Dongles, Dongles Everywhere

Yesterday at work, I mentioned to a coworker that I was using software that required a dongle (Propellerhead Record, to be specific) for use. To be fair, you can also use it with online verification, but plenty of folks don't connect their music computers to the 'net for security and performance reasons. Therefore, they lose a USB port to the dongle. And, when you're operating on a MacBook Pro like mine, you've only got 3 USB ports to work with. And my rig includes:

• A MIDI control surface
• A MIDI keyboard
• A MIDI-to-Guitar Controller
• A MIDI audio card

An old-fashioned MIDI cable allows me to connect the keyboard through the control surface, but the dongle knocks the whole thing out of whack.

In any case, I mentioned this inconvenient dongle, and this computer-savvy coworker had no idea what I was talking about. Hardware dongles aren't a huge priority outside of specialized software, and it's probably because the general public wouldn't stand for it. The only other time I've run across them (outside of music) is specialty scientific software, and at least those dongles allowed pass-through connection of another device (even if it was just a parallel port). Toss in that the new POD Farm plugin I want to use requires an iLok dongle, and I've only got one USB port left. There's the possibility of a USB hub for the dongles, but I'm still down one and I'm not sure about the performance impact of using audio and MIDI devices on a hub.

I understand software companies want to protect their investment in their software development, but a loss of hardware functionality isn't the way to go. The Internet verification is a low-mess solution for those who can always count on playing or recording in a WiFi environment, but that isn't always possible. I've seen recommendation for time-window verifications, where one online authorization lasts for a certain period of time, and that goes a little farther towards a good solution. Ultimately, though, any loss of functionality represents a loss that users have to consider when purchasing their software.