So let me get this straight - unless you lose the darn thing, as long as you can send them the defective or broken iLok, you can always get your software re-authorized - worst case, having to buy a new one if it isn't under warranty anymore - right?

Yup...that's almost right.  But let's say your iLok just quits working and you send it in and they can't find anything wrong with it.  What then??  I don't know. 

My gut feeling, especially in light of WAVES leaving them is that ol iLok is going to be dying out...and sooner than later...and that they know it and don't have a clue as to what to do about it.  I'll betcha a dime to a donut that they aren't even in business in 2015.

But I'm a rambler and a gambler and a sweet talkin ladies man.

I use ilok for only one plug-in which has since come out with a different protection scheme - PODFarm.  After a horror report on ilok (I believe from your experience yorpal) I will never buy another ilok plug-in.  Yes, that limits my choices, but there are always other alternatives.  (A side benefit of this "rule" is that I'll save money on plugins!)

It does seem like the companies are gravitating "up" to a cloud scheme, or the collective...

It will be up to those companies to re-write their protection scheme., if it is economically feasible for them.

Bit what about Syncrosoft?

I for one have not had any problems with ILOK or SYNCROSOFT protection or software,, but YMMV.

yorolpal


Yup...that's almost right.  But let's say your iLok just quits working and you send it in and they can't find anything wrong with it.  What then??  I don't know. 

My gut feeling, especially in light of WAVES leaving them is that ol iLok is going to be dying out...and sooner than later...and that they know it and don't have a clue as to what to do about it.  I'll betcha a dime to a donut that they aren't even in business in 2015.

But I'm a rambler and a gambler and a sweet talkin ladies man.

Thanks Ol Pal.


I agree w/ you - hopefully Waves and Brainworx are just the first in a movement generalized desertion.


In the meantime, I'm still waiting on the iLok 2 I had to order to actually get the Lexicon Reverb I won last week. I think I'll keep the iLok 1 for demo licenses of products I want to try and transfer the rest on the new one.

There is one very bad situation surrounding ILocks. They can fail and they do. At our college for example one of our ILocks just decided to die. Right before one of my night classes. Rendered an entire studio useless. Band came in etc.. It was for Pro Tools with HD authorisation on it. 

We only have the exact number of HD authorisations for the required machines that use them. Next day it was out of action for a while too greatly disrupting things. All sorted of course but created a bad situation. We will need to get a backup one now obviously. They have been running for years without a hitch.

Also in an interesting article in Audio Technology here in Australia a leading engineer was talking about working for Philip Glass doing a major tour. He refuses to use any in a concert situation because as he said they can stop an entire gig. Even with a backup there would still be down time while it gets changed over.

An Ilock failure  might be OK in a non pressure home studio situation but it also has the potential to disrupt a high pressure situation. Just that one little thing doing it. I don't believe there is anything so important that needs it that cannot be found elsewhere. 

  I can honestly say I have never had a problem with iLock. I think they need to be more flexible and have a way to temporarily get folks running with some kind of virtual dongle in a case where a legit customer has iLock failure, without any additional cost.  As far as dongles go, the one I hate is codemeter, that's what SSL uses. You can choose virtual dongle or codemeter stick. I originally went with the virtual dongle. My old PC died shortly after.    When I got my new machine built and ready to go I figured it would be a simple case to get my SSL buss compressor up and running... NO..To reinstall, you need to deactivate the old install in your profile at SSL. Even though I had my old hard drive installed and accessible there is no way to deactivate or import the old license.    Time to write SSL support. A few weeks went by before I received a very stern response telling me that it is corrected in my account and not to expect any assistance if it ever happens again.   Realizing the risk, I tried the codemeter USB stick and it was not as stable or reliable as the iLock and that codemeter software always running drove me nuts. So much I downgraded to the PCIe card version.
In a nutshell yea, iLocks policies suck but to a much lower degree than codemeter and IMO SSL customer support is abysmal, just sayin'

Bobebop


And why can´t you delete licenses you don´t need? Strange.

The reason that they won't let you delete the demo licenses is that you could download the demo again
and start over.  That's their rationale...