Vegas Video 14 — Can’t get Magix customer support to fix it

[Brandon Russell]

@ Dan Benkman, I feel your pain. I have absolutely not one good thing to say about Magix or their customer or technical support.

Last fall I received an email that said “Buy MSPS13 now and receive 14 for free when it’s released.” So I went ahead and bought the deal.

Long story short, I purchased the digital download version, big mistake! I realized that I was missing all of the 3rd party plugins that were advertised to come with program. I logged into my account and submitted a technical support ticket. 2 weeks go by and I haven’t heard a thing, so I call the customer service number and get to speak to a gentleman who spoke very little English. After 30 minutes of explaining what the problem was and having to talk slowly and repeat every other word to him, he tells me, in very broken English, that he would have to submit a support ticket. It took me another 10 minutes to explain to him that I had already done that and he said that was all he could do.

Another week goes by and I still hear nothing, so I call back to customer service. Apparently they don’t keep notes of your previous calls because I had to explain the ENTIRE problem over again to someone who spoke very little English. They said they would put in another support ticket with a “priority” stamp and I would get a call back the next day. Guess what?? No call!

So I called back a few days later, demanding to speak to a customer service manager or that they refund my money. They said I could not talk to a supervisor but that they would send him an email. A supervisor emailed me the next day basically saying the same thing as the customer service rep said. In the mean time Derek Moran from Movie Studio Zen was able to make contact with his people at Magix and help get the ball rolling on a resolution to this problem.

Finally, after weeks of going back and forth with customer service and multiple ignored emails from technical support, I was finally able to get the download links for the third party plugins that should have been included in the first place! Now months later, I hear that they STILL have not fixed the problem and those who purchase the digital download version are still having this problem.

I will NEVER buy another product from Magix via Digital Download. Sony made a great line of products and unfortunately with the sale to Magix, I’m afraid Magix will run this great product right into the ground with their non existent technical support.

[Eric Dettman]

@Dan Benkman

What is the ticket number for the ticket you created for the log in issue?

I will look into this for you.

MAGIX see.feel.hear.create

[Dan Benkman]

Eric,

The original ticket number is Ticket#2017010517008464, but they closed it without fixing the problem.

I opened a second ticket after that one was closed. That is number is Ticket#2017020517000344. They never responded to it after their automated reply.

Thanks for any help you can give, but I’ve pretty much given up. How can I trust them enough at this point to ever buy anything else from them ever again? They are killing their business with incompetent customer support.

Thanks,
Dan

[Eric Dettman]

That ticket is currently open again.

Thanks.

MAGIX see.feel.hear.create

[Dan Benkman]

Going in circles with Magix continues.

They DID fix my original email problem — the one where I never got their email that gave me the serial numbers to enable the Vegas Suite software to run.

So I got the serial numbers from the Magix site (NOT the email, which never came), now that I could log in with my old email. However, the site only lists the serial numbers for the Sony/Magix software, NOT proDAD or the Titler.

When you purchase and download the Vegas Suite from Magix, you get an exe file that downloads and installs all the software you purchased. That included proDAD and the Titler in my case. However, I cannot run them, and have been going in circles about this with Magix. By full circle, now they are now telling me to REFER BACK TO THE EMAIL I NEVER GOT, as if all these months of emails about the problem had never happened.

A couple of other things happened along the way. I DID get Vegas 14 to run on my desktop when they fixed my old email. But WITHOUT proDAD and WITHOUT the Titler, I found that 14 has essentially the same bugs and same blowups that Vegas 13 has, especially when mixing multi-track audio with HD video, so the net gain for my money and all the exasperation dealing with Magix has been ZERO.

But it’s worse than that. Vegas 14 will not run on my laptop. When I try to run it, it comes up with this error:
LoadLibrary failed with this error 1114: A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed.

Rebooting, reinstalling 14, deleting Vegas 13, all have no effect. Reinstalling 13 works, 14 simply won’t run no matter what. Their suggestion to install various Visual Studio Redistributables had no effect. They were all up to date anyway, and at any rate should be handled by their installation software.

And now, Wave Hammer in 13 beeps on my laptop because it has decided to become unregistered. Apparently there is no simple fix to this result from trying to install 14.

The bigger picture is this: Magix is incompetent. They can’t connect the dots between one email and the previous one, so they simply cannot solve these problems. It is beyond their capacity to deliver to the customer what they purchased.

If everything installed and ran when you bought it, consider yourself lucky. But if things didn’t work, realize that even after spending hours interacting by email with their customer service that you may NEVER get what you paid for to work, EVER.

At some point, you’d expect that they’d simply refund your money, but they are probably not set up to do that.

I purchased the Vegas 14 suite last November. It is now March, and it still won’t work as advertised. I asked them a question they won’t answer:

How can they expect me to purchase any new software from them, ever?

It looks like Magix has a competing video editor of their own that they wrote, and they may be simply trying to kill off the Vegas line. Either that, or they just don’t apply enough resources to fix their problems with inadequate customer support. They clearly don’t mind having a bunch of angry and frustrated customers, at least not enough to fix it.

So I ask the question here: Does it make sense to ever purchase another product from Magix? As far as I’m concerned, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT!

As it stands, now, I’m giving up. My time would be better spent researching and learning a whole new video/audio editing suite from another company than trying to get what I purchased from Magix to work. The money I spent on it is officially wasted.

Are there any suggestions for a not too expensive alternative to Vegas that includes decent multi track audio editing and mixing tools? The main problem with finding a good alternative is simply taking the time to learn enough to see if it will do what I’d want, so any suggestions for a competing product would be appreciated.

Magix is killing themselves by their own incompetence. My personal recommendation is to help them fail by never buying any of their products.

[Dan Benkman]

Magix’s latest response is to ask, once again, for the order number that they never sent because they could not send anything to my original email address but their ads because of their screwed up server, or whatever.

So I simply copied and pasted my response from a week ago when they asked the very same question, once again explaining that I never received the order number — which of course any competent company could look up anyway.

This is the very essence of incompetence. They keep asking for the order number that they never sent, and I have to keep explaining that I don’t have it and why.

I have requested that they cancel the ticket, keep my money, and leave me alone. They are simply an irritation.

Magix is definitely not a viable company with a viable product. Don’t let their advertising fool you into taking a chance on buying any of their products. Don’t give them a single penny for any of their products.

[Dan Benkman]

If you like Vegas, drive Magix out of business so that a real company can take Vegas over and make it a viable product again.

[Stephen Crye]

I’m about to finally install the Magix Vegas 14 I bought in November 2016 too.

I followed the link in the email to download it. I get a 4 MB file. Running triggers some kind of installer that offers to download/install the full versions of all the products that were bundled.

Is it possible to ever get the full stand-alone installer file?

I’ve been stuck with Vegas 12 build 770 for 3 years now because I can’t get 13 to run for more than 10 minutes without crashing. Same problem even with what I think is the latest version: vegasproMAGIX13.0.545_64bit.exe .

Any suggestions most welcome.

Sometimes I’m tempted to buy a Big Mac and go with Final Cut the way John did … but I can’t afford that, and I’m very used to the Vegas work flow.

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T7500, MultiTB SATA, 12GB RAM, nVidia Quadro 2000, Vegas 12, 11, 10, 9 DVDA 6.0 & 5.2(build 135) Sony HDR-CX550V, Panasonic GH3 with LUMIX G X VARIO 12-35mm / F2.8 ASPH, LUMIX G X VARIO 35-100mm / F2.8

[Dan Benkman]

After all the hassles I mentioned, I did get Vegas 14 to install on my desktop. But I was never able to get the extras (image stabilizer and titler) to run, thanks to the utter incompetence of Magix.

But I could never get 14 to install on my laptop, even though I could uninstall and reinstall 13 on it without problems. And of course Magix offered no solution to this problem either.

As far as Vegas 14 vs 13 goes, having tried both on my desktop it looks to me like the same blowups that can happen with 13 also happen with 14. My guess is that they did little to fix 13’s bugs, and instead just added the new titler and image stabilizer (proDAD) — which at any rate at least for me cannot be enabled, and are thus totally useless.

So if 13 blows up too much for your application and computer, I suspect that 14 won’t work any better. But it may be worth a try if you already paid for it. It is possible to have both 13 and 14 installed on the same computer, so you can probably install 14 without removing 12.

I understand about being used to Vegas, but I have my doubts that Magix will be able to keep Vegas usable and up to date, and at any rate they can’t support it. So inevitably people who want the latest features will have to abandon the Vegas platform and learn a new one.

But for now I just live with 13 and tolerate it’s occasional (for me) blowups.

[Robert Maier]

This sound terrible. I have been using Vegas 13 since it came out. I get an email every day from Magix to upgrade to 15 for $149.00. I ignore them. Vegas 13 works well enough. I tried a trial of 15 and couldn’t get it to work. I’ll stick with 13.