What technical issues did you have with BFD3, that you’ve ditched it? It’s been running pretty solid for me since the past year.
Apart from the usual Licence Manager issues of it thinking you have no licences so making BFD useless, I am idealogically opposed to subscriptions, which is what we have now with the 90-day system, regardless of whether money is exchanging hands or not, I am temporarily renting BFD at inMusic’s discretion. Users never agreed to that and by allowing them to carry on you’re only allowing inMusic to make more bad decisions. I am still trying to find out what data they are taking every 90-days, with no legal agreement it could be anything.
Also the installer is a bloody mess, with folders with the same names all over the place. I completely removed everything and downloaded EVERYTHING from fresh, every expansion as well as the main program and I never managed to get rid of the double kit pieces in the display. Well I did manage to get rid of them finally by uninstalling this crap.
I did get de-authorized about 3-4 times last year, but from what I can remember, unlike past times, I was able to authorize again easily. Shouldn’t be happening though.
I can’t argue with that on the 90 day subscription model. I definitely don’t like the idea of one day having no access to everything I’ve bought because of unforeseen circumstances.
Duplicates probably just means Fxpansion era files mixed in. You just have to make sure they’re not in the inMusic BFD3 users folder and rescan user content paths.
There are a couple of things that I reckon could easily be changed to avoid these issues:
1 - Align all product registrations to the same period, regardless of when registered. Currently, as far as I understand, it seems that every product gets its own 90-day cycle, tied to the initial registration date. This obviously makes an irritating situation even more so. Aligning all registered products to the same period should alleviate some of that stress.
2 - Instead of making it an exact 90-day period, perhaps it would be possible to provide users with a range/flexible time-period. An example might be ‘Between 80 and 120 days’. This gives users some flexibility as concerns project-timing etc. This way, it would be possible to update in anticipation, before starting work on a specific product, that otherwise would’ve straddle that 90-day deadline. Might be all it would take to avoid potential down-time.