The Steinberg Cubase SX 3 have been out for a year and was suppose to take music production to a new level by adding many new powerful features like real time editing while you play. But most of all, a big effort has been focused to improve the speed and processing time compared to SX2. Everyone that bought the SX3 discovered that Syncrosoft and Steinberg also had made a good attempt to prevent any form of illegal use as this version came with a “dongle”.
And it has taken over a year before anyone was able to make a working dongle crack for SX 3, the first working pirate version of Cubase SX3 surfaced just three days ago. So it seems like Steinbergs efforts paid of in one way. According to an interview with “Team H2O” (group behind the EMU) it took them over 1500 man-hours to build the dongle emulator and they will probably never do it again.
The thing that really bugs me with all this is, that by adding the dongle the performance of SX3 is reduced significantly. Why would anybody want to sell a lesser product than they need to, just to prevent theft? That is a big sacrifice for all the users that were willing to pay for the product in the first place. It is like buying a car that is impossible to steal but only can be driven in three out of five gears.
I understand copyright laws and I can see why companies want to protect their rights, but this is just silly. Now when the dongle fix is out I can’t find one reason to run the original application when I can get up to a 30-40% performance increase with the cracked version.
So the result is that the pirated version is (in some aspects) a better program than the original software and that feels a little awkward, at least to me.
Oh, and I did note your observation that the cracked version is faster, but I still think that it isn’t obvious that the dongle is the problem. Software optimization is an extremely counterintuitive art. IMHO one can’t really say much about why a particular feature is slow without analyzing it with a profiler.
It goes without saying that any time resources are diverted to interrogating hardware, ‘performance’ must suffer versus a routine where no hardware (dongle) checking is carried out.
I once worked for a firm where we had some impressive 3D modelling and stress (FE) analysis software. It was not only dongled, but licensed to specific CPU serial numbers and hardware configurations. Which was an utter beetch whenever the PC’s ram was upgraded, or additional hard drives added… it meant support calls (and thus ultimately fees, since only a limited number of support calls were provided free) for obtaining ‘new’ licenses for the software we’d already paid for any time we upgraded our machines. It wasn’t exactly the kind of software the average home user would want to rip off, either!
Anyway, the argument for dongles is “they’re harder to crack” than a software anti-piracy solution. Easier to reverse-engineer code than a chip. Whether to employ such measures in the first place is of course down to the vendors, and their financial aspirations for their product.
Micro$haft hasn’t gone bust in spite of all the pirated M$ software out there, and in spite of the fact that their products are bug-riddled insecure bloatware that requires bandaids (‘security patches’) practically every week. And it was them that invented the whole concept of “software licensing”. You don’t own the software you bought, mate. You just bought a license to run it on one machine (depending of course on the ‘license’) bugs and all.
Dongles are there to stop you violating the license by running their software (which you’ve only really leased) on more than one machine.
As for the entire issue of software ‘piracy’, I shall not touch that one with a bargepole.
Good point Craig, and the truth is I don’t know.
I may have jumped to conclusions too early on this. We installed the dongle free version on a second computer and some of the tasks were noticeably faster, so I just assumed. This could off course be related to non optimal USB setting, port conflict or that the original dongle is damaged etc.
I guess I should have checked around more before I started to complain about Steinberg.
My apologies to the software engineers at Steinberg, if I’m wrong.
Edit: Gary’s comments sound very valid and my assumptions were along that line.
I would be interested if anyone else had a similar experience or if it is just me.
As I said earlier, MarcusR, every time a routine addresses and interrogates hardware (a dongle) then resources are used, resources which otherwise are free for the main process.
If the dongle were only checked at program initialisation then it would be possible to remove it once the program was started. If you can’t remove the dongle once the program is up and running (because the program crashes, for example), then it’s a safe bet that the dongle-checking routine is being run at pre-defined intervals. Which means that your resources (CPU, RAM, I/O controllers etc) are being diverted to the dongle and away from what you want to be doing during those pre-defined intervals.
A dongle-free version of the same software doesn’t need to constantly interrogate the port and perform tests on the hardware (dongle), thus its resources are freed for the main process, and thus your program ‘performs’ better as you have described.
All depends on how often your PC’s resources are diverted to the dongle check.
I wouldn’t make that presumption. As I said earlier, optimization is a counterintuitive field. It’s entirely possible that forcing a routine to yield to hardware will make overall performance faster by allowing another thread to run. Not likely mind you, but possible. Experience has taught me to avoid drawing conclusions until I’ve profiled the code.
But even presuming that querying the dongle does slow down the code, this shouldn’t cause a 30% performance hit. It shouldn’t even be detectable by a human. I think the chances are very good that something else is going on (especially in light of Marcus’s second post), but, lacking access to the code myself, I can only guess.
I use Logic Audio, which has a dongle copy protection system, and it’s one of the snappiest sound applications I’ve used. This is anecdotal, but no more so than the rest of the thread. I don’t much like copy protection, but the dongle is less offensive than most other systems (e.g., forcing you to put the CD in from time to time, etc.).
Which is still a total indictment of dongles. Whatever the cause if there was no dongle it would eliminate all these possibilities for hardware failure.
I’d be willing to consider accepting dongles if the companies peddling the software were required by law to compensate me for downtime and any other costs I might incur related to their paranoia. Back in the bad old days I had two weeks downtime while waiting for Kinetix to replace my dongle for 3D Studio. And the replacement failed a few weeks later. This time we ordered a replacement, but downloaded a crack and threw the replacement dongle in a drawer where it stayed. Never had another day of trouble with the software.
What truly p*ssed me off was Kinetix’s tough luck, too bad attitude. They really didn’t care that I was losing money while my expensive software lay dormant waiting for a stupid, useless piece of unnecessary junk. I think they eventually dropped the dongle, but I’d already dropped their software.
It all comes down to respect your paying customers. And most software vendors started out with little and things have been getting steadily worse over the last few years.
In this case it seems very likely it is the dongle. If you read the details H2O have released along with things said by Syncrosoft and Steinberg it is pretty clear that Steinberg happily seriously compromised performance in their attempts to stop copying. The SX3 application is decrypting and moving code, checking the dongle, on almost every operation. Did this silliness gain Steinberg any sales? Hardly likely. They claim it does, but offer no evidence. There may be a few who went out and bought it because they believed the hype about this new dongle, but most people using a cracked copy of SX2 figured they’d wait and if SX3 was never cracked then they’d just stay with SX2.
Steinberg’s attitude towards their customers is what makes me not buy their products. I was using Sonar because I just like the company’s attitude, and it is a good piece of software, with no copy protection hassles. I know people who have used cracked versions of Cubase and really like it, but will not give Steinberg a cent until they drop the dongle. Of course Steinberg’s attitude is nothing compared to the juvenile attitude of some of their paying customers on the Cubase forums.
I’m glad to see H2O have succeeded just because it gives the finger to all these idiots.
This is the problem. The vendors claim they lose sales without the hardware protection. Therefore they obviously must get more sales with it. And so they should be compelled to carry all costs related to these ludicrous protection measures. They should not be allowed to have their cake and eat it.
Some vendors who have been brave enough to test the waters by dropping hardware protection and other overkill have discovered that not only did their sales actually go up, but their support costs plummeted. Makes sense…to people who aren’t smoking polycarbonate.
I have to admit that the first thing I usually do after purchasing software that requires the disc to be in a drive or has some form of hardware protection, is to find a patch to remove this nonsense from my life. Why should I suffer because I’m dumb enough to pay for software?
This can’t happen with something like this. The whole point is to stop the application doing anything until it has verified the code with the dongle. It is this that has made the dongle on SX3 so hard to break. It does seem extreme that the fixed version of SX3 would be 30% faster, but not necessarily impossible given the extreme nature of Syncrosoft’s latest white elephant.
Logic is a great application. Superior to Cubase in my opinion. I used one of the last versions that came out for Windows and it was definitely better than the version of Cubase I used at the time. Admittedly, although the owner of the studio had an original copy he never installed the dongle because he immediately installed the crack. I don’t know about the current Mac-only releases of Logic, but the dongles being used back then were a much simpler affair.
I can’t get SX 3 (h20) to work. It installed fine but crashes after loading GUI resorses, any one else have this happen & is 3 that much better than 2?
Thanks for your time
I have been using Cubase since '94. Back then it was just a simple MIDI sequencer and was very good at what it did. Installed from a single floppy disc. Never hanged, crashed, bottle necked… good stuff. As Steinberg developed the product, it became more and more advanced and had more and more bugs. (I suppose that’s natural) I did notice an up tick in problems when they went to the dongle protection. Kind of pissed me off.
I don’t like the suspicious nature of what they’re putting out, but I respect their right to collect the money for the product they have put out without some wanker stealing their technology with a pirate copy. Those of us who use software like this to make a living know that the price of the package is small compared to the yield it will add to our bottom line. Pay for the tool. Use the tool. Make some cash.
Better marketing could be the answer. I look at Coda Music and Finale. They have been really smart with their stuff. They inundated the market with “educational” packages, (full blown versions with serious discounts for students/teachers/clergy) and built a user base that will continue with that product because it is what they learned and grew up with. (Not to mention it is some damned fine software!) They also have lesser versions for the hobbyist that do less and less for less money, as does Steinberg, but on a more attractive scale.
Steinberg’s support relies heavily on a user’s forum much like this forum and if you think some Chiffers are skeptical/rude to others with only a few posts offering to sell some high end whistles, you should try to get help from the Whack-Os on the Cubase forum. Pretty brutal culture that has been developed. :roll:
Another way to look at this is if it took 1500 man-hours to crack the dongle, then they probably spent a similar amount of time developing the protection in the first place. Time I believe could have been spent perfecting the product.
Bottom line: Don’t be a schmuck! Buy the software and discourage cracked versions so they can concentrate on putting out a good product rather than copy protection.
Buy the software and discourage cracked versions so they can concentrate on putting out a good product rather than copy protection.