• 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.

 

Universal Audio - AI, Layoffs, and Out Of Touch Boomers
https://www.reddit.com/r/universala.../universal_audio_ai_layoffs_and_out_of_touch/

Also 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 7:02 AM

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.