The Gaming Outpost

I promised that I would write this:  the company Turtle Beach, which produced music software products a decade ago and now manufactures a very popular line of headsets for video game play, has demonstrated to me what can only be either intransigence or incompetence in response to a customer requiring what seems a very small amount of help.  I will give you the details and allow you to judge for yourselves.

First, though, permit me to announce the publication of the latest temporal anomalies Examiner article.  I have been examining the movie Timeline, and have just released Timeline 16:  a blast, which fills in some of the details involved in the anomalies which involve sending seven time travelers to the past, and then snatching one back to the future.  If you are new to this blog and interested in time travel movies, you’ll find an index of most of my work in that area here.  Now, let’s get back to the problem.

Turtle Beach once published software under the trade name Voyetra.  What some would say was a long time ago but I think of as fairly recently I purchased one of their products, something called Digital Orchestra, from a software rack in a Best Buy.  It did a number of things that were very good, but there were some things it didn’t seem to do, and the suggestion was that there was an available upgrade for it.  I contacted the company, and was told no, but there was a program called Record Producer that I could buy and download directly from their server which would take the proprietary .orc files and convert them to another proprietary .rpp format, from which I could produce midis, wavs, and mp3s.  I purchased it.

They tell me that I purchased it in 2003; I have no reason to doubt that.  They say that the price was forty dollars, but my recollection is that it was the most I had to that point ever spent on an online purchase or paid for software, and that this was on top of the previous software I had purchased from them which was supposed to do what this one did.  I installed it on my computer, which I think was by then running Windows 98, after I had been coerced to abandon Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 for that inferior operating system.  The program worked well, and I used it frequently, creating several collections of music and also using it to print scores and parts for songs I had written for others.

The time came when due to hardware problems I was forced to replace several computer components simultaneously, including the boot drive, and in the process was forced to upgrade to Windows XP.  This created a minor problem, because the registration code did not work; but customer service at Voyetra provided a new code that would work on XP, and although the program lost some functionality (it no longer saved in mp3 format), it still worked quite well and I was again using it frequently.

At this point it would be important to explain the security on this program.  Voyetra was serious about preventing piracy.  You could install the program, and you had to type in a code that was, I am told, unique to your copy.  It probably is not, but at least it was not universal.  This would make the program functional for thirty days.  In that time, you had to register the program to make it fully functional for more than thirty days.  If you did not, the program ceased to run–it would come to the registration screen and tell you that you’d finished your thirty days, and you could then register it or close it.  Registration was simple, though, because the program would itself contact the Voyetra server and obtain a code which you would never see, and that would resolve everything.  They were aware, however, that not everyone had Internet access on every computer, so they provided two alternative methods.  One was to log into that server directly from any computer, type in a string of numbers and letters that the program generated, receive a new string of numbers and letters which the site generated, and then put this information into the program to unlock it.  The other was to send that same string of numbers and letters to Voyetra by Fax, and receive a response by Fax with the needed code.

Earlier this year another hardware failure required replacing a boot drive.  This did not mean that I lost the Record Producer program, which was still installed on the data drive.  However, beginning with Windows XP Microsoft decided that its operating system would not recognize programs whose installations pre-dated its own.  That means if you have to re-install XP you also have to reinstall every other program on your computer so that XP will recognize it.  I did so, because I needed the music program.  It gave me the thirty day warning and attempted to contact the Voyetra servers.  But sometime in the past year or so, the Voyetra servers have ceased to exist.  Turtle Beach still exists, but they don’t maintain that site.  So I e-mailed them and asked for a solution.  I sent them the code that the program generated.

It took several e-mails before they even understood the problem.  Then they decided to tell me that there was no solution:  neither they nor anyone else could give me the code that would be needed to restore the program to functionality, because having taken down the servers they were apparently too incompetent to preserve whatever software was required to generate such a code, and having found a lucrative business in audio hardware they have in essence closed down their audio software division.

Our company president, who knows more about such things than I, says that if they will not or cannot provide the registration code to a licensed user, that makes it abandonware which anyone can use, crack, and install; but his preliminary search for a code or cracker to get the needed number has only revealed that there are many others out there in the same position, unable to register their software because the servers are gone and thus unable to use it after a computer crash.

To be clear and fair again, I understand that the program might not have worked on XP; that would then be one more complaint I would have about Microsoft, who repeatedly redesigns its operating system software so that my preferred programs no longer run.  That is not the case here, as the program ran fine on XP for quite a while and then when XP was reinstalled it ran fine for thirty days until the “trial period” expired and it locked me out.  I also understand that they might be unwilling to support software that ran only on operating systems that were no longer supported, such as Windows 98; however, it does run on Windows XP, and although Microsoft is threatening to discontinue support for XP next year it has not done so yet.  I’m old school; I would like to get my Commodore 64 running, get new controllers so I can play my Intellivision, and find a version of QBasic that runs on XP so I can run my own programs that are now nonfunctional thanks to Microsoft’s less-functional operating system changes.  I don’t think software should ever expire, and I don’t see any reasonable argument for it to do so.  It’s not as if I’m asking them for an upgrade.  I’m asking them to honor the license they sold me to use this software as long as I am using a computer on which it can run, by giving me the password to get around the security they installed on it.  They are refusing.  If, as they claim, they cannot, they are incompetent; if they simply will not, they are intransigent.  Either way, despite how polite they have been, I find their refusal to provide the necessary code to activate the software I bought from them unconscionable.

I am open to hear other opinions.

Before I close, let me note that Eric Ashley has again written another, Practise Bits:  The Meaning of Words.  Having just now read it, I find it a fascinating fragment of a world about which I would like to create more.  Perhaps I will find a way to do so.

–M. J. Young