Originally Posted By: admin
We understand that feelings run high about the PACE authorization system, because so many audio plug-in use it

This is bad news, not because 'so many audio plug-ins use it', but because PACE / Ilok is not a user-friendly solution.

I have been supporting PSP since the first days and I have always been particularly happy about the authorization system because - unlike pace - it worked flawlessly for me and I didn't need to worry about the amount of authorizations (which naturally does keep growing over a period of more than a decade) or any other stuff.

It is a serious amount of work to keep track of all the installations in different places when a system is being upgraded or changed, so far the PSP stuff had been on the friendly side, making my life easier. The ILok stuff is the opposite of that. For example some weeks ago several ILok authorized plugins stopped working without any previous warning, forcing an update of the ILok software. It is obviously unbearable in a professional client situation, that the working session can't be opened any more due to such issues. Also some years ago my ILok suddenly broke - even though I housed it safely inside my computer and it was never even touched or moved. Fixing that did cost me more than a day of work and several hundred Euros. After that I was the proud owner of an insured ILok which would have cost me a considerable annual fee - unfortunately for the already broken and returned ILok. My emails to ILok regarding this topic have been unanswered.

So my consequence is to avoid ILok based software as much as possible. I don't say that I will never again buy anything ILok based in my life - but it would really have to be so good, that I couldn't 'avoid' it. Luckily several other very good plugin developers have their own user friendly authorization system now, so that I am not at all out of options.

Originally Posted By: admin
We won't change our prices to pass our extra costs onto our users

True - but you impose the cost of running the ILok system onto the user. I like to pay for the function I want to use and I am going along with the copy protection out of respect for the developer - but I am not willing to add extra time or money for maintaining the copy protection.

Originally Posted By: admin
We do NOT require you to use iLok hardware dongle - you can select hard drive authorization if you prefer.

Which will certainly give you trouble if a hard-disk dies.

So that means that I will have to move on from PSP, I hope the old plugin versions will keep working for a while...

Michael