Up in the AIR, SOLVED! for now

[Glenn Stanton]

14 hours ago, John Vere said:

Now make sure to point the installer at the Air Music Technology  folder during the install or nothing will work. Do not attempt to install it anywhere else. 

ah, good old hard coding makes the world go 'round (and 'round and 'round until you're dizzy and fall dead) ? 

[John Vere]

I’ll just add that I ended up with a second issue regarding the 2nd copy of DB33 I bought in one of my attempts to troubleshoot. 
It didn’t show on the iLok list and I mentioned that to Air support and they fixed it right away. 
So I will now declare Air Support as being actually very good.  
 

@User 905133 The Velvet is a worthy e piano with lots of good features. I hadn’t tried it for a long time but I installed it as part of my troubleshooting. 
I actually forgot what it was and was pleasantly surprised as I’m an e piano hoarder. 
 

Don’t bother with the Mini Grand. Unless they de bugged it. It was very unstable for me but that was 6 years ago. 

Edited January 15 by John Vere

[Will.]

On 1/12/2024 at 11:10 PM, John Vere said:

SOLVED UPDATE: I'll put it up here so no one has to wade through the mess. 

Not sure exactly what did it. The list of what I did would fill a book.  I eventually got Xpand and Velvet working. This made it even more of a mystery.  DB-33 showed as successfully installed  and was played just fine in Magix Music Maker and Ableton Lite. ( ya I had to install them to test) But nothing in Cakewalk.

So I re installed it for the 4th time but this time as Administrator. At first it still didn't show on scanning. So I checked all the boxes including Re scan failed and scan in sand box. Scan dialogue showed 0 new plug ins found still, but. DB-33 is back and seems to be working fine.  

 

 

Below is my original post: 

I have used 2 Air products on 100's of projects over the last 6 or so years since I first bought them. The DB33 and Xpand2.  I have everything they make and got it all on sale at one time or another but these are the only 2 I like. And I like them over anything else I've tried.  I even have 3 different licenses for xpand2. But every time I've had to install them it's been a huge PITA.  

I just built a new machine and I more or less had all my plug ins up and running within the week after I fired it up. And I have used Xpand on a few new projects no problem since. All the ducks are in a row.   I lok is happy, Cakewalk knows they are in the Steinberg VST folder, they are on the plug in list etc. And as I say, I've used them. All of a sudden when I tried to insert the DB33 yesterday I got the notification shown below ( same one)  

I opened iLok and logged in and I found it was activated. I did notice a demo version showing too? Was that causing a conflict? 

 

I uninstalled DB33 in windows apps as well as making sure the dll. was gone from the VST folder. I checked all folders just to be sure.

I still had the old installer and all went fine and DB 33 was re installed and inserted in the project and played just fine all day.

 

Then the bad news- I shut down for the night and re open to resume and get the message again. I then tried inserting Xpand and got same message?? 

Another issue is my old computer had all there stuff installed and I forgot to de-activate before I re built it. All the other vendors responded and fixed the activations with in a day or two. Still no word from Air.  You can see all my Air products show 2 activations. The second shows as the old computer that has a new name now. There was also my Laptop I used and I went in there and deactivated all Air products and the others so I could use them on the new machine. There's another possible issue. It might have only sort of worked for Air. 

Thank you all. 

 

 

 

This was because of your new Machine ID which iLok do not recognised. iLok have been a pain the past two weeks. Licenses have mysteriously moved from my dongle to the cloud at one point. It took their servers 5 hours to be restored last week Tuesday. 

Anyway - your issue might have been related to a server issue on their end. 

Edited January 15 by Will.

[Will.]

40 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Don’t bother with the Mini Grand. Unless they de bugged it. It was very unstable for me but that was 6 years ago. 

It is actually really stable now. Suits certain tracks really well. 

[John Vere]

1 hour ago, Will. said:

This was because of your new Machine ID which iLok do not recognized. iLok have been a pain the past two weeks. Licenses have mysteriously moved from my dongle to the cloud at one point. It took their severs 5 hours to be restored last week Tuesday. 

Anyway - your issue might have been related to a server issue on their end. 

Looking a lot like it's iLok and not Air.   

So Guess what. I turn on computer this morning and opened the project and the messages are all back. Not only that inserting the DB33 crashes Ableton lite. 

So I re submitted to Air and will see if they can sort it out. 

As I said it's was working for over a month and now it's not. And it was certainly working fine all yesterday afternoon. I had even hard booted the computer just to make sure all was good. I just turned on my other computer and all is well there. Go figure. And that's a brand new ID as well. 

[Will.]

Yep, definitely iLok issue. Contact them too. They probably think you're running a pirate version of the plugs, seeing that you have it installed on three devices - where two of those are new machines/ID's?

iLok is a pain. 

[HOOK]

John...I had a similar issue a couple weeks back when I wiped a machine and went with a clean re-install...and what I found was that a bunch of my licenses were listed under "Cloud" in iLok.  All I had to do was drag and drop those onto my physical iLok 1 and all my problems went away.

No idea if this helps, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

Good luck.

[John Vere]

Thanks @HOOK 

I had no trouble with the new computer because my 2 licenses were on my old DAW and a laptop I use for live recording and stuff. I deactivated the laptop from all the Air products. 

So those activations were used for the new machine no problem and everything was working fine up until a few days ago. 

My old Computer was re done from scratch because of a pilot error and I hadn’t deactivated it.
I had sent in a request to iLok to deactivate the now officially dead computer and 2 of the vendors fixed that right away. 

Thanks to all for any insights and ideas everything helps.  I refuse to be beaten by a machine! 
 

 

Edited January 16 by John Vere

[Starship Krupa]

A year or so ago, my machine-registered iLok registrations decided to go sideways.

I submitted the reset requests via the iLok manager, which worked in most cases.

For the AIR licenses, I had to contact their support staff directly. Take a look at AIR's KVR support forum for how to contact them directly.

I much prefer physical iLok for registrations, but on a laptop, there is a vulnerability factor where that dongle is too easily damaged.

Fortunately, the AIR synths register just fine to the first generation iLok, so as long as you don't have iLok'd plug-ins (such as the iZotope Exponential reverbs) that require an iLok II or higher, you can get a cheap and plentiful first gen iLok for your AIR synths.

[John Vere]

Air just got back to me with a very detailed instructions on what to do. 
I am to contact iLok and ask them to reset all my licenses on the server. 
Then I’m to deactivate them locally. 
Then there’s a long list of steps to delete things stored on my computer. 
It’s a complicated process but we’ll see if it works. 
Air said don’t do anything until iLok confirms they reset. 

Question is why did it happen in the first place? Who’s to blame for wasting all my time? 
ILok or windows 11?  
 

I have a Steinberg e Licence dongle that I had to buy for Cubase and Wave Lab.  I just used that and managed to wrestle Cubase and Wave Lab 7 on to my old computer I'm slowly re building. Had to Hack the DVD and then run from the installer in W7 compatibility mode. 

Edited January 16 by John Vere

[User 905133]

48 minutes ago, John Vere said:

I am to contact iLok and ask them to reset all my licenses on the server. 
Then I’m to deactivate them locally. 
Then there’s a long list of steps to delete things stored on my computer. 
It’s a complicated process but we’ll see if it works. 
Air said don’t do anything until iLok confirms they reset.  [emphasis added]

Thanks for reporting their response Q: All licences or all AIR licences?

[Will.]

59 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Question is why did it happen in the first place? Who’s to blame for waisting all my time? 
ILok or windows 11?  

Just this morning, I wae working with a known songwriter in the industry remotely. She's extremely talented, but 40 mins in the Zoom she cursed and said that the iLok cloud was down again. Cause we were exchanging files to and from within PT.  Her timeout was 5mins max, but everything has been smooth since. I had immediately thought of your issue and suggested to her to get a dongle 3. 

Now heres my question to you, Sir John. Do you have your PACE license app installed? If so - how is the relationship between your AV and PACE? Are things rocky perhaps? Have you noticed any strange behaviour between the  two parties lately? Maybe councelling is needed. Check for these things. ? Thought I might throw some humour in this as well. Apparently Andriod has been cheating on Siri with Alexa. 

Edited January 16 by Will.

[John Vere]

32 minutes ago, User 905133 said:

Thanks for reporting their response Q: All licences or all AIR licences?

Im doing them all because other than Air there’s only 2 other vendors. 

[John Vere]

@Will.

I use the iLok Licence Manager software which is a Pace product. 

But thanks once again as I think you’re insight into the iLok funky servers  was bang on. 
 

Ilok sent me these instructions and it worked. 

1) Close any open cloud sessions (From the File menu in iLok License Manager)
2) Quit iLok License Manager if currently running, as well as any other binary that uses our protection
3) Go to the Start icon
4) In the search field type in “services” (without quotes)
5) Choose “Services” from the search results
6) Within the Services window, look for “PACE License Services”
7) Right-click it and choose “Stop” from the pop-up menu
? Leaving the Services window open, open a Windows File Explorer window
9) Navigate to the following location (this can be cut and pasted into the address bar):

     C:\ProgramData\PACE\Eden

  10) Delete all ”.sdb” files found there and then close the Windows File Explorer window
  11) Return back to the Services window
  12) Right-click “PACE License Services” and choose “Start” from the pop-up menu

The client database on Windows will be reset after completing this step.

Next, log in to iLok License Manager and from the File menu, click Preferences, then Licenses.
Click "Remove account data saved on computer"
If the button's text is already gray there's no need for this step.

Now reactivate your licenses; the products should launch as usual.
 

Edited January 16 by John Vere