• Universal Audio - AI, Layoffs, and Out Of Touch Boomers

I searched the forums here for anything related, but not a peep (yet, or deleted?).

Either way, I've already lived through something eerily similar to this (years ago), so I sympathize.

Also, I've been a UAD user (100+ plugins) for years (2009), and have had some dealings with Avid before (since my school days in Boston actually - before I could even afford the stuff), and we've all been regaled with stories in the media of how McDonnell-Douglas execs took over and clashed with and corrupted the engineer driven and run Boeing - and the subsequent disaster the company's become since.

I hoping the same doesn't happen to UA as happened to my company, and to Boeing.

In the event that the Reddit post gets deleted (as it has, from Gearspace and UA's own forum), here's a quick PDF printout of the body of the text (comments have been locked by the moderators - yay, free speech).

 

UA Connect collecting data from the computer to train IA models on Suno is way too much for me. I believe it's true? I hope not. It can be true? Totally. It's not possible to reverse engineer the software to find an answer because we already know it sends data. That's not the point. The point is how UA uses that data. But the giveway of that amount of freebies and the current price (Waves?) are quite suspicious considering UAD was always refered as a boutique brand. I'd not go crazy conspiring about it, but it needs the deserved caution.

Those apps are lame. If all this story is really true (and unfortunately we will never know) the Aquarius stuff from Acustica will be a light prank.

UAD? Are jealous from Audioloom?

 

I always believe reports like this from ex-employees of companies, or even current ones if they have reason to be disgruntled. Which, of course; who really doesn't anyway?

Anyway, I got sick of UA Connect trying to update to a newer version of itself which was incompatible with MacOS Catalina. So I just made a script blocking all their agents and other stuff. One command enables it, and another disables it. It also strips their U2B binaries to match the cpu architecture only, because who wants to hand over system disk space just to retain "fat binaries", and some other stuff. Not that Little Snitch doesn't do a good enough job of any outbound blocking I want, but it effectively shuts down any of their BS. It even dances around their Apollo stuff.

 

have avoided UA thus far and will only continue to do so now. there are plenty of pultecs in the world that aren't covertly collecting AI training data

 

There is one group of Witches that can solve this problem once for all, but let's not turn this into a request thread.

 

If you load up UA Connect, you'll see a tab dedicated to their UAD Labs AI project:
https://www.uaudio.com/blogs/ua/uad-labs

I work in marketing. It's a plague on humanity but I cant blame companies for jumping on the AI grift. It's where everything is going now and if that's what they need to do to stay relevant, then that's what they'll do whether we like it or not. What I CAN blame them for is farming their user's data. If that's true, then that's some shady shit.

That's why I always opt out from sending "anonymous user data" to any company. Not that I believe clicking on those options even makes a difference, they'll find ways to skate around that.

 

Last edited: Jun 5, 2026 at 12:11 PM

Uninstalled it. No more iLok software, no more UAC, no more AI bs. At least the only thing that i bought was the Ampex tape, i imagine that people who bought the interfaces and the bundles sold their souls to the devil. I'm not giving them this credit.

 

Instead we will have a regurgitated Content Farming thread from Gearspace, with all kinds of crazy space shit theories from people who complain about UAD for the 11 months of the year they aren't begging R2R to open the vault. Or maybe they (UA) are scraping Youtube to track down someone's track with like 100 listens (seen this scenario before on here already) to really start raking in the millions with it.

People will type a bunch of garbage over there and get upset when it gets locked or deleted, complaining about freedom of speech. Just as easily as the person creating the "whistleblower proof" can write some anti-AI junk about UA for other gullible boomers, can that same person *use AI* to create any semblance of "proof" which supposedly is the basis for their whistleblowing in the first place. Of course it will get deleted or locked, the rest is a waste of text.

 

I wasted much $$$ (and time) on the UAD-1 due to the marketing hype and recommendations of the UA tech support clan (BEFORE PURCHASE) regarding the UAD-1 as it was touted as being a "revolutionary new approach" to audio processing. That was nearly 2 decades ago. The UAD-1 proved itself to be a giant piece of shit that didn't live up to one iota's worth of the hype it got from UA. And to top it all off UA basically pulled the plug on the UAD-1 support wise, and still tries to this day to act like the UAD-1 never happened.

After all this - The UAD-2? Hell NO! never again. This fiasco combined with a number of other screw jobs endured from audio hardware & software firms galvanized a solid decision that 0 more $ would ever be spent on any of this stuff ever again. Furthermore another decision was made at the same time to forbid any/all of my production machines to be connected to the internet. These decisions have remained steadfast for a large number of years and will remain so long into the future. Utilization of the warez scene allows this to remain a reality for many who refuse to endure any more screw jobs from the corporate computer industry.

Praise be our beloved witches

 

Last edited: Jun 5, 2026 at 10:19 AM

I avoid UAD like the plague, and I avoided this topic as well because I thought such exposé wasn't well written. Lots and lots of talk, I can make up stuff online too. A claim such as UAD using your music to train AI can be easily verifiable. If they're not training it inside your PC (I doubt you wouldn't notice), they're training it elsewhere, which means you must have a high amount of traffic going out to their servers. Not just kilobytes, but in the megabytes or even gigabytes. I doubt someone wouldn't have noticed it by now, back when I didn't have fiber it was instantly recognizable the moment something starts taking my very scarce upload speeds. Is the whole world running on fiber already? Legit question. Also means that UAD is training AI of music that is being mixed by top engineers working for massive record labels. Seems unlikely. So lastly, the only way they could train AI without raising any flags is by taking input data or behavior data. I doubt UAD is tapping on your midi or keyboard strokes generally, and the only place they could do that without pulling other sensitive data that would get them in massive trouble would be on their own DAW. Which in that case, isn't that much different from all others DAWs who are collecting anonymous data.

 

Adobe already admitted using user pictures to train their own AI :
https://www.reddit.com/r/photograph...e_lightroom_uses_your_photos_for_ai_training/

Roomba take pictures of your a** and send it to the web
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...rtificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/

And you expect AVID or UAD to "respect" you ?

 

why are you all surprised. ? this planet is messed up. welcome to earth

now.. regarding UAD. i use their plugins and i think they are good but this is interesting now

 

They are not making suno models with our audio lol. I don't doubt they are pushing AI, but it has nothing to do with training AI music models.
UA sucks anyways, Im fully expecting them to go the Waves route soon enough.

 

UA sucks...
They killed
My dog and
Stole my weed,
And robbed
My geld...
R2R should really
Set them FREE

I'm no pest...
This is really
No request!!

 

Last edited: Jun 5, 2026 at 2:21 PM

Unless they're making a Futavorenecrofootfetishistic furry p0rn generator i don't see how my data would help them in any way, what a bunch of weirdos.

 

I downloaded and installed all their free plugins. And if this theory about users training AI is true, then there’s a very simple way to counter it: just create the crappiest content possible. That’s actually what I’ve been doing for over 20 years… with some success.

 

That's a well-thought take. However, while far from knowing enough to be sure, I think it could be doable for their DAW (Luna) to send actual audio. Besides other data that indeed almost every complex program sends.

Random guess: let's say only when you do a final render/mixdown or similar in Luna the audio with some metadata is sent to UA. It's not that much data. With their prices I bet 95% Luna users have at least 500Gbps internet.

 

OMG Although that's fashionable in Japan since a long time

Oh wait, Japanese culture is indeed sick (sry R2R )

 

Actually, his rant wasn't what I was expecting, I thought it was a well constructed and a genuine take on his experiences. He certainly comes across as someone who does love the company and the products they make, and thus is frustrated about some of the directions from the new management, and I totally get that.

The whole management attitude from the top-downs of "Customers love AI and therefore we have to put it in everything" is really just a bullshit take of "Management see the growth potential of glumming onto the latest tech bubble buzzwords so let's try and convince everyone that that's actually what the *customer* wants, rather than what the people maximising the financial returns on the company want."

 

Since you don't need audio to prompt Suno, this is scary the same way. The data they "use to improve their products" can be easily (and i mean, EASILY) used to improve generative AI.