license not activating

Symptom: you paste your license key and activation fails, or a dialog about your trial or license blocks recording.

One fact first: your recordings are never hostage. An expired trial or a license problem stops new recordings only — "everything you've recorded stays put — activate to take new audio in."

match the message

"That license key was not recognised." A typo or a truncated paste. Copy the key from your purchase email again, with no spaces around it. Activation from the purchase link is less error-prone than pasting.

"This license has reached its device limit." The license covers 3 devices, and every slot is taken. An old laptop, or a reinstall that counted twice. Open your Polar account (the purchase email links there), deactivate the machine you no longer use, then try again.

"another device took this one's slot" Same cause from the other side: this machine was deactivated remotely. Reactivate here and the other machine loses the slot.

"Activation failed (HTTP …)." The license server did not answer properly. Check your connection, or try later — the outage is on the server side, not in your setup.

"hop online once to keep recording" The license re-checks itself occasionally and this machine has been offline past the 14-day grace window. Connect to the internet once and it settles for another stretch.

"your clock needs a nudge" The system clock is far from real time, which makes the license look invalid. Enable automatic date & time in the OS, then retry.

"your free week is up" The 7-day trial ended. Activate a key, or buy one — recording resumes the moment activation succeeds.

"couldn't activate from that link" The browser hand-off to the app failed. Open yapyap and paste the key by hand instead.

still stuck?

Activation needs three things: the right key, a free device slot, and a reachable license server. If all three look right and it still fails, send the exact message shown to [email protected] — it identifies the step that broke.