iLok - So what?

[Scardanelli]

There seems to be a lot of bad feeling about iLok, and talk as if it were the end of the world if Mixbus goes that route.

I really don't get it.

I have the complete Soundtoys collection of plugins - iLok
SSL maybe 6 plugins - for several years - iLok
Pro Tools 2022 permanent license - iLok
Metric Halo Production suite - iLok
 and so on and son on and....

Oh and add to that list UAD Connect. Finally I can get rid of the DSP PCIe dongle (had to, M2 Mac Mini) and still use their excellent plugins - now THAT's progress. Anyone want to buy a UAD-2 Solo?

Harrison is a small company, and Mixbus 32C has a minute fraction of a percentage of the DAW market. I doubt that the business model is ultimately sustainable without serious investment and therefore a change in business methods.

How many full time employees on Mixbus? 2 -3 -5 - 10? Work out their salaries and benefits, then realise that Mixbus RARELY sells at full price, I'm willing to bet that the majority of buyers have bought a $79 or whatever. And the upgrades are cheap as chips. So how does that pay for development or bug-finding or further features?

iLok is simply a licensing tool You don't even have to buy the USB stick. But having the stick means I can take my entire production suite anywhere, to any computer. How is that annoying?

It's called change. It's a little bit like growing up, or getting older. Things that you used to do no longer matter, or you do them differently, or more slowly, or less, or not at all!

There was a wonderful audio editing program, MAC only, years ago - BIAS Peak. I loved it. There was nothing like it. Its was simple, not over-designed (as Wavelab has become) and when it stopped being supported and went out of business in 2012, I had to find an alternative. If SSL had bought it I'd probably still be using it. 

Bring on the iLok for Mixbus 32C and I can stick it in my travel bag without even taking my laptop.

Get over it! 

Let the games commence!!!

[madmaxmiller]

There seems to be a lot of bad feeling about iLok, and talk as if it were the end of the world if Mixbus goes that route.

I really don't get it.

I have the complete Soundtoys collection of plugins - iLok
SSL maybe 6 plugins - for several years - iLok
Pro Tools 2022 permanent license - iLok
Metric Halo Production suite - iLok
 and so on and son on and....

Oh and add to that list UAD Connect. Finally I can get rid of the DSP PCIe dongle (had to, M2 Mac Mini) and still use their excellent plugins - now THAT's progress. Anyone want to buy a UAD-2 Solo?

Harrison is a small company, and Mixbus 32C has a minute fraction of a percentage of the DAW market. I doubt that the business model is ultimately sustainable without serious investment and therefore a change in business methods.

How many full time employees on Mixbus? 2 -3 -5 - 10? Work out their salaries and benefits, then realise that Mixbus RARELY sells at full price, I'm willing to bet that the majority of buyers have bought a $79 or whatever. And the upgrades are cheap as chips. So how does that pay for development or bug-finding or further features?

iLok is simply a licensing tool You don't even have to buy the USB stick. But having the stick means I can take my entire production suite anywhere, to any computer. How is that annoying?

It's called change. It's a little bit like growing up, or getting older. Things that you used to do no longer matter, or you do them differently, or more slowly, or less, or not at all!

There was a wonderful audio editing program, MAC only, years ago - BIAS Peak. I loved it. There was nothing like it. Its was simple, not over-designed (as Wavelab has become) and when it stopped being supported and went out of business in 2012, I had to find an alternative. If SSL had bought it I'd probably still be using it. 

Bring on the iLok for Mixbus 32C and I can stick it in my travel bag without even taking my laptop.

Get over it! 

Let the games commence!!!

Are you serious or do you have a "trolley" moment?
MMM

[Lars]

Seriously ilok just does its thing and is there and is nothing i even think about.
Software uses ilok-protection? Fine, let's go.
Software uses some other way? Yeah, sure, why not.

I guess iLok-Hate is always (and has always been...) very loud online, while the rest just quietly couldn't care less.

[madmaxmiller]

Seriously ilok just does its thing and is there and is nothing i even think about.
Software uses ilok-protection? Fine, let's go.
Software uses some other way? Yeah, sure, why not.

I guess iLok-Hate is always (and has always been...) very loud online, while the rest just quietly couldn't care less.

Oh I'm happily telling you offline why the iLok is something the world doesn't need. Mind you when I came across it first time I knew nothing about it, nobody had "influenced" me. All I wanted was getting my student version of PT10 running. I never understood why I had to register at three different places and jump hoops for something which can be achieved much more customer-friendly.
Then Mixbus came along and delivered Ardour's missing mixer. I bought a version and was ready to run instantly. It was even based on Ardour and it was available for Linux. It became the best colab between an OSS project and a commercial vendor.
SSL is about to kick this into the dirt, the iLokification of Harrison products is just a symptom.
But keep enabling that kind of crap, the moment Mixbus itself goes ilok (and is therefore automatically withdrawn from Linux) will be the end of a better software model.
Plus I hope Microsoft and Apple iLok their respective OS's and let you register and pay for every single sh*tty little feature. As a subscription of course. Because you love it that way.
MMM

[Holger]

There seems to be a lot of bad feeling about iLok, and talk as if it were the end of the world if Mixbus goes that route.

I really don't get it.

I have the complete Soundtoys collection of plugins - iLok
SSL maybe 6 plugins - for several years - iLok
Pro Tools 2022 permanent license - iLok
Metric Halo Production suite - iLok
 and so on and son on and....

Oh and add to that list UAD Connect. Finally I can get rid of the DSP PCIe dongle (had to, M2 Mac Mini) and still use their excellent plugins - now THAT's progress. Anyone want to buy a UAD-2 Solo?

Harrison is a small company, and Mixbus 32C has a minute fraction of a percentage of the DAW market. I doubt that the business model is ultimately sustainable without serious investment and therefore a change in business methods.

How many full time employees on Mixbus? 2 -3 -5 - 10? Work out their salaries and benefits, then realise that Mixbus RARELY sells at full price, I'm willing to bet that the majority of buyers have bought a $79 or whatever. And the upgrades are cheap as chips. So how does that pay for development or bug-finding or further features?

iLok is simply a licensing tool You don't even have to buy the USB stick. But having the stick means I can take my entire production suite anywhere, to any computer. How is that annoying?

It's called change. It's a little bit like growing up, or getting older. Things that you used to do no longer matter, or you do them differently, or more slowly, or less, or not at all!

There was a wonderful audio editing program, MAC only, years ago - BIAS Peak. I loved it. There was nothing like it. Its was simple, not over-designed (as Wavelab has become) and when it stopped being supported and went out of business in 2012, I had to find an alternative. If SSL had bought it I'd probably still be using it. 

Bring on the iLok for Mixbus 32C and I can stick it in my travel bag without even taking my laptop.

Get over it! 

Let the games commence!!!

I see two problems here: For one thing, I try to install as little third-party software that has to run in parallel on my music computer as possible.
For another, I did some tests with ILok on my Windows machine and had a few worrying crashes. There ILok tried to write to unauthorized memory areas.
This is not exactly a sign of reliable programming for a tool that is supposed to perform only a small service. (Interestingly it runs under Wine and Linux to some extent...)
If I now consider that there are much more useful ways to protect a software (see e.g. Plugin Alliance) I don't really understand why manufacturers do this to themselves and rely on third party software.
From my point of view as a software developer, this is incomprehensible.

[ROG]

Let's face it, ilok is about trust - the software company is saying, loud and clear "we don't trust you not to pirate our product".
OK, but I don't have an ilok account and my main computer runs off-line. You would not believe the amount of work needed to allow me to use a new Harrison ilok plugin, but I can say that it has just crossed the hassle event horizon and I won't be attempting it. I'm sure I'm not the only one and so Harrison will lose some revenue. I'm pretty sure as well that some people will have given a Harrison product to a friend, but the friend most likely wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it makes no difference to Harrison sales. I could construct a mathematical model to evaluate the pros and cons, but sometimes I just get bored....

PG Music have a good system - install the software, click authorise online and the program calls home and does it. Offline is simple as well - the program generates a code which you email to PG. They send a code back which you enter and the program is licenced for that machine for ever. How can it be that simple and no one else using it?

[Sojuzstudio]

So you feel like you're more of an audio pro when you use a product that is ILok "protected"  

We'll get back to it when the problems start. It is worth buying all possible ZDT services that money can get. And a bag of spare sticks.

But hopefully the winds will be favorable as you sail with your new friends.

ILok may also affect record sales and Spotify streams, if you really believe so.

[sunrat]

I'll relate to you a tragic tale of iLok.
We had a series of 11 shows with The Living End. In the middle of that run were 2 days when they didn't play, so those 2 days hosted shows with Kurt Vile. TLE wanted to leave their gear set up and had brought in a Digico SD8 with SoundGrid server to run some external Waves plugins. Their sound engineer didn't leave the iLok key as he didn't want us to use his plugins.
I came in to set up the show and the desk wouldn't initialise properly without the SoundGrid server, so frantic phone calls to the engineer got him to disclose the iLok key was in a bag in the back room with the rest of their gear. So I eventually got it running but didn't use the SoundGrid server even though it was connected.
Fast forward to the subsequent next TLE show. Frantic calls from their engineer to me saying they couldn't properly initialise the desk or server. They ended up having to totally reinstall the SoundGrid software on the desk which apparently took quite some time. All I had done was turn it on and off, and it had worked fine on the second Kurt Vile show.
So from my experience, screw you iLok. You will never come near anything I use. Burn me once, more fool you; burn me twice, more fool me.

[madmaxmiller]

Let's face it, ilok is about trust - the software company is saying, loud and clear "we don't trust you not to pirate our product".
OK, but I don't have an ilok account and my main computer runs off-line. You would not believe the amount of work needed to allow me to use a new Harrison ilok plugin, but I can say that it has just crossed the hassle event horizon and I won't be attempting it. I'm sure I'm not the only one and so Harrison will lose some revenue. I'm pretty sure as well that some people will have given a Harrison product to a friend, but the friend most likely wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it makes no difference to Harrison sales. I could construct a mathematical model to evaluate the pros and cons, but sometimes I just get bored....

PG Music have a good system - install the software, click authorise online and the program calls home and does it. Offline is simple as well - the program generates a code which you email to PG. They send a code back which you enter and the program is licenced for that machine for ever. How can it be that simple and no one else using it?

Oh yeah trust: When you attempt to purchase the free (as already owner) iLok version of Drum/Bass Flow so you have the latest version for Linux without lock you come across some interesting things:

1. For Win/Mac users it's SSL Download Manager coercion, they don't have a choice of just downloading the plugin - another piece of unnecessary software on your computer.
   
2. You forfeit your right to cancel any purchase after you downloaded the software (see screenshot).
   

That begs the questions:

1. I'm pretty sure the download manager can (and will) be used to delete any unlicensed SSL soft off your computer. I haven't read the T&Cs yet but I'm sure you gave your ok by "unconditionally adhering" to them.
   
2. If the iLok is the non-plus-ultra of license control there should be no problem with cancellation of software purchases as the iLok won't allow to run the software without license anyway. Right? Well if this is not the case, then all that iLok blabla is a big lie.
   

So here we go.
   
MMM

Edit and P.S.: Existing non-lock versions should keep working, also on Win/Mac right? So why locking them then? There's only one conclusion, sadly: Mixbus will be iLoked for Win/Mac as soon as all AVA plugins are iLokified. From there it's only a short step to forking Ardour and dropping the Linux branch.

[x42]

Mixbus being licensed in terms of the GPL cannot be licensed using the iLok.
Besides, the iLok does not work on GNU/Linux.

Even if there would be some license loophole, it would likely be the end of Mixbus...