My being’s wilted. 
I know it’s a crappy thing to say, but I’m glad you went first and discovered how things work. (and took the bullet so that rest of us wouldn’t have to. Personally, I was just about to do the exact same thing.)
Edit: A big THANK YOU, since Discourse only allows likes.
Honestly, I suspect the ship has sailed on the inMusic scheme. I think that’s an inMusic plan that extends across multiple product lines. There’s at least one license in the temp key directory which doesn’t seem related to BFD. I don’t recognize the product at all (SAS6). It’s a little strange, though, because I thought my other inMusic (AIR Instruments) products were all iLok based. So maybe there’s hope that there’s flexibility on the subject.
Now, the good news is that it didn’t prevent me from reauthing the product. It prevented me from deauthorizing it. So, I have a working kit. I just don’t know how long that will last, whether it will survive the next reauth cycle, or (and I hope this is the case) the number of deauth’s/reauth’s will be reset when the next natural cycle comes up. It would be great if BFD just spelled this stuff out for us in a user manual or something.
Short of replacing it altogether with some proven auth scheme, I just want it to be workable, one way or another.
it was a mere couple of days since the last intrusion of the authorization scheme here.
this is intolerable, unacceptable
Definitely unacceptable to me, I made the mistake of not noticing that BFD was not activated pending an activation check, saved my session and closed Cubase. Opened it next time (after reactivating BFD) and noticed the entire BFD session was cleared to default. If I hadn’t saved that preset previously I’d have been out all my work.
I have no idea why this type of behavior seems like a good idea to any developer, this is how you give your users away to the competition. Or it this another step towards realism in having BFD act like a pissy drummer who walks out of a session and you’re out an entire day’s work?
Nope. Saw this in CxB at the beginning of the InMusic “launch”. Had a number of “early stage” projects with WIP kits and the LM was blowing away anything unsaved. A real PITA because there was no way to save anything loaded, but not saved. Could be a DAW problem, only I’ve never been hit with this before.
Update: Just got hit again with the “authorization” punch in the face and yes, it completely wipes out any loaded kit pieces, -even if- the kit was based on a saved preset. I’m struggling to think of a worse example of a software release which arbitrarily trashes the work done with their product.
@Steve63 appreciate your positive spin on the current fiasco, trying to do the same here despite taking a productivity hit, but this could only be viewed as a bug if InMusic were trying to improve what was a pretty darn useful program. I only see this as an udderly clueless attempt to put a chastity belt on a cash cow.
Doing my best to refrain from venting here (and failing…), would love to help fix this but at this point they can’t give me enough free expansions to make up for the cost of still trying to recover from the current ineptitude. It’s been months with only the herculean efforts of Drew and a couple of beta testers to keep this from being a total disaster. Making iLok look like a pretty good alternative atm.
IME (which is extensive) no developer would ever sign up for this. It smells way too much like an upper level “business” decision with no clue as to the damage done to the goodwill of the existing customer base and even less as to the negative impact of any future potential revenue.
Definitely a bug. Agreed. Underlying it is a desire to check once a month. Yet we’ve been told BFD’s default behaviour is to work offline. So it makes me questions why have a once a month check that can have bugs that then cause BFD itself to not work. Its not making any sense currently. If its just to check for updates, every other bit of software I use has an option to not check regularly for updates. let alone be in anyway connected to authorisation. Any other software doing that and I’d just delete it without thinking and find an alternative. Its not quite so easy to do that with BFD.
A monthly check is asking for trouble, and seems to have no benefit to anyone. I dont get it. And its not something we’re being told as to why and seem to be having to trouble shoot it ourselves. It makes it impossible to defend as there is no clue why its even happening in the first place, the monthly check.
I dont feel good about having to hassle @BFD_Drew, or any of the inmusic or BFD teams, but its slow going and still bugged out and we all just wanna use BFD and extol its virtues as the best sounding drum software there is.
Obviously, I know you know all this, just talking… talking… talking… 
And people getting trashed kits too… Total song killer.
The more I think about it, all the relaunch managed to accomplish was to put BFD into perpetual demo mode. If for whatever reason you are unable to survive the “bug” in a very poorly implemented DRM “feature”, everything you’ve paid for over the lifetime of BFD up until InMusic is rendered unusable. Which in my case, represents the single largest investment in any software I use. Unbelievable.
ProTools has a nice track record of shooting themselves in the foot, head, user base with their “strategies” to hogtie existing customers, but InMusic is a leading contender in the ‘hold my beer’ category with the relaunch.
(Earlier in this “process” of switching to inMusic, at the point where it was not evident that BFD even had a presence in their universe, I provided feedback to my 2 preferred resellers regarding the fact that the product that they still had up on their sites was seriously problematic. In their probable inclination to be diplomatic, their responses where neutral. “We’ll look into it,” which I totally understood. It’s interesting now, however, going back to their selling sites that BFD is not currently an offering.)
On the plus side…I have never seen a BFD forum this active in the decade plus that I have been using it. Fxpansion forums were a ghost town!
Booted up LM today to find that 3 more expansions had been de-authorized. The others de-authorized about 5 days ago.
It seems pretty clear that whoever programmed LM and authorizations, made it so that licenses would self destruct ever 30 days.
I can’t think of a bit of software with a worse strategy for license manager and authorizations, which is kind of impressive in a way.
For now I have gone back to the FXpansion version of BFD3 that works well and gets out of my way, I’ll be keeping an eye on here for any changes that make me reconsider. For what it’s worth I’m still very hopeful about BFD and can’t imagine my production process without it, so to me it’s just a matter of time before things settle into smoothness.
I have a rule that any DRM which actively gets in my way during a session (as BFD just did) and makes me uncomfortable just by having it running, gets no second chances and is booted out of my system immediately (which is why I haven’t used Waves or anything using PACE for many years). BFD gets another chance because it’s BFD and I’ve been in love with it since the first release.
Yep, this is my usual way of doing things too. Its keeps my system clean, means no surprises mid session, nothing popping up and getting in the way and is just good practice for keeping the PC running perfectly all the time.
BFD gets all the chances atm because its great, but its playing with fire
This is the double edged sword of being an active app and the forum being active on giving feedback. Show stopping errors are going to be talked about, people are going to vent, but if its working and bugs are getting squashed, the praise is going to spread too, as is a responsive dev team working on said bugs. Its all going to be noticed, but its the way to get a loyal fan base and (horrible phrase incoming) market growth.
We BFD users know it sounds the best, so it has a niche dedicated user base, it just needs to work without stopping all recording dead with weird online checks to get a larger user base of dedicated fans, and the forum will stay active, meaning more dedicated fans…
BFD have been very responsive so far, so hopefully this bug will be gone soon enough…
maximumdembo.
Words well said.
Why doesn’t BFD just go with iLok and be done with it?
For the love of all that’s good and right in this world please no…
What’s wrong with iLok? If you don’t want a hardware dongle there’s iLok Cloud. iLok is the simplest authorization system and once the asset is on your iLok you don’t have to do any of this license manager nonsense. I have it and love it and wouldn’t be without it.
iLock cloud requires you to remain connected to the internet. The dongle occupies a USB port. For me, that’s what is wrong with iLock.
Yeah, please, none of that.
I expect you know this, but iLok supports three modes for authorization, one of which is machine authorization. No cloud, no dongle, required. You only have to be online 1x to authorize a product.
Not necessarily a fan, but it is flexible, it works and it does not prevent me from working. I dug into their business model and didn’t find it particularly expensive or difficult to integrate given what I assume was a fairly significant user base. Wondering if the reason InMusic didn’t go for it is the yearly license fee they would have to pay. One can only guess as to the cost of reputation vs. implementation.
No, I was not aware of a machine authorization mode. Thank you for the info. I would have no problem with using software that is authorized in that manner. Just for the record, it has been well over 30 days since I purchased a license to use BFD3 and have yet to experience any authorization issue with it or any expansion pack.