, the operating system, the USB-to-MIDI chord, the program itself, or my increasingly antiquated synthesizer, but I figure that installing the software on my laptop and plugging the ol' synth into that might possibly give me some hints.
Annnd... Turtle Beach/Voyetra, makers of my software, have quietly decided to just be Turtle Beach and stop supporting software altogether.
And taken the servers necessary to activate any of Voyetra's software offline.
Oh. Joy.
Slogging through some Google searches and a significant number of irate comments on various boards, I discover that what's left of TB is singularly unhelpful in dealing with this issue for any of Voyetra's old customers. A few brave souls have ventured e-mails to the support staff along the lines of "Well, if you're not supporting or selling the software any more, surely there's no harm to be had in offering up a free means for anyone to unlock the programs which they, after all, bought?"
Stony silence.
The happy ending is that another forum poster mentions that if you happen to have the program on an old computer, you can copy a particular registry entry and bang, you're in. It's a little more complicated than that for me- my new computer puts things into different parts of the directory tree than my laptop- but not significantly. About thirty seconds of text-editing and shuffling a flash drive around, and I'm "activated" on the laptop.
Which begs the question, as many people who follow similar issues of Digital Rights Management have asked, if the intensely customer-unfriendly "security" was ever worth a bent cent in the first place.
In any case, I'm never buying anything from Turtle Beach again, and I was a non-trivial customer of their products before.
Posted by Flaming Toad on a Stick (Member # 9302) on :
There have been several instances wherein I've had to download a crack in order to play a game I bought legally.
DRM is a virus.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
DRM is the best way to make the pirates look like the goodguys!