The MPC Air plugins phone home.

OK so like a smart guy I got all excited about the standalone plugins from Air and Akai for the MPC. The idea of something that I could have for 20 years and expect to work with only hardware issues to think about appeals to me coming from Mac OS and the constant changes to the DAW landscape that happens from OS updates etc. So I bought them all over the last year.

Well I kicked out my internet router when I was rearranging my studio the other day, and BAM! most of my Air plugins had deauthorized. I eventually was able to get Air tech support to admit that they phone home every three months to check authorization, and of course he had no idea why the internet being interrupted for a half day did them in? but it perfectly exemplifies why this is such a stupid and backwards thinking anti customer choice for them to make.

Can't recomend them going forward, and I feel stupid for having invested in them, it pretty much defeats most of the advantage of hardware to have plugins that are vulnerable to their authorization scheme.

Are you using the new public beta if so that might explain it..

It could be worse. They could do the paid subscription thing. I agree, this need for Wifi for the plugins is stupid. But most longtime user don't use the MPC for the plugins & unfortunately Akai is taking advantage of that for now, but as more newer & younger users grows, they will be more motivated to correct this Wifi/plugin drama.

Was this in standalone or in your computer? Could you paste their response in full?

I’ve just realised, having downgraded back to 2.15 after a long stretch trying to love the beta, that I never had to reactivate the purchased plugins once in all the time I was evaluating the beta, but I’ve had to do it three or four times in the last two weeks since returning to 2.15. That would imply some kind of embedded coding for authorisation which was left out of the beta (but I assume it’ll be in the official release)…

The phoning home issue has been known for a while - I mentioned how a rep said it was intended behavior in September of *2023* and others have mentioned similar before that. One thing is clear: reps can't seem to get their story straight on how often units are supposed to phone home. In my personal experience, it went from bad (once every few months) to worse (plugins deactivate every time I turn the unit on). Account is good, hardware isn't faulty. Reps are stumped. YMMV

Nutrisse wrote:The phoning home issue has been known for a while - I mentioned how a rep said it was intended behavior in September of *2023* and others have mentioned similar before that. One thing is clear: reps can't seem to get their story straight on how often units are supposed to phone home. In my personal experience, it went from bad (once every few months) to worse (plugins deactivate every time I turn the unit on). Account is good, hardware isn't faulty. Reps are stumped. YMMV

Dan Gill is the lead product developer on the MPC range, he is basically the guy who designs and makes hardware and component decisions, and he claims there is no intention for standalone to call home, but acknowledges there is a bug relating to time zones. Dan always seems like a good guy, so I would be inclined to believe him, although they don't let him out in public anymore thanks to this performance



Either way it doesn't change the fact that people are being forced to re-activate under certain circumstances, so it definitely needs to be addressed.

I have mixed experiences. At first I had to re-activate which fits into the every-three-months cycle. But once I was on 2.15 the activations seemed to be stable.

Now that I have switched to 3.4 I haven't had issues yet. Cannot recall if three months have passed since my switch.

MPC-Tutor wrote:

Nutrisse wrote:The phoning home issue has been known for a while - I mentioned how a rep said it was intended behavior in September of *2023* and others have mentioned similar before that. One thing is clear: reps can't seem to get their story straight on how often units are supposed to phone home. In my personal experience, it went from bad (once every few months) to worse (plugins deactivate every time I turn the unit on). Account is good, hardware isn't faulty. Reps are stumped. YMMV

Dan Gill is the lead product developer on the MPC range, he is basically the guy who designs and makes hardware and component decisions, and he claims there is no intention for standalone to call home, but acknowledges there is a bug relating to time zones. Dan always seems like a good guy, so I would be inclined to believe him, although they don't let him out in public anymore thanks to this performance

Either way it doesn't change the fact that people are being forced to re-activate under certain circumstances, so it definitely needs to be addressed.

I'm sure Dan is a stand up person...even though he's responsible for the Rhythm Wolf and subsequent iterations.

That said, this video is from almost a decade ago. Judging by recent rep responses, the plan has obviously changed at some point. That's likely not Dan's fault and has more to do with the bean counters at InMusic satiating the guys writing the checks.

I did hear about the time zone bug from a tech at Akai (internal time clock slips out of sync), but after going through the detailed process of making sure that wasn't the issue, the tech stopped short of confirming the "phone home" narrative from the rep.

While I'm "Team Dan", let's not forget he also once claimed they weren't able to improve on hand gestures for the touch screen due to an Apple copyright, which I believe has been debunked a few times over now.

Point being, who knows what's going on at this point. Not me, and seeming not many at Akai either.

Nutrisse wrote:That said, this video is from almost a decade ago. Judging by recent rep responses, the plan has obviously changed at some point.

That video was just to explain who Dan is to anyone who didn’t know, the comment about no calling home was made last year.

Not sure the touch gesture thing has been debunked, there are definitely a huge amount of ludicrously inane patents out there covering really obvious stuff, a lot of it covering really specific usage. There’s continuous litigation going on between the likes of Google and Apple, I doubt inmusic would be interested nor have the funds nor patent portfolio to get into a patent war.

it's not entirely like that and it's far more convoluted than it looks on the surface...
The original plugins and authorisations were done with cooperation of AKAI, 2getherAudio and BigTick Audio, AFAIK.
2GetherAudio had always problems with authorisation of their plugins - their forums are riddled with "can't authorise" topics from as early as 2017/2018. Anyway, at some point those guys formed yet another company called... tadaaam... QUBIQ and created an editor called struQture which was heavily used by the "BigTickAudio" guy and later on by AKAI. Roughly at around the same time, authorisations were taken over by AIR Music Tech (in my mind, they gave them already broken feature) and at around 2020-ish they've sold all of the 2GetherAudio assets to InMusic (probably to let themselves focus more on Qubiq thingy). I think that Qubiq didn't turned out as good as they wanted because apart of initial announcement around 2017, you won't find anything about it on the internet until the "Ring The Alarm" which was first qubiq plugin under the Akai umbrella. From now on - Force/MPC have two types of plugins AIR ones and Qubiq ones (subfactory, filterbank, ring the alarm) so I think that those guys eventually ended up in AKAI or just lease them qubiq technology. Don't know what's the role of the BigTick guy in all of this :/
Anyways, take that story with a grain of salt as it's made up from the info from the internet and mostly from the forum boards, for me it looks like a huge circlejerk of several people creating companies, selling them, creating another ones dumping them, doing some cooperations, transferring the assets between each other etc... life goes on...servers still down


https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=18
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=295&sid=1a6835f7007156c5b81101e37094e10a
https://www.2getheraudio.com/
https://www.bigtickaudio.com/
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=477851
https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1134027-new-plugin-development-platform-available-copy-protection-ecommerce-supports.html



BTW. Dan is the most chilled guy at AKAI imho - wouldn't go after him

MPC-Tutor wrote:

Nutrisse wrote:That said, this video is from almost a decade ago. Judging by recent rep responses, the plan has obviously changed at some point.

That video was just to explain who Dan is to anyone who didn’t know, the comment about no calling home was made last year.

My bad. I was at work and wasn't able to watch all the way through. As for the debunking, I think it was the GS forums where people were unraveling about it. You bring up a good point though, so yeah, who knows.

I can spend time reading this please truncate

Certified Beatz wrote:I can spend time reading this please truncate

You say you have the time to read, but still impatient. There's no pleasing you...

B-Wise wrote:

Certified Beatz wrote:I can spend time reading this please truncate

You say you have the time to read, but still impatient. There's no pleasing you...

Yes your right but time changes and they will come i hope voice over ethernet or usb.. that will change with new cards or a new breakout box.. old school terminology