Creating music for your gaming projects and having Cubase issues with either the free trial or paid for versions of Cubase 13 or below? Well, here’s a solution that should fix the elicencer not playing nice even when you don’t have elicenser products installed. Or if you get a loading hang at the moment of VSTConnect.dll. Steinberg suggest that you disable elicencer using the following method.

1. Press Windows button + R (same time)
2. in the RUN window that pops up type or paste in – %appdata%/Steinberg/Activation Manager
3. Press OK
4. Open the Settings JSON file with NOTEPAD
5. Delete everything and paste the following:

{
“asyncTokenRefreshThresholdMinutes”: 1440,
“autoActivateProductPackages”: true,
“enableELicenser”: false,
“environmentType”: “production”,
“exitPeriodKeepAlive”: 10,
“licenseStateRefreshTimeHours”: 18,
“licenseWarningExpiryTimeMinutes”: 5,
“logProductMappingQueries”: true,
“overriddenHumanReadableComputerName”: “”,
“remainingLeaseTimeRenewThresholdHours”: 168,
“removeUnresponsiveClients”: true
}

6. Press File then select SAVE.

This should work with a current install, but if you have upgraded it might start searching again for the elicenser. So, what we did is completely uninstall elicenser from our PC via add/remove programs. No restart was required. After this the VSTconnect.dll no longer hangs and it loads perfectly.

Hope this helps.