Toontrack is the only music software company that I have seen impose a limit like this. This limit does nothing to reduce piracy or oversharing of licenses beyond what the concurrent installation limit already does.
I own two computers. I have Superior Drummer installed on both. I like to reformat my hard drives about once a year in order to cut down on unnecessary bloat. Doing this once means that I have now reached my activation limit. To do this again next year I will have to e-mail Toontrack and ask them to reset my activation limit AFTER removing the licenses that are currently being used (meaning it is impossible to have a period of no downtime). There is also no guarantee that my request will be granted, so I could just lose my ability to use the software I paid for permanently.
As long as this ridiculous limitation is in place, I will no longer be purchasing any Toontrack products. The mainstream alternatives, Addictive Drums and Steven Slate Drums, both have more sane activation policies and I will sooner switch over to one of them than buy an upgrades or expansion packs for Superior.
Reformatting hard drives does not change the computer ID that the software uses, so you won’t need more authorization slots then. Also, there is room for two inactive authorizations and two active authorizations for each product at a time, and the inactive authorizations are automatically cleared after a certain time to reduce the chances that you will need to ask support to remove them.
Olof Hermansson - Toontrack
Coder
You mention worrying about too much “downtime”…. Just the process of reformating a hard drive and reinstalling all your software, is a LOT of downtime in itself. While you are doing all that, it would probably take LESS TIME to email Toontrack and get your authorizations reset. And as Olof pointed out, reformating a hard drive doesn’t change your computer ID, so re-authorizations are unnecessary.
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