Hi, some of you long-time members might remember me from PlanetChristmas. I am sorry to have not participated on this forum. Been reading through a lot of threads and recognize some names from back in the day. I'm still working for a decorating company around Christmas and maybe will even do my own display again this year. I wanted to come to the source to get some answers and figure out if I should use LOR2 this year or not. Let me ask a few questions, because I would like to know if there is some clear consensus.
For starters, we have been using LOR 1.5.0 with the 1.6.x hardware utility for the past few years, and we've gotten most of the kinks ironed out of our production system over several years. I've got displays running with anywhere from 16 to 150+ channels using LOR1602's ranging from the old modular boards produced in 2003 to the current blue boards. Production environment uses MP3 directors wherever music is involved.
I'm primarily using a rather old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop for most of my editing and hardware testing. It's freshly installed this year with XP SP3 but only 256MB of RAM.
1) I've read quite a few threads here with people reporting bugs in the licensing module. Where I'm working on shows, I'm not likely to have a connection to the internet. I'm also getting paid by the hour to do this. What is the likelihood of the current build of LOR2 to de-activate on me in the wild and demand that I re-register? If the probability is substantially higher than 0%, then it's a no-go for me. I'm trying to guage what the current wisdom is. For the record, I've personally had both Windows and MS Office de-activate on me for no reason whatsoever, with perfectly legit volume licenses.
2) Will LOR2 and LOR1 peacefully co-exist on the same system? Will I have problems?
3) I've read about timings shifting 0.3 seconds out of sync on some files, on some LOR versions, on some WMP versions. Is there a definitive answer as to what combination of software causes this problem to manifest itself? I'm running the stock WMP9 that installs with XP and plan to continue doing so unless given a reason otherwise.
4) Does the above synchronization problem affect the MP3 Director boards? And will the synchronization appear different from on the computer when I transfer a show to the MP3 director? If there's a FAQ that covers this, please direct me to it.
5) Finally, does LOR allow permanently shifting a license seat from one machine to another (newer) machine? Similar to how you can "de-authorize" a machine in iTunes?
I think I'm leaning toward staying with LOR1 for 2009, but I await your advice. Thank you in advance for any information you can provide. Looking forward to the 2009 season!
My personal feeling would be to stay with what works this year and investigate an upgrade for next season, since you do this as a business. You probably won't have the time to take advantage of all the new features in LOR S2 this year since it is so late in the game now, and if you have problems ........
You might want to inquire with LOR if there is a time limit for your free upgrades.
Depends what you mean. Everyone who purchased LOR 1 has been issued a free Advanced license for LOR 2, though they may not have retrieved that free license. There's no time limit for retrieving the free license.
However, when a license is purchased, generally speaking it's good for releases that are created within one year of the purchase date - except that for people that purchased LOR 1 and therefore received a free LOR 2 license, instead of the actual date that they purchased LOR 1, we use the date that the free licenses were created and made available - which was something like the middle of June 2009, I believe.
So, let's say you purchased LOR 1, and therefore were issued a free LOR 2 license in June 2009, but you don't actually retrieve your license info until the year 2037. By 2037, the latest version of software is version 37.37. But your license is good only for versions that were created through June of 2010 - for example, perhaps up to version 2.12.
At that point, you could either:
(1) Purchase a version upgrade (at a discount since you already have a license), which will be good for version 37.37 and any other versions that we create within one year of your purchase, or:
(2) Download version 2.12 and use your existing license, free of charge. We intend to keep old versions available for download, for people who don't want to purchase upgrades.
Of course, by the year 2037, version 2.12 may not even work anymore on whatever newfangled operating system is currently in use, but if it does, or if you can somehow get good ol' Windows 98 SE up and running on your machine, you're good to go.
I think I can answer a couple questions: All the license "problems" I've seen reported here come after people upgraded to a new version. Those "problems" were simply that they had to re-authorize the computer. Under most cases this won't use up an additional license seat.
As far as transferring licenses: The current license scheme is for 5 machines, and there is currently no user-driven way to transfer a license (personally I think there should be...) But LOR has stated that if you ever "run out" to let them know, and assuming it's for legitimate reasons, they'll take care of you.
Thanks for the info. Sounds like I will stay with 1.x for production this year but try out 2.0 on another system. One thing I noticed in the demo was that the channel configuration screen was so slow it was almost unusable. This was a show with around 160 channels defined. It took literally several seconds for the GUI to scroll one line. Is this normal with only 256MB ram? Except for the slowness, I really like the new channel config.
Jeff Sand wrote: It took literally several seconds for the GUI to scroll one line. Is this normal with only 256MB ram? Except for the slowness, I really like the new channel config.
Smooth sailing here. Course, I have 24x the memory, to. (6GB)
you're reminding me of last year when I tried to run my show off a P3-667 with 1 GB of RAM in a WinXP environment...
Well I'm feeling better now knowing I have an advanced license since I just found out my 2.0.16 version was programmed to stop working. A popup window would of been nice...guess I'll have to download a good version before Jun 2010 :-)
