dekstop: weblog

I just wanted to check out the beta of Ableton Live 5.2 -- since switching to a Mac last year I haven't found a decent audio sequencer yet that I could actually afford, and had been hearing great stuff about their recent improvements.

Well what can I say: I didn't get to actually use Live, because its copy protection mechanism sucks, and clashes badly with my stubborn viewpoints on privacy -- and then some.

For example...

When you start up the application for the first time it requests admin privileges?! After canceling this request you're informed that it just tried to silently install ReWire, and of course then failed lacking proper authorization. Sigh. I thought by now everybody knows how silent software component installation is bad, and that's especially true if you're installing a beta that will expire within a couple of days.

You then have to register with this serial number: 3006-5523-B867-056F-28AE-4EC7. Usually a piece of cake, but the dialog to enter serial numbers has clipboard interaction disabled, which means you have to type it in by hand. Can someone please explain to me how this is supposed to make sense? Why I have to transcribe a long string between a text editor window and an application window sitting right next to it, on the same computer?

Now I actually took the time to transcribe the serial number, clicked "OK", and saw that I wasn't finished yet -- you then have to authenticate your software with their servers. A couple of years ago such a mechanism would have created an uproar, but I suppose by now everybody is used to it because every software company already does a variation of this. Especially music software companies seem to love the Internet for this.

Well to cut a long story short there are two alternatives: let Live do the authentication for you, or write down a challenge code Live generates for you and go to the Ableton website yourself.

Of course I chose method number two, the process is more transparent to me, and why should I trust a demo application enough to grant it net access.

But, of course, they display the challenge code, yet you can't copy it to the clipboard. Apparently they expect you to write it on a piece of paper, and walk to your friend with Internet access.

Oh man.

Ableton, I can see why you don't want everybody to just keep using a beta version of your software instead of buying the real thing.

And I can see how it might make sense to create a small barrier of entry to your beta so that people using these beta versions are really dedicated to your software, and everybody else just won't bother.

But this is just stupid.

I wish for the sake of your future that the "real deal", the commercial version of Ableton Live, has none of those flaws. Because if you get people pissed off at your software this early in the process you're clearly doing something wrong.

At least let us use the clipboard.

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