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…
An interesting addition to this particular story. I’ve bought some iLok plugins, but I would probably by a whisker prefer not to use it. Nothing against it in a way, for example it’s positive that UAD now allows you to install plugins with no cloud activation. But still, I like the portability of just using a simple installer from a website.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is because of the Soundtoys point. Recently there has been some chatter thay they “don’t use iLok.” I mistakenly thought this was the case until I registered my Soundtoys to my actual iLok account thinking this could be undone. Which turns out to not be possible-because you’re using iLok whichever way you spin it. Support have been friendly and have answered my questions, but also revealed something interesting.
While you don’t need an iLok account for Soundtoys anymore, you are still running iLok on your machine if you install the plugins. The only difference with the account is the licenses are no longer trapped on your machine and you can move them to a new one without contacting support. But whichever way you spin it, Soundtoys still uses iLok. It’s just if you don’t register them to an account, they will install the licensing bit in the background and run it that way. It would be pretty cool if they ran without any DRM at all, but alas they still do.
Thought that might be interesting for others to know also…