I had previously installed 2018 from the USB stick after Windoze 10 zapped my hard drive and I had to reinstall.

That didn't work swimmingly since I wasn't thinking about the USB stick not being able to hold all the real tracks, etc.

So then I went through and tried to install the missing real tracks, etc all the way from my 2012 BIAB disks all the way up to before 2018. That helped but still had a bunch of missing stuff.

I was really on the fence about spending the $$$ for the 2019 update but after talking with support they said the best way to get everything up to date was to purchase the UltraPAK for 2019 on HD.

So I did that, and the HD arrived a couple of days ago.

So in preparation I de-activated 2018 which is said was successful. And then uninstalled 2018 and all the RealTracks, etc. Then removed all the folders under c:/bb

Then I installed the UltraPAK 2019 picking option 2 to install the programs on the hard drive but leave the real tracks on the external UltraPAK HD.

There were NO errors during the installation process and I shutdown since it was late.

This morning I tried running BIAB and got a wonderful "The License is locked on this computer, so some features are not enabled" pop up. I tried going to help activation as the pop-up said, but that just got me back to the same stinking pop-up.

This should be essentially a fresh installation of 2019 so how in the heck could the license be locked? This is the first and only installation I had done from the brand new fresh out of the box UltraPAK HD. And even if they somehow were counting the 2018 license activations there would be one installation burned for the zapped HD and the one that I de-activated which should in theory still leave me with 2 2018 activations, if product activation is working without bugs.

I sent a request to pgmusic support early this morning but haven't heard anything back as of tonight.

To say I am annoyed is an understatement. I've committed to spending about $180 for 2019 with the xtra pack and the HD purchase and it is NON FUNCTIONAL.

This is one of the reasons why I really hate product activation. I understand the theory behind why companies do this but when there is a problem like this it is the customer who suffers.

I can of course return the HD and xtra pack DVD at my expense, and I may have to do that if they cannot find a solution to this problem. But that also sucks since essentially I would be returning a non-functioning (for me) product and having to pay to ship it back to Canada.

I'm travelling now so I'm not able to try a test run on another Windoze 10 box that I have which has NEVER had BIAB installed on it. Maybe that will work, or maybe not.

So has anyone else encountered a similar issue with the "product activation"? Is this a bug in 2019? Another Windoze'ism? Phase of the moon?

Thanks for any suggestions on something I can try to resolve this issue when I'm back in front of the computer.

Burt,

It's 10 minutes after your post and Live Help/Chat is now open. Why not use it to talk to PG Music staff directly?

The icon for it is up in the right, top corner of the webpage.

Rest assured that PG Music will help you. It's not an issue that you need solve by yourself.

Regards,
Noel

Yes, you should contact Support.

I'm not sure what you purchased. If you bought the UltraPak Upgrade, then it expects to be installed over a full installation of BIAB. If I read your post correctly, you had deleted that prior to the install. But Support will be able to look up exactly all that you have bought and figure it out.

All good advice above. Please don't let this get you down. The Support team will work with you to resolve everything.

You definitely wouldn't need to return anything, the problem will be fixable. You said you de-activated 2018, and this might have something to do with it -- are you sure you aren't accidentally running version 2018, because that would explain it. The 2019 activation is not connected to your 2018 version at all. If this is somehow happening with your 2019 version, close the program and delete the *2019 ticket files from C:\Users\Public\Ticket, then re-run the program and activate again. Message us if you still have problems.

Thanks all, yes I just chatted with support.

Note that I had removed the old installation since I was led to believe that this would install cleanly, as what I had been told was that this would be the easiest way to resolve the original issue. Of course that may have lost something in translation.

There is no way that the 2018 version is running, it was de-activated AND removed.

But support thinks that it is some kind of activation loop related to the 2018 installation.

But it sounds like it is related to the ticket files.

I'm not going to be near the machine until next week, and then I'll work with support to try and get this resolved.

Thanks for the feedback, BurtB. Do let has know how this is resolved.

Finally resolved the issue with support. Tried removing the ticket files as suggested here and on my first online chat. But that didn't do it.

So support today had me use the unblock advanced option today and they gave me a code that resolved the license blocked issue, but I guess the chat must have dropped since I didn't hear back after saying that it appeared to resolve the issue. I'd asked what might have caused the problem since no errors were encountered during installation.

Now that it's working I need to install the Realtracks to the internal hard drive. I'll have to see if I can track down the best way to do that.

What about the steps here? https://www.pgmusic.com/techfaq55.htm#166

166. Can I store the RealTracks and RealDrums on a different hard drive than the Band-in-a-Box® and RealBand program?
Yes. The "RealTracks" and "Drums" folders, which are normally located in your bb folder, contain all of the audio files. If you have all of the "Real files" released to date, these will be quite large. Moving them to a different hard drive allows you to free up disk space on your main hard drive. To move them, you can simply select those two folders and use Edit-Cut and Edit-Paste to transfer them to a different location. You may not need to move the folders; you may have selected a custom folder when you installed them originally, or you may have purchased the program on a USB hard drive.

Either way, you need to specify the location of the folders in Band-in-a-Box® before you will be able to use them, if they are located anywhere outside your main Band-in-a-Box® folder. To do this, go to Opt. | Preferences, and click on the [RealDrums] button. This opens the RealDrums Settings dialog (which can also be accessed by a button in the toolbar). Select the "Use a custom folder location" checkbox, then click the Select Folder button. Locate and select your Drums folder, then press OK. Alternatively, you could just type the path manually without using the Select Folder window.

Use the same procedure for your RealTracks folder (Opt. | Preferences | [RealTracks].

Thanks Callie,

I was thinking I could probably just copy the files from the UltraPAK drive and then tell BIAB not to use the custom folder(s) for RealTracks and RealDrums.

Now if I just knew what caused the issue with the license being blocked so I can avoid that in the future, although that is probably more for curiosity than a real need to know. Hopefully it won't happen in the future if I need to install again.