Creative (Suite) Self-Destruction

What do you do when your primary creative tool stops working? It's an increasingly common problem as our tools become digital. When Gibson snuffed out Opcode Vision, the pioneering, elegant MIDI sequencer, it took me years to get comfortable with another music-making tool. When BitHeadz fizzled, my copy of its DS-1 sampler software began a countdown to self-destruction as well. I had just enough time to rescue my custom sounds before DS-1 shut down permanently.

But when a program from a company that's still in business abruptly refuses to launch, it really chaps my hide.

Several years ago, I was in Japan for a few days and took a long train ride to visit a shakuhachi player whose CD I was mastering. He met me at the station, we climbed to the top of the hill where he lived, I fired up my laptop computer...and my audio editing program at the time, Steinberg Wavelab, asked me to insert the original program CD to verify I owned it. (That version of Wavelab conducted random piracy tests.)

I didn't have the CD, of course, and the Internet connection on the hilltop was poor. So I ended up using a DJ program instead, just to figure out song-to-song timing and levels. Back in the States, that version became a rough guide, but I soon switched to another audio editing program, even though I'd really liked Wavelab.

Jochen Wolters put it best: The single most annoying thing about Digital Rights Management [DRM] is that it only affects honest media buyers.

Then last month, on the road again, I launched Adobe Dreamweaver to edit a feature for the O’Reilly Digital Media site. And got this annoying error:

Worse, not only was Dreamweaver refusing to play, so was the entire Adobe Creative Suite: Fireworks, Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, Illustrator, and even Soundbooth, my new audio editor! Reinstalling in the hotel room wasn't an option — not only didn't I have the pile of DVDs, I didn't have the hours it would take to install and update the programs.

Punching the error phrase into Google, I found an Adobe support page with five complex workarounds, some with up to 22 steps. I plowed through them all. None of them worked, though as compensation, I did see one of the most ridiculous dialog boxes ever:

Honestly, it's enough to make a guy go open source. I've been using Open Office on my laptop instead of the Microsoft Office suite, and it's been fine. If only I didn't love Adobe Fireworks so much and have so many custom macros in Dreamweaver.

I'm now packing for another trip. Maybe I'll pass the time on the plane by feeding my laptop a stack of Adobe DVDs.

Of course, the primary creative tool is still the brain, but every time one of my computer tools fails, my mind gets derailed as well and I lose the creative flow. Perhaps the solution is to have open-source alternatives for all one's creative tools so it's relatively painless to switch to the backup. But there's got to be a better solution to DRM, one that rewards honest users rather than punishing them.