We just renewed 3 of our 4 work licenses (I have lapsed my personal license), one of which had the Symphony option. These were perpetual licenses, not subscription. My Symphony license is now deactivated and Avid's support is telling me I need to renew this license. This doesn't make any sense to me? If I had a perpetual license with Symphony, why do I need to renew it seperately? If I let my perpetual license lapse, I should be able to keep the version I currently have installed shouldn't I? Symphony included? Does a perpetual license only include the base version of MC without any of the options?

I have just checked my personal version and that has also had the Symphony option disabled now that I am no longer maintaining support. I must be misunderstanding this, I can't possibly have lost the Symphony option by not continuing to pay for support? Because perpetual means that I perpetually have access to the version I have installed. And I had Symphony installed on those machines.

Can someone explain this to me?

Andi

You may need to sign out of Avid Link and then sign back in, in order to force Avid Link to 'phone home'. If that does not sort the issue, email Chris dot Bove at Avid dot com. He can sort this out for you. Include your System ID's and the email address used for your My Avid account. (However, DO NOT post your Sys ID's publicly on these forums)

Hmm,

Have you tried MANUALLY entering your Sys ID and Act ID in Avid Link in the Symphony License pull-down?

On my system, there's no "cloud" license available (or Avid isn't seeing it) so I have to manually enter the above info for Symphony option to work. I'm also perpetual.

j

Thanks Job, yeah, something is funny here

Andi

Jason Sedmak:

Have you tried MANUALLY entering your Sys ID and Act ID in Avid Link in the Symphony License pull-down?

Yeah, i was getting an error. I have since managed to re-activate my personal version's Symphony option by using an older activation code I found in the jumble that is the "My Products" page. I will still need to check on the work license but I will speak to Avid about that. 

Andi

Just to follow up on this. It turns out that even if you have a Symphony license with your perpetual license, once you stop paying your support fees, you then only have a perpetual Media Composer license and your Symphony license is taken away from you. If you want that back then you pay (£169 in my case, for one year). So perpetual is not perpetual in that sense.

Personally I don't think that's fair. If I had a Symphony license at the time of lapsing my support contract, I should be able to keep that license along with the rest of the program in it's current state. It should be a snapshot of how my system was right before my contract expired. Clearly this is just another way of squeezing some more cash out of a loyal customer base and it doesn't sit well with me.

The reason I was able to get Symph up and running on my personal machine was because I have been with Avid for such a long time that my Symphony license is actually pre-2012 when they broke Symphony out in to a seperate option so it still works as an actual permanent license. If you are unfortunate enough to not have that luxury then you will still be paying additional fees to Avid despite having a "perpetual" license.  

I guess their plan is working though as going forwards I'll abandon all my perpetual licenses and just do one year subscriptions to Ultimate, they've made it so that it's just too much hassle to maintain perpetual licenses. This is for work, like I say, personally, I'm not continuing to pay.

Andi

Hello,

Can we have an official statement on this? My perpetual support ends in march and I intend to let it lapse, I have a symphony option and a phrase find option attached to it, I need to keep those working. Those options were sold as perpetual, I really don't see why they should stop working with that license?

ripvanmarlowe:

...even if you have a Symphony license with your perpetual license, once you stop paying your support fees, you then only have a perpetual Media Composer license and your Symphony license is taken away from you. 

Hi everyone, and thanks Job for pointing me to this thread. 

I'm not sure where you heard that quote Andi, but it is certainy not true. When we sell something as perpetual, you absolutely get the entitlement to that product perpetually. Avid does not "take away" anything. 

There are a couple of instances we've been dealing with, bug-wise, which might make this seem so, but they are simply bugs and there are indeed workarounds. For example, if you are running Avid Link version 2021.12.0 and a perpetual version of Media Composer 2021.12.0, then the Symphony license is unable to "lock-up" in Avid Link. This is a bug that we fixed... but while it was an active bug, it was easily circumvented by either entering the Symphony code manually, or by reaching out to me and my team and getting a temporary version of Symphony (which we gave out for free to everyone who we saw with a legit Symphony perpetual). 

Now, ripvanmarlowe, my team and I looked at your own individual account. We see that the license you're talking about was a crossgrade that you purchased. This means that the System ID has BOTH the Media Composer and the Symphony Activation IDs listed in your MyAvid account. So, when you are manually activating those codes in Avid Link, make sure that you are only entering the "MCEG..." code for Media Composer, and the "SMAJ..." code for Symphony. 

Also note -- the only thing that happens to a perpetual license once its support contract expires is that the version of the app you are running is now locked to what you might call a "ceiling version". Meaning, if I let a perpetual license expire in December of 2018, then the highest version of the app I'm allowed to install and get activated is 2018.12.0. Getting a more "current" version of the app would require renewing the service contract. That's where some of the money from the service contracts goes -- towards the engineering and app designing teams who did all of the work to make those newer versions.

So... If everyone here does everything I mentioned, and you are still seeing some sort of an activation issue... then PLEASE email me and let me know. This is stuff we can fix. It's probably just some low-level tech issue that happened, and is NOT some dark and dirty conspiracy.

I'm ALWAYS reachable at chris.bove@avid.com and do my best to get back to you pretty quickly. 

Hi Chris, this is very confusing because you are the person where I heard that quote. I'm going to copy your exact words from your email to me:

"Hi Andi.

Media Composer can be purchased either in subscriptions or in perpetual licenses.  However, the “options” you can attach to it – like Symphony, ScriptSync, Phrasefind, and Newscutter – are always subscriptions.  The Symphony option purchased with that system ID expired in December on the 22nd.

If on your browser, you log into your MyAvid account and click on My Products, you’ll see that it has moved over from the My Products Tab to the Cancelled & Expired Tab.

You can get it again (here)."

You then linked me to the Symphony option page where I paid £169 for a new one year license of Symphony. 

My individual account is not the thing I'm talking about here, I managed to get that working with an older Symphony license (although, like I say, my newer Symphony license which was bought at the same time as the perpetual no longer works - it was just luck I had a second, older license).

I am talking about another account I use for work which has 3 perpetual licenses and one Ultimate. This had a Symphony license for one of the perpetuals. This is the one that stopped working and the one I renewed by paying £169 after you advised me that that option had disappeared and needed renewing. This is despite that fact that we renewed support on all 3 perpetual systems (which technically, if I had let that support lapse, I'd still expect to keep the Sympphony option). So I was surprised that the system that had the Symphony option, when renewed, only renewed the MC part and not the Symphony part. 

Maybe I'm getting mixed up somewhere but I'd love to get this explained to me because to me it seemed that

1) My personal copy of MC with Symphony lost it's Sym license when I stopped paying support

2)  The one perpetual license that had Sym with it on my work account, lost that option (despite continuing with our support plan) and I had to re-purchase it again

Chris, where am I getting confused?

Andi

Aaah - thanks for putting these two things together... You're right that I was mistakenly thinking that the offending issue was from that crossgraded license. 

After reading the second part there, it looks like there's simply a glitch somewhere that's confusing things. 

I'm away from my desk today, so I'm going to have Ajay, one of our top licesning experts, reach out to you via your MyAvid email address. He'll be able to figure out what's going on. 

Chris wrote:

Also note -- the only thing that happens to a perpetual license once its support contract expires is that the version of the app you are running is now locked to what you might call a "ceiling version". Meaning, if I let a perpetual license expire in December of 2018, then the highest version of the app I'm allowed to install and get activated is 2018.12.15.

Hi Chris,

IIUC from what you wrote above, those who stop support renewal on a perpetual license are still entitled to DL and use the dot/bug fix iterations that are released after stopping support renewal. In my case, my last full version was 2021.12.0 - so I should be able to the latest 2021.12.x iteration? Some months ago I inquired about this, but was told I'd be frozen at 2021.12.0. FWIW it's a Symphony license that mut be going on 20 years old - dongled. Appreciate your insights here.

Keith

bump - can Chris or someone else answer my question in above post? Many thanks.

bonang:

Some months ago I inquired about this, but was told I'd be frozen at 2021.12.0. FWIW it's a Symphony license that mut be going on 20 years old - dongled. Appreciate your insights here.

Keith

Our licensing servers see everything in terms of release date and time stamp. So, if your last version was 2021.12.0 (December) and you expire in January, then you will not have access to any "maintenance releases". So, what I wrote above is actually incorrect. Sorry about that. I was speaking in shorthand... I'll go edit my response above to say 2018.12.0 so as not to confuse anyone else. 

Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks for the clarification. I have a perpetual license with symphony and phrasefind perpetual options, I plan to let it lapse since perpetual won't be updatable anyways starting 2025. My question is when I will want to move to subscription to benefit from up to date MC, let's say in 2025 for example, will I need to crossgrade to Ultimate to keep symphony and phrasefind or will I be able to use standard subscription an attach those options I own to that subscription? Can't seem to get an answer?