Greetings.

My band's guitarist and I are looking to get a perpetual Pro Tools Studio license because we work a lot together with the band's mockups and outside the band we both work as engineers in other studios, and they all run Pro Tools. But in my home studio I use REAPER, so sometimes is a pain to render multitracks or projects that have a video synced with music.

We are wondering if we could share the license with 2 dongles or 1 physical iLok and the other use iLok Cloud, is that possible?

Thanks for your time.

 

would be easier if you both used Reaper and avoided all that fuckery

about ProTools, I guess you could use on iLok Cloud account - logged in both your computers,
but user license agreement clearly says 1 license for 1 user, so you could loose it anytime....

 

Yeah, I told him Reaper is the way to go! and looks like it is

Avid's websites says that one computer at a time using iLok Cloud, that's why we were asking if using 2 dongles or 1 dongle and the other iLok Cloud was possible, because both using Cloud it is impossible

 

Hello, you can share the ilok account in order to use the same license on two or more computer (I do this very often), but one at a time as Avid says. When you launch pt on a computer, ilok will tell you that the other host will be disconnected. Sorry but getting 1 or 2 ilok dongles will not solve that... if you have a pt license, you can keep it on the cloud or you can MOVE it to an ilok, not both, and then that license will no more be available on the cloud.

Workarounds:

1) if one of you are on windows, you still could use the well known audio utopia 12.5 version... for free. Works perfectly on win 7 and enough well on win 10/11 (just remember: open the app as administrator!) and it can open sessions made with later versions, with some caveats (check google for this).

2) in a mac with intel cpu you can use the same 12.5 version in a bootcamp windows 10 partition or drive (also in w11 I guess, but never tried). Works very well.

3) in a modern mac powered by silicon cpu (m1,m2,m3...) you cannot have Bootcamp, but still you could open pt 12.5 in a win 10 x64 UTM setup so a Virtual Machine (but I mean Emulation, not Virtualization cause in silicon macs the latter is possible only for ARM windows, and there PT doesn't launch).

Even if I have a perpetual license, I done this UTM trick in order to open sessions including aax plugins only avaible (for free!) in the 12.5 au version... I mean I launch UTM and boot the win10 VM , launching pt under windows and there I can freeze / bounce the tracks including plugins I don't have in my current legit PT (i.e. Fabfilter...) so i can later continue on the legit pt. Performances in windows emulation are not so good as in bootcamp, of course, I doubt you could record anything cause high latency, but with my m2 pro macbook pro it is ok for simple editing tasks, or even basic mixes with mid track amount.

So if you want to spend some money in a license, to get current pt features and better general experience, you could share it in the ilok cloud and have a "b plan" for when you need to open pt simultaneously in both systems...

bye

 

Last edited: Jan 26, 2025 at 5:48 PM

If you both use REAPER during your tracking and editing processes, you could always just bounce multitracks and import them to Protools for mixing and other work next as a seperate mix stage. Even if you could "share" a license, the last thing I'd want to do is go in on a shared "perpetual" license on anything, nevermind a DAW. You can count on someone getting screwed on it.

 

reaper

 

+1 for REAPER

 

The main reason for the "Icloud" push was to end the local virtual server drivers for the calls as this could be done fully offline.

For now you have to take turns using the icloud account as both using it at the same time will be easy for them to stop.

I hope that this icloud nonsense goes away but with the new music "Engineers" of "click a button" to automatically mix everything these protection schemes will be common, we all seen what happened to Adobe Photoshop and how the AI features all went to the Cloud ( even the ones that could be ran offline before).

I see this trend of returning to 1970 dumb terminals, I mentioned this several times over the years and back then I was warning people about this move. Now in 2025 more applications are headed this way, even some video applications are now also moving some features to AI online only.