I hate iLok, especially paired with UAD’s stuff. An attempt to register some UAD plugs bought through plugin boutique resulted in a three-way customer service deathloop I only resolved by filing a fraud charge with my credit card company. After that I nuked my account and will never use third party auth again.
One thing that made this possible for me, though, is that you no longer need it for soundtoys! You can register directly to one machine without it.
Plague.
My experience with iLok was ok: I could not resist to use free Eventide VST plugins granted after maxing out the hardware (H9).
I just installed something and it just works (software option).
The only problem now: don’t remember all the credentials and need to move to the new machine some time…probably will be some mess
Absolutely agree. Almost every commercial DRM was cracked and protected software was torrented at some point. Ones who don’t want to pay, will find easily the “free” options and typical professional user won’t be messing with protection… It’s just sort of conservative thinking. More reasonable pricing and affordable plans are working better imo
I would prefer iLok to a half dozen different vendor activation apps … if it were actually good enough to replace them.
“Good enough” including things like:
If I just spent 2500$ on a UA interface that runs the plugins….the interface itself should suffice as the dongle/authorizer
…after 4 years finally back in the box for real, i have learned many latest lessons…
pretty much all daws can cover pretty much all third party plugins these days…
and the more ur into the daw of ur choice, getting along with what u got right there, the better, slicker, faster gets ur whatever workflow to achieve ur goals and final results…
copyright protection remains a no way around struggle, on all the companies’ side, as much as on ALL the users side…still too many to each their own solutions all over the place…but what to do about it…?
plain and simple most basic rule, always work with what u got, was never more truu and effcient than today…
so, whenever u whish for a next new piece of code, think about a way, how u could realise the same thing with what’s already in there just waiting for u to be discovered…
in 9 out of 10 cases, it turns out to be the better choice…