Ableton Live Trial Sassafras Workaround
The coronavirus pandemic has presented loads of new challenges to almost every sphere of life. Everyone had to make a sudden shift to working and studying remotely and this shift looks like it will be the new normal for the next while.
This move to working and studying from home has also presented a few issues with software licensing for some of the applications we need to use for school assignments. Ableton Live is one of these applications that we need for our last year of college and the college has graciously loaned us a Mac for the year. The issue is that the licensing is all centrally managed through a Sassafrass server on our college’s network. We don’t have VPN access to the college network and so our copy of Ableton was unusable.
The workaround was to download the latest trial of Ableton Live 10. The trial has been extended until January and this is perfect for what we need to get done this semester. However, once installed, it appeared that the Sassafrass licensing config was copied across to the new installation of the trial version of Ableton Live and we were back to square one.
How we managed to workaround this
So the trial didn’t quite do the trick. We burned through a few trial licenses that the college was able to provide and it was the same every time. After a bit of trial and error and speaking with one of the college technicians, we came across the following article:
I started out by by removing the config files in the shared preferences folder of the college mac, this can be found here:
/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 10.x.x/
I booted up the Ableton Trial again, but got the same error. I then tried checking the user preferences from Ableton. The user library folder on the Mac was hidden, so I had to use the terminal to get the job done. It is unlikely that this folder is hidden on your mac too, but you can change directory to the required folder. Open up the terminal and type in:
cd Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 10.x.x/
Next we need to remove the config files. Since this is a college computer, I just renamed the files so I can change this back before I return it. This can be done with the following commands:
mv Options.txt _Options.txt
mv Library.cfg _Library.cfg
I restarted Ableton and I was able to start the free trial.
Although this is a very particular situation to be in, hopefully this is helpful to someone else who is in a similar situation. They are trying to access a Sassafras server that is on a different network and aren’t able to use the Ableton Live trial as a result.