SOUNDTOYS : Facts, Rumours and Expectations

[dayjob]

I just received an email from Soundtoys "Get Ready to Upgrade" apparently they are going to have a 50% upgrade sale in mid August lasting 4 weeks and they are upgrading their account systems. I think this gonna be it..! Soundtoys 6 might be coming...?

i've owned them forever. love them. i must not be subscribed to the newsletter. didn't get any email. nothing twitter/instagram about this "get ready to upgrade" statement.

[bungle]

There seems to be some notice taken by Soundtoys of the publics distaste for all of this.

"I understand your feelings at what appears to be an arbitrary and sudden shift in our policies regarding license transfers. First, our license agreement is pretty clear about license transfers, and this paragraph has not changed at all since at least 2008, well over a decade ago:

“You may not transfer this software license to any third party, except with the express written consent of Soundtoys, Inc. Soundtoys reserves all rights to deny any requests for the transfer of this license, and may institute transfer fees and policies as it sees fit at the time of any request for the transfer of this license.”

That said, we may have been a little too blunt in our message and haven’t given you enough information as to changes in our new account system. After seeing this we immediately had a team meeting to talk through this and try to clarify our policies and communication.

In the fall of 2018 we changed the way in which we deliver software licenses, from direct iLok account deposits, to delivery using iLok “activation codes”. We did this to make it easier for our customers, many of whom either had no interest in creating an iLok account, or who were completely confused and turned off by the process. Since we made that change, we no longer require our customers to create an iLok account in order to use our software.

Since then, it’s taken us up until now to do the work needed to update our account system to support the new license delivery method (so that we can better support the many, many people who have become new customers since 2018) and decouple ourselves from relying solely on iLok account info. We thought that this might be a six month project, but in reality it turned out to be a very complex and time-intensive process to migrate all of our customer and license data from our old account systems into a brand new platform, not to mention building that new platform

We haven’t yet completed all of the features in our new account system, and one of those things that we’d like to implement is a method to allow customers to transfer licenses to someone else. In order for a license to be seen in our new system, we rely on our own internal license and order information as well as looking at the state of the iLok license asset. When someone transfers a license outside of our system, only the iLok license part changes hands. If a customer does not explicitly request that we transfer their license to someone else, we have no easy way of knowing that a license has been transferred to a different customer, or if the original customer has granted permission to transfer the license, or if this was a fraudulent purchase that was then resold at a temping price to an unsuspecting customer.

We still want to accommodate everyone as best we can, but we are also wary of overloading our support team with requests like this, which can often take quite a bit of detective work to track down the original license and owner.

After our meeting we’ve decided to continue what had been an ad hoc (i.e. unofficial) policy of trying to accommodate external license transfers as best we can. It will take quite a bit of resources from our support team to try to help everyone that may find themselves in this position, but we will do our best.

Please try to be patient as we work our way through the myriad bumps and potholes as we work out the kinks in our new system and our policies.

Best,

Ken"

I have contacted the seller i bought from and asked them to contact Soundtoys and inform them of the sale.

[ThomasHelzle]

I bought a second hand SoundToys plugin here on KVR via iLok transfer four years ago. So far it always had been in my ST account, now it was missing.
I contacted them providing my iLok transfer notice (which contains the sellers iLok name) and within a day it got added to my account again.

Good to hear they won't go through with not allowing transfers, would have been hard to argue when the plugins actually CAN be transferred via iLok - I have plugins that can't, so not allowing transfers would have been something they could have managed. Doing it retroactively would have been a major piss-off to many customers...

Good move!

Now lets hope scalable interfaces are on the agenda...

[Heartfeltdawn]

Unless you bought second hand, support have just confirmed that they no longer support second hand sales (Even though it is ilok) and anybody who bought second hand will not get any upgrade pricing at all, you will have to buy the next version at full price.
Absolute scumbaggery at its worst.

It isn't scumbaggery of the worst kind. It's a reaction to the amount of fraudulent licenses sold out there. There's the scumbaggery you're looking for.

[bungle]

Unless you bought second hand, support have just confirmed that they no longer support second hand sales (Even though it is ilok) and anybody who bought second hand will not get any upgrade pricing at all, you will have to buy the next version at full price.
Absolute scumbaggery at its worst.

It isn't scumbaggery of the worst kind. It's a reaction to the amount of fraudulent licenses sold out there. There's the scumbaggery you're looking for.

So you are saying it is possible to get fraudulent ilok licences?
I thought that was impossible and the entire point of ilok?

[ramseysounds]

Just got the same email about upgrade offer due mid August.

[Havok]

Unless you bought second hand, support have just confirmed that they no longer support second hand sales (Even though it is ilok) and anybody who bought second hand will not get any upgrade pricing at all, you will have to buy the next version at full price.
Absolute scumbaggery at its worst.

It isn't scumbaggery of the worst kind. It's a reaction to the amount of fraudulent licenses sold out there. There's the scumbaggery you're looking for.

So you are saying it is possible to get fraudulent ilok licences?
I thought that was impossible and the entire point of ilok?

Scammers buy the licenses with stolen credit cards, sell the codes on second hand market places. Then when the credit card owner finds out the charges get reversed and the person who bought the license "second hand" gets it revoked from their account.

[chk071]

Unless you bought second hand, support have just confirmed that they no longer support second hand sales (Even though it is ilok) and anybody who bought second hand will not get any upgrade pricing at all, you will have to buy the next version at full price.
Absolute scumbaggery at its worst.

It isn't scumbaggery of the worst kind. It's a reaction to the amount of fraudulent licenses sold out there. There's the scumbaggery you're looking for.

So you are saying it is possible to get fraudulent ilok licences?
I thought that was impossible and the entire point of ilok?

Wrong. The point of any copy protection is to minimize or erase the possibility of cracking the software.

Imagine a software without any copy protection, but the software policies still oblige you to buy a license to be able to use the software, and that license is bought with stolen credit card credentials. There, you got it. A fraudulently acquired license, without any kind of copy protection involved. Because the one doesn't have anything to do with the other.

[GusGranite]

There seems to be some notice taken by Soundtoys of the publics distaste for all of this.

"I understand your feelings at what appears to be an arbitrary and sudden shift in our policies regarding license transfers. First, our license agreement is pretty clear about license transfers, and this paragraph has not changed at all since at least 2008, well over a decade ago:

“You may not transfer this software license to any third party, except with the express written consent of Soundtoys, Inc. Soundtoys reserves all rights to deny any requests for the transfer of this license, and may institute transfer fees and policies as it sees fit at the time of any request for the transfer of this license.”

That said, we may have been a little too blunt in our message and haven’t given you enough information as to changes in our new account system. After seeing this we immediately had a team meeting to talk through this and try to clarify our policies and communication.

In the fall of 2018 we changed the way in which we deliver software licenses, from direct iLok account deposits, to delivery using iLok “activation codes”. We did this to make it easier for our customers, many of whom either had no interest in creating an iLok account, or who were completely confused and turned off by the process. Since we made that change, we no longer require our customers to create an iLok account in order to use our software.

Since then, it’s taken us up until now to do the work needed to update our account system to support the new license delivery method (so that we can better support the many, many people who have become new customers since 2018) and decouple ourselves from relying solely on iLok account info. We thought that this might be a six month project, but in reality it turned out to be a very complex and time-intensive process to migrate all of our customer and license data from our old account systems into a brand new platform, not to mention building that new platform

We haven’t yet completed all of the features in our new account system, and one of those things that we’d like to implement is a method to allow customers to transfer licenses to someone else. In order for a license to be seen in our new system, we rely on our own internal license and order information as well as looking at the state of the iLok license asset. When someone transfers a license outside of our system, only the iLok license part changes hands. If a customer does not explicitly request that we transfer their license to someone else, we have no easy way of knowing that a license has been transferred to a different customer, or if the original customer has granted permission to transfer the license, or if this was a fraudulent purchase that was then resold at a temping price to an unsuspecting customer.

We still want to accommodate everyone as best we can, but we are also wary of overloading our support team with requests like this, which can often take quite a bit of detective work to track down the original license and owner.

After our meeting we’ve decided to continue what had been an ad hoc (i.e. unofficial) policy of trying to accommodate external license transfers as best we can. It will take quite a bit of resources from our support team to try to help everyone that may find themselves in this position, but we will do our best.

Please try to be patient as we work our way through the myriad bumps and potholes as we work out the kinks in our new system and our policies.

Best,

Ken"

I have contacted the seller i bought from and asked them to contact Soundtoys and inform them of the sale.

Nice work, Bungle.

Not recognizing 3rd party sales was a poor decision.

[plexuss]

Nice detailed info. Understandable on Soundtoys side, software is a crazy thing. Good thing I dont plan to sell mine. I still like and use Soundtoys even though the UI is small and outdated. The sound is still really nice. I just with the UI was updated and resizable.

[TBlake]

Nice detailed info. Understandable on Soundtoys side, software is a crazy thing. Good thing I dont plan to sell mine. I still like and use Soundtoys even though the UI is small and outdated. The sound is still really nice. I just with the UI was updated and resizable.

Sounds like it will be a paid upgrade for things like UI update and resizable, M1 compatibilty and possible oversampling. I just hope they don't go all McDSP on us by making the upgrade cost unreasonably high.

[elxsound]

Just got my email and am prepped for the whatever comes next.

Not sure what to hope for, or is it just a 50% off upgrades to v5?

I’ll still use these no matter what happens or doesn’t happen.

[audio/fault]

Just got my email and am prepped for the whatever comes next.

Not sure what to hope for, or is it just a 50% off upgrades to v5?

I’ll still use these no matter what happens or doesn’t happen.

got the mail, too. sounds more like an upgrade to the full v5. i love my soundtoys Bit having the full bundle for years, it’s a little annyoing to constantly get sales-mails about single plugins or an upgrade to the bundle. their crm-should know better…

[bungle]

Unless you bought second hand, support have just confirmed that they no longer support second hand sales (Even though it is ilok) and anybody who bought second hand will not get any upgrade pricing at all, you will have to buy the next version at full price.
Absolute scumbaggery at its worst.

It isn't scumbaggery of the worst kind. It's a reaction to the amount of fraudulent licenses sold out there. There's the scumbaggery you're looking for.

So you are saying it is possible to get fraudulent ilok licences?
I thought that was impossible and the entire point of ilok?

Scammers buy the licenses with stolen credit cards, sell the codes on second hand market places. Then when the credit card owner finds out the charges get reversed and the person who bought the license "second hand" gets it revoked from their account.

So let me get this straight, the licences that are fraudulent get revoked from the ilok account of the buyer?
So how exactly does this make it OK for Soundtoys to not support ilok licences that haven't been revoked?
This is a very strange argument where the goal posts keep getting moved and yet the goals are still being scored.

Let me simplify this then, Soundtoys not supporting people who own LEGAL ilok licences is scumbaggery at its worst. (Which by the way, they seem to now acknowledge, even if some on here don't)

[fese]

Nice detailed info. Understandable on Soundtoys side, software is a crazy thing. Good thing I dont plan to sell mine. I still like and use Soundtoys even though the UI is small and outdated. The sound is still really nice. I just with the UI was updated and resizable.

Sounds like it will be a paid upgrade for things like UI update and resizable, M1 compatibilty and possible oversampling. I just hope they don't go all McDSP on us by making the upgrade cost unreasonably high.

I would have no problem paying for an upgrade with all those features (and VST3), that’s fine with me, I got the whole bundle for a good price back then just because I had one of their freebies, and they’re still great plugins all around (microshift, EchoboyJr and PrimalTap being my favorites). But agreed, it has to be reasonable (“reasonable “ of course being highly subjective;)