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(More customer reviews)Leaving aside the copy protection debate for a moment, addressed on both sides in many other reviews here, this is a terrible company, with terrible policies extremely unfriendly to customers, creating endless hassles making it difficult to use products you have bought already, including their own.
I've used iloks for ten years.
Here's a few reasons why I hate this company, not including any issues with copy protection in general
No customer service, no tech support to speak of.
No phone support, that's pretty common amongst dodgy second rate software companies, but much less common for pro audio companies whose customers pay huge amounts of money and use their products for time sensitive professional jobs.
Ok, no phone support I can live with. But get this: No Email support either!
They claim on their site they offer 24/7 support through their guided help pages. These are actually FAQ pages which are very incomplete, not covering a large range of issues that may and have come up for me over the years.
Most of the faq's lead to a dead end with no way to contact the company for additional help.
Only a very few allow a support ticket to be generated with a form at the end of their faq pages.
These limited categories for help tickets may not cover your issue and they are very difficult to find, the only way is to go through them one at a time manually.
They charge customers 40 dollars for a dongle worth 10 at most.
This dongle only holds 100 licences for some idiotic reason, most likely naked greed.
This may seem like a lot, but remember each license is only a few digits of data, these dongles can hold hundreds of thousands of licenses, but they prefer to limit it to 100 so you have to keep buying more 40 dollar dongles from them.
If you must buy one, do it on Amazon, because ilok dot com charges 15 dollars for shipping a usb dongle! Unheard of! This shipping costs less than one dollar! Where does the other 14 go? Into their dishonest bloodthirsty parasitical mouths.
100 licenses, why that's a lot of software right?
Wrong! What if you, like me, like to sometimes try a demo version of software before buying it? (which you must do when the software products cost from $300 to $10,000 per title. That sounds like a lot? Pro audio baby. Welcome to the expensive world of pro audio.)
So say you've tried a demo version of an expensive software package like I recently did with Waves Mercury bundle.
The trial period expires and you decide in this case not to buy the software at this time. For instance, you may find the software is not as good as you hoped or it's just not useful enough for your particular needs.
Well, guess what? Ilok makes you keep that license on the dongle forever! You can never delete it, and it sits there clogging up your dongle for eternity. And in the case I mentioned it's not just one of the 100 spaces available. As a bundle, waves and ilok count each component of the bundle as a separate license even though they were downloaded as one product.
So now my 100 spaces are full because of one demo and products I have actually paid for and purchased since then will no longer fit on the dongle. This forces me to buy an additional ilok, not counting my backup iloks, so two iloks must be bought if you want a backup.
How convenient. I can use my plugins on more than one computer thanks to wonderful ilok, but I have to haul around a whole freaking keyring of ilok dongles when it could all easily fit on one.
Of course there is no notice of this screwed up "a demo is forever" policy on the ilk website, not in my account page, there is no error message stating this when I try to use it with my new software, it just didn't work and I had to do lots of troubleshooting and research to find out why.
The "non-erasable license" "feature" is essentially a secret. It's not clearly stated on their website and can only be found with extensive research.
So now, just because I tried a demo package, my ilok is now dead in the water and I need to buy a new one just to hold the new licenses I've paid for.Also they occasionally die.
Ilok knows this and they profit from it by offering a "ZDT zero down time plan" where you can transfer your licences from your dead ilok to a new one. Most companies would allow this sort of thing free if their product died on you. Not ilok. They charge you 30 bucks a year per ilok for the privilege of allowing you to use your paid for software when your ilok dies.
This doubles the price of your ilk and must be renewed at full price once a year per ilok.
And guess what, there is a list of software in which the license cannot be replaced with zero down time. What's on that list? Only the most popular plug in company there is, WAVES! So if you are using ilok for waves products, there is no zero down time replacement. I guess you have to buy the product again if the ilok dies. How much do waves products cost? Thousands per title baby!
Do they tell you this when you buy your ZDT plan? NO! you have to look it up in the faq's.I could go on and on with the problems this company has caused me and the lost time and money in the studio due to iloks crappy policies, crappy hardware, crappy website, nonexistent tech and customer support etc.
Unfortunately I'd love to boycott it, but I don't know of very many pro audio software companies who don't use it. It's taking over like a pandemic.
Seriously if this company were to offer standard professional service levels and customer/tech support I would not have a problem with it.
As it is it's a ripoff and you don't really have a choice but to deal with them at this time if you are an audio pro.
I guess going back to tape and all analog hardware is a way. Expensive, but at least you get what you pay for, With Ilok you pay to be abused and you can't always even get that.
Worst product ever, worst company ever. Please someone compete with this monopolist! I don't mind copy protection but this is extortion.
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