SOLVED: Beware New iLok (HD?) Authorised Software Installations

[Compyfox]

Gotta love this iLok drama. Slate was sending out e-mails the other day that they are still (a week later) trying to fix iLok issues and now this happens. I'm sure people who got their licences screwed up because of Slate appreciate this new adventure of all the licences becoming inactive again. You can't make it up.

I'll contact Slate later and ask him if he's aware of that issue, and if this is maybe also happening with his release. It could indeed be a remnant from the last server glitch.

And Compyfox still trying to make Pace look good. It's hysterical!

I'm not trying to make Pace "look good", I try to give a different f*cking viewpoint rather than instant finger pointing that ultimately one company (and this one alone) is to blame in this case.

There seems to be a bug, and that one currently correlates around:
- AiR Music Tech's blowout sale
- Zynaptic's new reverb sale
- possible Slate's "The Monster" freebie release

BTW: Eventide also just jumped on to a Subscription plan with Gobbler - so this could also add to the equation of server glitches, etc.

Hope this will teach developers a lesson to look into something that u-he is using or Camel Audio was using when it still existed.

I hope you REALLY meant this as a joke.

- U-HE uses serial and time bomb (plus some more stuff that is a trade secret - dig out Urs' threads)

- Camel Audio used C/R and f*cked over a sh*tload of users with their announcement "whelp - we stop business now - you have 4-5 months left to backup everything you can get and pray that your tools keep on working", while after a couple of weeks the C/R server slowly started to act up and made it impossible for users to continue using what they recently bought/updated. Then they were "integrated" into Apple Logic with Windows users being shown "the Finger" (not the NI trigger tool, mind you)

Better by a longshot? I full-heartedly disagree.

Nope, no update. And it's the latest one, according to "Check for updates".

So just to get you right...

You neither did an update for either iLok nor OSX, neither did you any software update. Things just "Bombed" after you changed your OS password?

So unless you "re-synced" your licenses, this shouldn't happen - as this clearly sounds to me like "whoops mate - you changed some stuff, need to reset all licenses cause C/R is a thing, 'right?".

I really don't understand why everything should bomb out of nowhere if you didn't do anything crazy, or installed something new!?

I just got a reply from iLok support.
They told me I need to go to there website and file a support request... Which is what I did in the first place! I know some people love iLok but this is bad service.

*sigh* Sadly not the first time this happened... indeed unprofessional.

... The software and service is still 32-bit based.

...
Else regarding the service and software running still on 32bit... well... my DAC tools are on 32bit still as well. Doesn't slow me down. ...l

For me this is not a speed issue, it is a statement of a piece of software's internal structure and the development team's capabilities.

I don't get you here - why do you think that 64bit "Managers" (read software - I think the drives ARE 64bit) are so important? Unless it's more down to frustration like "these folks can't program for sh*t!" - which I do get of course.

I installed the AIR music tech pack the other day and it broke all my other iLok plugins, but the AIR plugins would still work. So today just for the fun of it I installed the Adaptiverb demo and that just now kicked out all my AIR plugins (i.e. they would show up as registered but not run).

So basically, it seems there's a bug in iLok where the latest iLok plugin added kicks breaks the registration of any the older ones.

I think it's pretty safe to say based on these observations that it has nothing to do with windows updates as there were none performed on my PC since yesterday and the AIR plugins worked today until I installed Adaptiverb. Then they stopped working like the rest.

FWIW, my license manager is v3.0.3.1468 (r33772), win10pro 64bit. Software iLok.

Question here as well:
Was there an iLok Manager update being handled by you in the meantime?

It seem to be boiling down to v.1468 on Windows, and the most recent version on Mac. Rarely v.522 on Windows.

Sadly there is no blog or release notes list on the page to see when the last driver updates were. Maybe this could exactly pinpoint when things went awry.

[jinxtigr]

I'm going to keep it brief, and hopefully KVR being KVR it's a safe space to vent just a bit …okay, I'm not going to keep it brief, at all. But I am going to vent.

this is exactly why I bailed on the 'software industry' as a developer.

For close to ten years now I've sold plugins, and part of the reason I started was because I saw people having registration nightmares with unanswerable companies and suicide software, back in 2007.

I went and wrote hundreds of plugins, many free, others $50, all completely lacking in DRM so legit users could not have their stuff taken from them due to some license code going sour. Stuff might as well be a virus if it's designed to break your DAW on a hair-trigger. It's built to fail upon suspicion of you.

I averaged $2000 a month over that ten years, and I watched software makers go down like dominoes. I outlived Bias. I outlived Camel. I outlived my own damn payment processor, Kagi, which was good and honest right up to the end, but they fell because the way the world is constructed, only the top dogs get to continue, and that means certain Big Names with big hype and often a lot of lies who typically are lined up with PACE. Lined up in front of PACE so they can take the bullets for the team.

Why?

Because PACE lets them hold you hostage. The latest thing is renting your plugins. To me, this idea is appalling. I've got a road case with a bunch of XLR cables, a bunch of tools: I have a legit copy of the Adobe Design Premium suite, for CS4. I don't know of any situation, ANY situation, where renting your stuff and allowing software companies to 'update you' leads to security and reliable tools. Increasingly, all the changes are awful, and that's not just the DAW industry or the plugin industry.

When Kagi went bust, it was the last straw, and I jumped ship to Patreon and began to port every plugin I've ever made to AU and Mac/PC VST2, for free. This has literally decimated my livelihood and that's why other vendors aren't doing it. They are locked in a battle for survival for which there are few winners, and the end game is vendor after vendor in a hype war going out of business after they convert to a rental system. They will not survive doing something like I've done. They're not frugal enough, their 'positioning' won't support it, their dev budgets won't support it, they pay for advertising and astroturfing etc etc etc and they can't survive suddenly getting 1/10 of their income.

…naturally, I hope it gets better. I do, however, doubt other people can do the patreon thing I'm doing because I have a catalog of over 250 plugins I can draw upon, and ten years in the 'small pond' of Audio Units for Macs, so at least I can make a start. New devs wouldn't be able even to do that. Even though it doesn't look like much, my Patreon is already in the top tenth of all Patreons at a miserable $250 or so a month. If I can make $800 a month I think I can keep going indefinitely.

But I don't care. It's not conditional on making goals, I am going to keep making my stuff free to DAW users as long as I'm still alive and have electricity to code on (roughly $75 a month, no AC here even in summer!). Why?

When the PACE-using developers go out of business in their dog-eat-dog world, their tools are GONE. When you stop paying by the month, your access to your own toolkit on your DAW is GONE. The system as it stands is racing towards a cliff, where increasingly desperate developers hype up a storm trying to kill each other off and the centralized 'Big Dog' of the DRM world refuses to take accountability for their failings. Look at what happened with Camel Audio's C/R servers.

Kagi went bust, and they were my payment processor and sole livelihood for nearly ten years. If PACE goes bust, it's game over, and a lot of your software will be GONE.

If I die, all my (now free) software will still work as long as there's DAWs to run it. If I do well enough to start opensourcing it all, the ideas inside the audio code will get propagated out so others can use them. That's really the hail mary pass of this strategy. I'm converting over as quickly as I can to a 'flood the market with replacement stuff so people have SOME fallback position when the commercial industry implodes'. Can't do it perfectly and there's a lot of work to do, but this is why I have taken a 90% pay cut in order to start 'giving everything away for free'.

As far as I'm concerned, the OP should go back to all-caps. I respect the choice to make it more gentle, though, because when Kagi failed and I abandoned ever getting directly paid for plugins again, one big quality of life upgrade was this: I don't ever have to put all-caps and exclamation points and hype in topic lines again. To even get people to look at $50 plugins in 2016 was ridiculous, requiring hype parity with the big industry hype cannons. 'Free' is much gentler and much easier, and makes me happy

[Fleer]

Nope, no update. And it's the latest one, according to "Check for updates".

So just to get you right...

You neither did an update for either iLok nor OSX, neither did you any software update. Things just "Bombed" after you changed your OS password?

So unless you "re-synced" your licenses, this shouldn't happen - as this clearly sounds to me like "whoops mate - you changed some stuff, need to reset all licenses cause C/R is a thing, 'right?".

I really don't understand why everything should bomb out of nowhere if you didn't do anything crazy, or installed something new!?

Correct. Except for the Eventide UltraChannel deactivation and reactivation.

[dayjob]

iLok says they have a full fix rolling out for this soon.

in the meantime i was told to uninstall. reboot then reinstall the license manager.. also, in our troubleshooting i deleted a file from the prefs in the library that was supposed to rebuild the license database blah blah blah.

[wasi]

Thanks, jinxtigr. I want to buy some of your stuff now. Your point could not be better illustrated.

When the PACE-using developers go out of business in their dog-eat-dog world, their tools are GONE. When you stop paying by the month, your access to your own toolkit on your DAW is GONE. The system as it stands is racing towards a cliff, where increasingly desperate developers hype up a storm trying to kill each other off and the centralized 'Big Dog' of the DRM world refuses to take accountability for their failings.

We are not iLok/PACE customers. They only care about us and our user experience to the extent that it influences their sales proposition to developers.

[arachnaut]

I don't get you here - why do you think that 64bit "Managers" (read software - I think the drives ARE 64bit) are so important?

The Pace service is also 32-bit.

I would like all my software to be native applications running on my OS, not stuff running in a virtual machine wrapper.

Seems like a reasonable request and all the companies have had ample time to make these things happen.

It will reduce the number of dynamic libraries required, simplify Microsoft updates, reduce my fixed memory overhead and disk space, etc., etc.

It's like wearing bifocal lenses if you need glasses. If you don't need bifocals, why would you ever buy one?
Oh, yeh, that's the only way that brand is sold. In a sense, all Windows 64-bit OSes are wearing bifocals so they can see 32-bit stuff.

[aMUSEd]

- Camel Audio used C/R and f*cked over a sh*tload of users with their announcement "whelp - we stop business now - you have 4-5 months left to backup everything you can get and pray that your tools keep on working", while after a couple of weeks the C/R server slowly started to act up and made it impossible for users to continue using what they recently bought/updated.

No they didn't - their authorisation was initially keyfile based, then they moved to 'baking in' the keyfile to the actual plugin and soundbanks on a per user basis (so basically personalised installers - which is also why they can't be transferred) - there was never any need to connect to an authorisation server, the install is entirely offline if you want it to be (I think you are thinking of their installation manager app which downloaded and installed everything from their server but it was optional and also worked offline anyway).

[Slate]

Hi guys, a user brought this thread to my attention so I want to clear up some rumors regarding Slate plugins, since this is all I can comment on.

On the 5th, we released a free ilok plugin called Monster. Because so many users downloaded it at the same time, it caused issues with ilok so they suspended the license for about five hours, made some adjustments, and then by the evening it was working again. This suspension would have no affect on any other developers at all.

Aside from this issue, our VMR build that we released had some bugs that had nothing to do with Pace. We fixed that last week, and it's been very successful.

Now, the ilok issues being reported now are news to me, but I'm very sorry for those affected. I'll discuss with my team to see if we have any similar reports, but from a brief look, it doesn't seem it's the case.

If you do have a Slate plugin and are having any ilok issues, we are here to help at http://www.slatesupport.com

Edit: From what I'm seeing, this reported issue affects some NON ilok dongle users and I'm also told a fix is in place

Cheers,
Steven

[Fleer]

The present iLokalypse has nothing to do with your wonderful plugins, Mr Slate. They all continue to work perfectly in my system (Mac El Capitan with LPX) as they always have. And your free Monster is yet another breathtaking achievement. Just wished we didn't need iLok, but that's another debate, back on topic indeed.

[dayjob]

Edit: From what I'm seeing, this reported issue affects some NON ilok dongle users and I'm also told a fix is in place

Cheers,
Steven

not in place yet. i'm still sol over here. thanks for chiming in though.

i'm in midst of back and forth w/ilok tech support. so far no fix. tried a handful of things.. some of which i did yesterday on my own.

still my licenses are not available.. are vanished to who knows where.

[Compyfox]

Funny that this "iLokalypse" is not an "iLokalypse" - at least not in the sense of what the actual "iLokalypse" actually was (complete failure for both iLok/HDD and iLok/USB on certain engines). Then again - different opinions and such.


But thanks Steven for chiming in and taking a closer look.
Definitely appreciated.


Things seem to be in motion - now it's only down to waiting...



@dayjob / @simmo75
How are things coming along in general? You're back on track again for the time being?

(apparently not fully, as the last post from dayjob shows)

[TexLoco5]

THIS IS WORKING FOR ME

I received a reply from iLok to my support ticket. They recommended the following ... this is for Windows:

1. Go to Services > Right click PACE License Services > choose Stop to turn the service off

2. Go to Program Data\PACE\Eden > delete or remove all .sbd files

3. Go to Services > Right click PACE License Services > choose Start to turn the service on

I did these 3 steps and then rebooted.

Next I clicked on an iLok protected item that was previously blocked and a window popped up that was titled Updating License Storage.

After that all of my iLok protected items were working.

None of my license uses were incremented as a result of the process.

BINGO!

KenB

[simmo75]

Yesterday i did the de-activate all licenses and re-activated all licenses, it worked.
i just went to try and do some work and all my licenses are broke again. This is a nightmare.

iLok have told me its nothing to do with them and that its the fault the software manufacturers, the software manufacturers are claiming this is iLok's fault and they are working with them to fix it....

NOBODY IS TAKING RESPONSIBILiTY for this massive balls up!

I'm not only losing faith in iLOK but in the software manufacturers too. It's disgusting that way this has not been resolved.

Last email from iLok basically said, there is nothing they can do and it's now up to the manufacturers to issue new iLok licences codes.
So i'm now going to try and get new iLok codes for 50 licenses, that i've paid for legitimately and being made to feel like this is all my fault.

Someone needs to admit they F$c%ed UP!

edit: Mac, latest OS, Ableton Live 9.6 and Computer based iLok license manager latest version.

[Fleer]

Got this reply from iLok:

"Hello,

Please try deactivating all of your licenses, even any that are working properly, then reactivating them. Let me know if the problem persists.

Best Regards,
iLok.com Technical Support"

[dayjob]

Got this reply from iLok:

"Hello,

Please try deactivating all of your licenses, even any that are working properly, then reactivating them. Let me know if the problem persists.

Best Regards,
iLok.com Technical Support"

the first reply i got from them said basically "that thing you did 3 times yesterday.. yeah.. do that again"

didn't work. no luck. but after reminding them of all the things i've tried and pointing them to my very first email that explained all these details i was told "we'll get you up and running today" but i have my doubts.

they're trying though but currently haven't heard back for a bit. so i'm guessing they're out of suggestions/work arounds for this issue.

fwiw thye sent me a similar thing to do as the above windows user.. deleting .sbd files and reinstalling the license manager after deinstalling.