thanks Ralf, very cool
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Let There Be Music!
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2004-05-27 09:22 ]</font>
why we now charge for key transfers
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hubird
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hubird
yes quapla, that was for free
Change of hardware ownership still is free, no key transfer is involved.
About the key transfer of the Prodyssey, let me explain exactly my situation.
During the rereg to get Scope 4.0, I bought two 50% plugins.
The second one I couldn't registrate to my Pulsar mainboard because that was already used to registrate the first one.
As I had two HWSNO, one for the mainboard and one for the InOut board that comes with the Pulsar, I was able to use the IO board for the registry of the second plugin.
So far so good.
However it was not possible to activate the key of the second plugin, as the second board didn't show up at all in the registry window of Scope.
There was just the HWSNO of the mainboard, and the key was not accepted by that board.
Now that Ralf has fixed the whole thing, my 'second' board has been deleted on Mypage as a separate board.
It obviously should not be seen as a second board, all my keys are now changed to the 'main' board, including both new plugs.
So, for what it's worth, It's my guess CWA will not charge you for key transfer in these cases.
After all it's CWA itself which brought me in this position, I had no choice.
I was allowed to buy two plugins, one for each board on Mypage, but at the same time I seemed to be not allowed to activate the key to that second board.
If you would like to transfer a key to another board just to be able to sell a board, that's a different thing I'm afraid
Key transfer in case of splitting the cards over more than one computer is of course a complication, this is like quicksand for CWA, as it's hard to controll and could lead to heavy discussions in different situations.
But you always can try
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2004-05-26 09:13 ]</font>
Change of hardware ownership still is free, no key transfer is involved.
About the key transfer of the Prodyssey, let me explain exactly my situation.
During the rereg to get Scope 4.0, I bought two 50% plugins.
The second one I couldn't registrate to my Pulsar mainboard because that was already used to registrate the first one.
As I had two HWSNO, one for the mainboard and one for the InOut board that comes with the Pulsar, I was able to use the IO board for the registry of the second plugin.
So far so good.
However it was not possible to activate the key of the second plugin, as the second board didn't show up at all in the registry window of Scope.
There was just the HWSNO of the mainboard, and the key was not accepted by that board.
Now that Ralf has fixed the whole thing, my 'second' board has been deleted on Mypage as a separate board.
It obviously should not be seen as a second board, all my keys are now changed to the 'main' board, including both new plugs.
So, for what it's worth, It's my guess CWA will not charge you for key transfer in these cases.
After all it's CWA itself which brought me in this position, I had no choice.
I was allowed to buy two plugins, one for each board on Mypage, but at the same time I seemed to be not allowed to activate the key to that second board.
If you would like to transfer a key to another board just to be able to sell a board, that's a different thing I'm afraid
Key transfer in case of splitting the cards over more than one computer is of course a complication, this is like quicksand for CWA, as it's hard to controll and could lead to heavy discussions in different situations.
But you always can try
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2004-05-26 09:13 ]</font>
Hi
I purchased my first CWA board an Elektra second-hand a few years ago. The whole thing was transferred free and the same day. Since then I have spent around 2000 euros on CWA stuff. If when I purchased my Elektra it had taken a few months to transfer, I may not have been so enthusiastic about spending another 2000 euros!?!
I think is is OK to pay for transfers as long as CWA do it in a professional way. Hopefully this has now started to happen.
Regards
Kenf
I purchased my first CWA board an Elektra second-hand a few years ago. The whole thing was transferred free and the same day. Since then I have spent around 2000 euros on CWA stuff. If when I purchased my Elektra it had taken a few months to transfer, I may not have been so enthusiastic about spending another 2000 euros!?!
I think is is OK to pay for transfers as long as CWA do it in a professional way. Hopefully this has now started to happen.
Regards
Kenf
My 2 cents worth:
The patient is sick in hospital, please don't squabble about who pays for the grapes
In financial terms, the old Creamware was dead on its feet. Now, the new CW Audio company is taking some sensible steps to sort things out - rationalising the product line, tightening up on some policies and procedures, and stopping doing work for free. Yes, the systems are expensive compared to sound cards, but that's not comparing like with like.
Should your one-off purchase of a card and some software licences entitle you to a lifetime of free tech support? Well, that depends on how the company prices the product. They may choose to offer "free tech support", but there's no such thing as free in this world - you still actually pay for it through an increased product cost. Even if the cards had actually been sold with a "lifetime free tech support" promise, that would have lapsed once CW Audio came into being, because I assume they acquired the assets of Creamware gmbh but not the liabilities. That's pretty much a standard thing when a company gets rescued.
The SHARC platform may be old, slow, and very outdated, but the overall Scope package is unique. What CW Audio needs, and what we as users need, is for the company to get on with its consolidation, and build up enough resources to design a new generation of cards based on more powerful modern DSPs. Then let's argue about fees for transferring licences
BTW I may be a newbie at posting, but I've been a happy Pulsar owner for years
The patient is sick in hospital, please don't squabble about who pays for the grapes
In financial terms, the old Creamware was dead on its feet. Now, the new CW Audio company is taking some sensible steps to sort things out - rationalising the product line, tightening up on some policies and procedures, and stopping doing work for free. Yes, the systems are expensive compared to sound cards, but that's not comparing like with like.
Should your one-off purchase of a card and some software licences entitle you to a lifetime of free tech support? Well, that depends on how the company prices the product. They may choose to offer "free tech support", but there's no such thing as free in this world - you still actually pay for it through an increased product cost. Even if the cards had actually been sold with a "lifetime free tech support" promise, that would have lapsed once CW Audio came into being, because I assume they acquired the assets of Creamware gmbh but not the liabilities. That's pretty much a standard thing when a company gets rescued.
The SHARC platform may be old, slow, and very outdated, but the overall Scope package is unique. What CW Audio needs, and what we as users need, is for the company to get on with its consolidation, and build up enough resources to design a new generation of cards based on more powerful modern DSPs. Then let's argue about fees for transferring licences
BTW I may be a newbie at posting, but I've been a happy Pulsar owner for years
I partially agree on the statement about discouraging 2nd hand plugins trade.
And imho it will not be the last reaction on such a market revolution like eBay has turned out to be. Not restricted to CWA at all...
But argueing about who to blame is completely pointless - they don't even have to justify their product or price policy.
It's business, and business rules apply.
As you correctly pointed out anyone who dislikes it may leave anytime he wants.
Of course anyone is free to complain - why not, but deducing a certain kind of rights is a bit over the top imho. And copyprotection is inevitable at todays customer habits - unfortunately.
The billing and bookkeeping of the fee is at least 5 Euro alone
cheers, Tom
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2004-06-05 19:50 ]</font>
And imho it will not be the last reaction on such a market revolution like eBay has turned out to be. Not restricted to CWA at all...
But argueing about who to blame is completely pointless - they don't even have to justify their product or price policy.
It's business, and business rules apply.
As you correctly pointed out anyone who dislikes it may leave anytime he wants.
Of course anyone is free to complain - why not, but deducing a certain kind of rights is a bit over the top imho. And copyprotection is inevitable at todays customer habits - unfortunately.
The billing and bookkeeping of the fee is at least 5 Euro alone
cheers, Tom
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2004-06-05 19:50 ]</font>
well Stardust, I'm long enough in computer business to not only know what kind of support you're talking about - I've also experienced it.
On both sides of the counter: as a support engineer myself and as a developer interested in leading edge technology.
I still do have that letter from Intel when they informed me (!) personally about some of their new chips. It was completely out of question if I was a possible OEM or not, everyone was served as good as it got those days.
But that was very long ago...
and you'll never hear or read that 'killer argument of the so called computer industry and its innovation cycle...' from me
in my very humble opinion this industry is in constant decrease since > 10 years
Actually CWA reminds me strangely at the spirit of high tech companies in the late 80s and early 90s. In some way they are not 'professional' at all - and I really hope they keep it up this way.
NI (just to refer to a company you mentioned) started as an innovative company (and I admit it was mainly Reaktor to bring me to computer synths), but for a decade they sell their same old sh*t in constantly changing boxes.
Absynth isn't even their own developement.
And even if CWA was going to announce all support for free I wouldn't want them to go that way...
But back to business - do you really mean business ?
Say you bought gear for 2000 Euro, write it off for 4 years, making a 25% value loss per year, reducing you tax balance accordingly.
Additionally you get the 16% vat back.
As a rule of thumb you can assume any 'professional' use will make the product at least 30% cheaper than the shop price suggests.
The reselling you mention is considered extra profit and generally avoided - officially
that's why I call the hazzle around the re-registration fee a storm in a teacup.
As far as it concerns professional use it's a non-issue, and if someone spents that much for his personal amusement, well it's just that, amusement - and who cares on money for that ?
If you do it for fun and just overlooked the 'business opportunities' - be creative in another sense of the word
cheers, Tom
On both sides of the counter: as a support engineer myself and as a developer interested in leading edge technology.
I still do have that letter from Intel when they informed me (!) personally about some of their new chips. It was completely out of question if I was a possible OEM or not, everyone was served as good as it got those days.
But that was very long ago...
and you'll never hear or read that 'killer argument of the so called computer industry and its innovation cycle...' from me
in my very humble opinion this industry is in constant decrease since > 10 years
Actually CWA reminds me strangely at the spirit of high tech companies in the late 80s and early 90s. In some way they are not 'professional' at all - and I really hope they keep it up this way.
NI (just to refer to a company you mentioned) started as an innovative company (and I admit it was mainly Reaktor to bring me to computer synths), but for a decade they sell their same old sh*t in constantly changing boxes.
Absynth isn't even their own developement.
And even if CWA was going to announce all support for free I wouldn't want them to go that way...
But back to business - do you really mean business ?
Say you bought gear for 2000 Euro, write it off for 4 years, making a 25% value loss per year, reducing you tax balance accordingly.
Additionally you get the 16% vat back.
As a rule of thumb you can assume any 'professional' use will make the product at least 30% cheaper than the shop price suggests.
The reselling you mention is considered extra profit and generally avoided - officially
that's why I call the hazzle around the re-registration fee a storm in a teacup.
As far as it concerns professional use it's a non-issue, and if someone spents that much for his personal amusement, well it's just that, amusement - and who cares on money for that ?
If you do it for fun and just overlooked the 'business opportunities' - be creative in another sense of the word
cheers, Tom
Incidentally I believe that FM7 (which I agree is great) was also initially developed outside of NI and subsequently purchased.
Pretty much everything else (with the possible exception of Pro53) seems to be based on the same codebase as reaktor, with some gui work and perhaps some fiddling with a few specific modules to make them work better within the instrument in question. I've mentioned how long it took them to fix a simple cpuid check in Kontakt before...
Pretty much everything else (with the possible exception of Pro53) seems to be based on the same codebase as reaktor, with some gui work and perhaps some fiddling with a few specific modules to make them work better within the instrument in question. I've mentioned how long it took them to fix a simple cpuid check in Kontakt before...
I've been following this thread with some interest.
As a retailer and and a CW user I'm still baffled why we even continue with this discussion. As it appears CWA isn't going to change the price.
The thing that gets me as a user is that over a year ago I asked someone in the Canadian office about transfering some of the plugins from my Scope to my Pulsar II. It was never done. I emailed CWA about it and never recieved a response. Then a few days later the "announcement" was made that they are now going to charge for plugin transfers. And I still recieved no answer back.
Ralf has made a valiant effort to appease a few people, but the user base in general is not happy about the whole thing.
Here's an example:
A customer walks into AGB (our store), he has a Luna, he wants to sell it and get a Powerpulsar (or whatever it's called now). "Can I get my purchased plugins transfered from the Luna to the new card?" he asks. "Yes" I reply and then I explain the whole process to him, and I also explain that the process has not been a smooth one from what I've read here and that they charge for the service now. The customer then changes his mind after reading the horror stories on this board and purchases a competitors product instead.
As a retailer I didn't lose, the customer thanked me for my honesty, still purchased something from me (actually more than he originally planned). As a CWA retailer I lost, the product is still sitting on my shelf. As a company CWA lost, they lost a customer to a competing product.
I wonder if this is just an isolated incident or is this actually happening in other places as well?
As a retailer and and a CW user I'm still baffled why we even continue with this discussion. As it appears CWA isn't going to change the price.
The thing that gets me as a user is that over a year ago I asked someone in the Canadian office about transfering some of the plugins from my Scope to my Pulsar II. It was never done. I emailed CWA about it and never recieved a response. Then a few days later the "announcement" was made that they are now going to charge for plugin transfers. And I still recieved no answer back.
Ralf has made a valiant effort to appease a few people, but the user base in general is not happy about the whole thing.
Here's an example:
A customer walks into AGB (our store), he has a Luna, he wants to sell it and get a Powerpulsar (or whatever it's called now). "Can I get my purchased plugins transfered from the Luna to the new card?" he asks. "Yes" I reply and then I explain the whole process to him, and I also explain that the process has not been a smooth one from what I've read here and that they charge for the service now. The customer then changes his mind after reading the horror stories on this board and purchases a competitors product instead.
As a retailer I didn't lose, the customer thanked me for my honesty, still purchased something from me (actually more than he originally planned). As a CWA retailer I lost, the product is still sitting on my shelf. As a company CWA lost, they lost a customer to a competing product.
I wonder if this is just an isolated incident or is this actually happening in other places as well?
I suspect that this predates the charging for key transfer issue and they are implementing the charge as an effort to stem the tide. Unfortunately CWaudio GMBH is making up for ground that they lost as formerly creamware, as well as having to work into the future.On 2004-06-07 11:19, 7XL wrote:
I wonder if this is just an isolated incident or is this actually happening in other places as well?
As for why we continue to discuss things, personally I think its because this forum is for sharing our thoughts, ideas inspirations and even dislikes (or just opinions). I do agree that the situation isn't probably going to change, however if anyone is carrying on the conversation here in an effort to get creamware to notice your views (rather than just to express them) I might suggest that a better course of action would be to send something physically written or typed via regular mail, or even more than just a single email. It is nice that Creamware (and Frank & Ralf as individuals) pay some attention to the goings on over here, but it certainly wasn't something promised when they set up their company.
At least this conversation is still civial and the exchanges somewhat thought provoking.
Just have to add that I also think it is a mistake for CW to charge for transfers and kill the 2nd hand plugin and hardware market.
Already in the past due to CW marketing offers and bundling many plugins lost their value very rapidly, and now that is even more so.
It is not the users fault that the transfer process is so complicated, it was CWs decision to use the chosen protection method.
I think it should be possible for us to sell on our hardware and software without incuring this extra cost.
I hope CW can find a way to automate the transfer process.
Cheers,
Menno
Already in the past due to CW marketing offers and bundling many plugins lost their value very rapidly, and now that is even more so.
It is not the users fault that the transfer process is so complicated, it was CWs decision to use the chosen protection method.
I think it should be possible for us to sell on our hardware and software without incuring this extra cost.
I hope CW can find a way to automate the transfer process.
Cheers,
Menno
I blame the jerks that feel entitled to free software & never pay for it. I can't say I blame CW for creating a semi bullet proof copy protection scheme. Sure it can be a pain, but there is much less automatic mark up to offset piracy losses. I would rather CW use their precious time & resources to develop new products than to make it so I can easilly sell off the ones I don't want. If you buy a new board & it comes registered with plugins you already have, big deal! Sell the device with the transfer fee included & be done with it.
Another thing. Why would CW want to do this for free when any one of us could buy one of the plugin packs & sell off each device individually for a quick buck. Sure, the devices were bought & paid for but switching them over would be draining from CW's resources. A very smart move!
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: scary808 on 2004-07-05 21:18 ]</font>
Another thing. Why would CW want to do this for free when any one of us could buy one of the plugin packs & sell off each device individually for a quick buck. Sure, the devices were bought & paid for but switching them over would be draining from CW's resources. A very smart move!
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: scary808 on 2004-07-05 21:18 ]</font>
point 1 : there isn't even such 'first hand' thing - or why else didn't CWA fix that 50% shop mode for registering SFP 4 -I'm almost certain it will still work...On 2004-07-05 20:44, menno wrote:
... and kill the 2nd hand plugin and hardware market...
...I think it should be possible for us to sell on our hardware and software without incuring this extra cost...
point 2 : the 'right' to sell software (or better it's use) is more an exception than a rule - not a single supplier will appreciate it, even if they tolerate it to a certain degree.
I frequently buy used records because I'm too lazy to copy and like the artwork.
But that doesn't help the artists at all. Even though I never use filesharing (on the internet - not in the Apple office
) I'm in no way better than any 'regular' s*cker...cheers, Tom
and when you sell your kitchen table the furniture maker does not get a dime. Once you buy something, you ought to own it period no ifs ands or buts. The whole notion that software is intellectual property and doesn't really belong to you even though you have fully paid for it is totally bogus. Because it is new, and because governments have been on the side of corporations and not consumers (as they should be) the law is developing into something totally unfair.
If it is so complicated to change the software keys, that is Creamware's fault not the ours. They should abandon keys if it is going to annoy customers. They should be glad that people are using their cards and software even if they obtained them used. Is money all that matters to them?
Furthermore, I could care less what the so called "rule" is. Just because most companies do something and it is legal by no means makes it right.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-07-05 23:12 ]</font>
If it is so complicated to change the software keys, that is Creamware's fault not the ours. They should abandon keys if it is going to annoy customers. They should be glad that people are using their cards and software even if they obtained them used. Is money all that matters to them?
Furthermore, I could care less what the so called "rule" is. Just because most companies do something and it is legal by no means makes it right.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-07-05 23:12 ]</font>
and when you lease a car it's still owned by the leasing company.....
software licensing laws MAY be unfair, but you know what the deal is when you put out your money.(or you should when you read your agreement) also, the fact that it's a LICENSE should tell you somtin'...
it ain't gonna change at the moment so 'nuff said.....
software licensing laws MAY be unfair, but you know what the deal is when you put out your money.(or you should when you read your agreement) also, the fact that it's a LICENSE should tell you somtin'...
it ain't gonna change at the moment so 'nuff said.....
No it's not going to change soon. Perhaps one day it will. Most of us prefer to buy our cars and not lease them.
Here is what Frank should have posted:
Because we at Creamware have created such a ridiculously complicated method of copy protection which we have no intention of changing, each such transfer is a manual process that usually takes between 45-60 years of full attention and concentrated work by 37 scientists. It requires several back-and-forth 128 bit encrypted hexadecimal communication steps between us and the vector matrix. While still the user just sees the tip of the insanity, no one knows how morbidly obese the process really is for our dear beloved proctologist.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-07-05 23:30 ]</font>
Here is what Frank should have posted:
Because we at Creamware have created such a ridiculously complicated method of copy protection which we have no intention of changing, each such transfer is a manual process that usually takes between 45-60 years of full attention and concentrated work by 37 scientists. It requires several back-and-forth 128 bit encrypted hexadecimal communication steps between us and the vector matrix. While still the user just sees the tip of the insanity, no one knows how morbidly obese the process really is for our dear beloved proctologist.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-07-05 23:30 ]</font>
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