I thought the UAD plugins were virtually un-hackable because they were completely dependent on a physical card to be used. Does anyone know anything about this? How did people get around this???
Yesterday Gannon Kashiwa addressed issues they’ve been having with pirated plugins. I don’t understand how there even CAN be an issue.
Gannon’s reason for addressing this appears to be that some of the precautions the company was taking were mis-interpreted as attempts to strong-arm UAD users into buying new hardware by making it incredibly difficult to buy used hardware. He conceded that there are attempts being made to re-visit the policy so that it the anti-piracy changes don’t hurt the legit users, who again, I thought was everyone.
Does anyone know anything about this? I’m not going to call their own tech support and go ‘hey man…is it true your plugins have been getting pirated?’
I’ve never heard of this. I guess it’s possible to pirate UAD plugins and use it on their hardware even if you don’t buy it? But as far as I know, there’s no way to run their plugins natively. I have a hard time believing it’s really a big issue for them though. Some companies like to make a big deal out of piracy.
I was wondering if someone on the inside might have leaked source code or something like that.
Same here. I believe Gannon…that he was telling the truth, especially when he said the policies people are blasting UAD for are going under review. That UAD software team is small enough to where they’re still willing to listen to their customers and adapt.
That’s a common political strategy: come out with a hard line policy, then wait for the blow-back and issues to arise. Then apologize for the ‘misunderstanding’ and adapt to the demands of the constituency. In a sense, then they come out looking like the “good guy” for being reasonable and ‘adapting’ their policies, but if it was well thought out to begin with they already planned for that ‘adjustment’ and are being shrewd if it’s a coy façade. Typical bait-and-switch technique.
Now if they actually didn’t think it through, then they’re just naïve dumbasses.
… and this is exactly the reason why I don’t do dongles and expansion cards anymore. I love pretty much everything that UAD has on the market right now but I can’t take the gamble on getting the hardware bricked.
My guess is that people are probably buying the hardware and expanding the software from another purchase, so getting one seat license and say installing on 2 cards or more.
Still, considering the pricing and the pricing of the hardware, I doubt that it is a real problem, so why strong arming the user? It doesn’t make sense.
I guess this experience validates my philosophy that if I can’t get it done with Studio One Producer plugins and freeware vsts, it just isn’t worth doing
by the way…which UAD plugins do you have? I was gonna send PT sessions for you to experiment with…I guess I’ll leave some of the plugins on if you can use them.
Hows it a gamble? Gannon specifically said they’ll handle the registrations transfers on a case-by-case basis, and that every hardware transfer goes through a real person. They’re not trying to hurt their loyal users. They’re trying to stop these fuckers from stealing their software. Have you ever heard of a case where someone was denied a serial number transfer, even after the 5 owner limit had been exceeded?
You can’t! It doesn’t work like that. The only way this is possible if the two owners request that the accounts merge. The merge is irrevocable, one of the two parties permanently and indefinitely surrenders the licenses to the other account. There’s also no such thing as a single-seat license in the UAD world. I can install multiple cards on all of the computers in my facility, and both of my interns can access all of my plugins on each machine. This in my opinion makes the UAD plugins a WAY better buy for multi-seat facilities. If we want to move Waves plugins around, we have to keep bouncing the damn licenses around the Waves cloud.
No no no! I don’t think they are! I think users read the policy, got shit scared, worried and blew a fucking lid when it the new policy was aimed at software thieves. And from Gannon’s response, I think UAD was caught off guard.
I have no idea, I haven’t really dealt with UAD at all. It kind of reminds me of the Digidesign/Avid/Pro Tools thing though, where they required proprietary hardware to use their LE products up through version 8, then with version 9 they opened up the field to 3rd party interfaces (though still limited products IIRC) because so many people (their newly expanded user base) were bitching about it. At that point, a Digidesign interface kind of became a dinosaur in terms of value. “Ha, fooled you sucker!” as the saying goes.
Stan, UAD is an entirely different company and I honestly believe they respect their customers far more than avid. I used to loathe avid’s minimum wage low-end customer service fucktards and haven’t forgotten the many ‘fuck you very much’ emails I’ve gotten from them. But their higher end service and support guys are exceptional, and I’ll show my gratitude for that.
There were some major changes in the company around that time, where in the red and realized they would be eating dirt if they didn’t stop depending on their hardware to sustain them. I’ve poured over years of avid’s finance statements, and you can even see the change of direction in their cashflow when they opened up to 3rd party. I have no doubt that it was the correct move, though it did come across as a ‘fooled ya sucker!’ you say.
But hey, you wanna talk about them being assholes? Here’s one for ya. So the idea is that you wanna make it a bitch to try and buy a used Avid HDX card. Right? Avid used to sell these fucking things for $8000, now they cost $3000 yet they’re no more powerful than your cellphone. Get this. If you buy one used, you have to buy a license in order to activate the driver. Its called a digilink license, and the driver is $1899!!! That driver must be registered to your Avid account and it is not transferrable. THAT my friend is a bullshit attempt to curb the used market. UAD cares about those people. Avid could give a flying fuck.
The cracks I beleive are no different to any other cracks as long as the hardwear is used.Even I lok has been cracked now .people can basically get anything if they find the need and know where to go .
Yeah, they are are, because there is no native version of this software. The software LIVES on the card. This is like trying to ‘pirate’ the operating system of a Yamaha Motif workstation keyboard. It doesn’t even make sense. You can’t break into the computer system on that keyboard, because no one has software that can even talk to it.
Yes, I guess the point was maybe they should have done that a long time before that. User protests went way back several versions before then, at least.
Power and control rules the world. It sucks, but that’s the way some companies choose to play it. If UAD is trying to do the right thing and be fair to their customers while trying to protect themselves, more power to them.
As long as you have the hardware and know-how to look at what happens at registry level, you can easily copy these changes to the new PC and lock is so it won’t update and you will probably have the same setup as PC #1. I am sure it is doable. For the most part I’ve seen validation schemes usually affect the legit users more than anyone else.
I got locked out of a legit version of Cubase and it took them several days to resolve my issue just enough so I can export my files out of it to Sonar. Lost a project thanks to that. Their solution was for me to do a full reinstall of the PC or upgrade (pay another $400) to their latest. I bailed at that point. I learned my lesson, now I create an image of my recording drives…and I don’t walk into convoluted validation schemes.
You’re right - Waves is a mess and I am off of them as well. I know exactly what you’re referring to, and honestly I found enough good substitutes that I don’t need anything from them. Well…maybe still miss the L2 but that was causing me to overcook things anyway
