Yay, MOTU!

So, recently I decided to upgrade my music computer to a SSD, because as the root filesystem has gotten fragmented, it’s been having more and more trouble recording 16 tracks at once.

Thanks to Dan Spisak and a great video on Youtube, I was able to do the disk upgrade with a minimum of fuss. However, when I fired up the new mac, suddenly Digital Performer had forgotten that it was licensed.

I looked in the front of my DP 7 manual, and discovered that it had no keycode. Not suprising, since it was a upgrade edition from DP4. But I have no idea where my DP4 manual is, or if I even still have it.

I was very sad, because DP is a $500 piece of software and I don’t have a spare $500 right now, and I *really* didn’t want to be unable to record anything multitrack until I had the money to buy DP again. However, when I popped up my MOTU account, I discovered that in the process of buying the upgrade edition, I had registered DP4. Sadly, the MOTU page had the serial number but not the license key.

So, without a lot of hope, I sent a email off to MOTU support asking if they could regenerate my license key from either my serial number or the Auth-DigitalPerformer file on my disk.

I didn’t have a lot of hope for this, and in fact was already composing in my mind my second email where I pointed out that I was using MOTU for all my audio IO, all my MIDI io, and had several pieces of MOTU software and are you sure you don’t want to help me..

However, and I do feel very chagrined by this and make a mental note to be less pessimistic in the future, they responded .. in less than four hours.. with my license keys.

In general I have been very happy with MOTU. Their MTP AV is a rock solid MIDI router and MIDI IO appliance, I’ve never had a problem with my pair of MOTU 896 interfaces except once when I upgraded OSX (back in the PPC days) and their driver caused a kernel panic – and they had exact, detailed directions on their web site explaining how to fix it. Digital Performer meets my needs well as a MIDI sequencer, virtual instrument plugin host, and multitrack digital audio recorder. I’ve recorded three albums with it, and I’m working on recording three more right now. I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t help me recover a lost license key – I guess I was expecting them to look at it as a opportunity to make a sale.

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