Thank you all for the healthy debate on this. I've read all of these arguements and there are some great minds that read these forums. For a company with a lagging profit margin, this is one way to ailienate customers who have long paid the avid premium, regardless of performance.
I suspect this strategy was enacted to specifically push the amount of liscenses sold to help out a lagging bottom line. If all avid wanted to do was "please" their customers by not making them plug in a USB key (oh the horror), a wireless solution would've been just as acceptable (imagine an iphone app with all your settings and codes).
While the possibility of loosing small hardware looms large, and the loss of a USB port can be annoying, the benefit of bringing your pro tools (or avid) with you not only helps with work flow, but with proper immagination (on avid's side) having a phisical plug to activiate your system could lead to other potentialities (such as having your dongle carry your user settings, project settings etc). While I sympathise with the idea that some people have a distaste for dongles (or the much more impressive ilok), in practice it is very useful to tailor your work experience as such. It saddens me to see Avid essentially fix something that ain't broke.
If Avid would get a DVD authoring/Blu ray authoring package for the Mac with this bundle I would never need to install FCP Studio again. Glad I will be able to install Pro Tools 8 on the same machine at the same time with 3.5 though Pro Tools needs to build in the DV toolkit to be fully useful to me. Very excited to see Avid FX make it to the Mac. Side thoughts: I'm a big fan of the Avid. MAKING THESE LIMITATIONS ONLY HURTS THE PEOPLE THAT ACTUALLY PAY FOR YOUR SOFTWARE!
Most other major software companies like Adobe and Maxon already allow for this. I suggest 2 activations with some form of network checking to make sure the software isn't running on the same network at the same time. Something has to be done to fix this issue. But I cannot justify buying two licenses when I'm not using both at the same time. Now I can see that for the cost of the software Avid wants me to only be able to use it on one machine at a time. With Avid's new software activation I will only be allowed to have the software functioning on one of these systems. Just pull it out of my tower, plug it into my laptop and I am legit and ready to go. Or on my laptop when a client would like me to travel to their location. At home for when I am doing a smaller single bay project. Which is why I bought MCsoft to have in the other 2 locations I need to use Avid software. Like most of the editors that shell out the 3k to buy Media Composer Software, I have 3 systems, one at work, one at home and one I travel with (laptop). While I agree that the software activation solves both these issues, I would like to bring up this concern:Īvid's new Software Activation needs to be tweaked I also see Avid's need to maintain control over where their software is installed. I know a lot of people are annoyed with it and how easily it can be lost.