In fact, the presence or absence of iLok Cloud does not have much decisive importance!

 

Oh, I didn't know that. Because all the uncracked iLok stuff requires you to use either the USB dongle, or you need to be always connected to the internet, I thought the cloud has been undefeated just like the dongle. Like Softube uses machine auth and they are cracked, but companies like Sonox who used Cloud are still uncracked. Now I think there must be a level of protection in the Cloud stuff too, and the Bigsky or the free slate stuff must be protected by something that is a bit doable to crack as compared to the UAD or Pro Tools level of protection.

 

Last edited: Jun 28, 2025

First, about Slate comment before this post; Sonnox or UAD iirc made a similar announcement sometime within the past year also. The announcement was that they had added machine-based option also.

The presence of Cloud version in any of them should not be of much importance because it is just an authorization method. It is not Cloud computing, where a dummy terminal is accessing and running an application which lives in the cloud. The application is not being hosted on servers like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. That is called "Platforms As A Service" and "Software As A Service" , or streamed from a internet located server. The benefit of iLok Cloud is that you could leave your USB flash drive/dongle at home.

If that entire layer was completely removed like it was never there; it wouldn't have much decisive importance as suggested.

 

Exactly - the teams just remove the iLok wrappers etc - no more iLok, doesn't matter whether it's auth'd to machine, dongle, or Cloud - all that stuff is gone. What takes the effort is that iLok has various protection options, and this has a large impact on how easy it is to remove the iLok stuff. The most severe plugins use the most severe, and harder to remove, protection options, like Metafortress.