This has just been posted on PlugInUpdate site..

We’re sorry to announce that the PluginUpdate Store project has been cancelled due to lack of interest. We had thought that it would be a great way to tie PluginUpdate together as a complete solution, and obviously a very transparent and unobtrusive way to fund the project, however, it turns out it was a complete miscalculation. Very sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused (although it doesn’t seem that anyone will mind much.) The good news is, further development of PluginUpdate continues, totally unaffected by this revelation. We’re committed to keeping PluginUpdate free and incredibly useful. 

This is a real shame as it would have given us a one stop shop for plug-ins but it is not to be. However it is good news that the PlugInUpdate project isn’t dead.

In this video, James takes a look at the XFilter 500 true stereo EQ for API 500 series by Elysia. He shows how to use the EQ for a drum master buss and how to get the best from this very classy 500 series unit. This is the first in a new series of reviews of API 500 series kit.

Neil travelled up to sunny Manchester last week to show Mike the new Pro Tools PC. We videoed our experiences and discussion about what it looks like, and how well it works…

• See Mike taking it out of the box.
• See how little needs to be done before you can use it.
• See Mike fitting his HDX card into it.
• See how easily the Pro Tools PC fitted into Mike’s Mac based studio.

If you like what you see, you can now buy yourself a Pro Tools PC on the PTPC web site which was launched today.

The Pro Tools PC website has today gone live and is taking orders for the UK and Europe as well as taking enquiries of interest from the USA and the rest of the world.

Head over to www.pro-tools-pc.com and take a look at the newly-designed website. We think you’ll find all the information you need (but feel free to use the website contact form or Facebook page to ask anything more you might need or want to know).

As I am sure most of you are aware iLok undertook a massive migration of their systems and released a new License Manager application. Overall it has been very successful and the vast majority of users have had no problems, however a very small number of users have had some problems, including some of the Pro Tools Expert team, for example, where some licenses show up as ‘Temporary’ that were Full licenses before the migration. So we wanted to give all iLok users some tips on how best to proceed.

There are two ways forward depending on whether you have downloaded and synced your iLoks using the new iLok License Manager or not.

Click to read more ...

Part of Russ’ sightseeing tour in New York this year

Wow! It seems that some of our intitial letting off of steam on the podcast last night was taken to mean everything from (A) me wanting to shoot myself to (Z) a conspiracy to sell Pro Tools PCs.

Our podcast comments were simply the PTE team, whilst watching the WWDC with one eye and recording a show at the same time, expressing our early thoughts about the new Mac Pro. After a serious amount of cider and a night’s sleep, I feel a little better about it today; I may well end up buying the thing (after all, it is shiny and does have an Apple logo on it!).

Normal service will resume and I’ll continue to rip Neil apart for thinking round computers are as silly as the notion of a round earth. Please continue to feel free to express your views in your comments, but also appreciate we will do that too.

Scrub, a division of HHB Communications, which supports Pro Tools Expert and specialises in serving the post production industry, has upgraded 12 of ENVY’s Rathbone Place and Margret Street audio post production studios to Avid Pro Tools HDX hardware and version 10 software. 

The upgrades were executed by Scrub technical support staff and ENVY’s technical and sound teams over a single weekend and were fully operational on the Monday morning. The project included updating ENVY’s Pro Tools systems from HD4 and version 7.4 to the latest HDX cards and PT10HD software. Scrub also provided sales and technical support for two new Pro Tools studios, including supplying a 32-fader Avid Icon console and a Pro Tools HD Native suite. 

After completing the install, Scrub staff hosted a Pro Tools training session to bring the studio’s team up to speed on the latest features of version 10 software. 

ENVY’s Head of Technical Operations Daniel Sassen commented: “The Pro Tools HDX upgrades provide significantly improved power and sound quality, which allows our award-winning mixers more creative freedom than ever before. Upgrading all 12 studios in a single weekend was not going to be an easy task. As always, Scrub was integral to making this happen and worked very closely with the team at ENVY from early planning through to final implementation.”

This shows the kind of complete package that dealers can offer; that they can provide their clients all the support they need, rather than just deliver cardbord boxes and run.

The team at iLok have asked us and other outlets to share this with our community:

Dear iLok User Community,

We have let you down and we know it. We could have done a better job communicating that we were hard at work to fix the issues some of you have been having and for that we are truly sorry.  

We handle tens of millions of licences for users, some stretching back over a decade with legacy code. Whilst we have worked to ensure a seamless transition, some issues occurred.

We are currently finishing the data migration to address each of the affected licenses. This should totally complete in the next three hours. The data change will happen in the background, and the resolution may not happen for each license in your account at the same time. It is a “first in - first out” change, so older licenses across all iLok accounts will be finished prior to newer ones. By the time you receive this, your licenses may already be fully migrated. 

The following are updated steps for solving the temporary license issue:

Steps you need to take once you see the license type of “License” instead of “Temporary”:

• If your iLok with the license had not been seen by the server, just the updating of the database record for your license will take care of the issue.
• If your iLok had been seen by our server and your license is no longer working, please plug in the iLok and deactivate each of the affected licenses. To do this, open the Detail pane, then select the license from the license grid at the top. Choose the Deactivate link. Once the licenses are deactivated, you may then activate it to any allowed location.

If you are still experiencing difficulties please use this link to contact us and we will work with you to fix your issues. We are monitoring our support tickets closely during extra long hours to right matters.

We appreciate your continued support.

Andrew Kirk
Vice President
The iLok.com Team

As the letter says, for users who are still having issues, please use the link above to contact their support team.

Russ, Mike, Neil & James are here with a packed Pro Tools Expert podcast that includes

Apple today announced the new Mac Pro, giving users a preview of what is to be expected when the unit ships later this year. It is a departure from convention in terms of design, which should come as no shock to long term Apple fans, who are used to Apple making these bold design statements.

Apple have sometime been ahead of the curve when it comes to guessing the future of product development, two examples are being the first company to drop the use of floppy disk drives and also creating a laptop (the MacBook Air) without any optical drive. At the time, both ideas were seen in many quarters as odd, only to see the rest of the industry follow later.

However, the idea of a circular design that does not allow for conventional pro expansion remains to be seen, with many early responses criticising the new design. What do you think, is this genius or madness? Are some of us simply slaves to conventional PCI based card slots when the future is via options like Thunderbolt and USB3? Discuss…

More here

The iLok team at PACE have issued a statement regarding the issues some users have been facing during the migration to the new licence system.

“The recent update of iLok.com involved the migration of huge amounts of data to our new system which is designed for ease of use and scalability. This new system will provide us the ability to add more of the features that you and software publishers are asking for.

After the Sunday night re-launch of iLok.com and related services, we immediately began to see a tremendous volume of activity. Although we prepared for a high volume, we are not satisfied with the level of service we are presently providing. We are currently expanding our infrastructure to help eliminate time-outs and provide more system resources.

Since the re-launch we have been monitoring all activity carefully to watch for any issues. We are aware that some people are experiencing issues with a subset of their existing licenses reporting to be of Type “Temporary”. The Type is only a database label and the change from the previous Type (most often Update) resolve over the course of the next several days as a data migration remediation continues.

The change in the word shown as the Type should not in any way affect your ability to use your plug-ins or protected software authorized by licenses that are already on your iLok(s).

Rest assured that we have records of all of your license data just as it was before the migration started. No data or licenses will be lost. 

If you are experiencing additional issues that are not explained in the this message or in the error messages you see, please send us a support ticket via the iLok.com website’s Support page. The more information you can provide about the exact situation you are experiencing, the better.

We understand your frustration and our team is working non-stop to understand and fix any issues the community is having.”

A first look at the new iLok Licence Manager App for Mac and PC. Manage your iLok from your desktop and more!

The Facebook Group “We Want A New Mac Pro” posted this image on their Facebook page overnight.

If it’s real then this is a serious shift in another direction, or is it a fake?

What do you think?

Click on the image to see a larger version

UPDATE: We are getting some unverified reports about issues with some vendor licences not working. As we say these are unverfied forum posts, if you have any concerns DO NOT UPDATE

To access and manage our iLok licenses users for many years now have used a web browser and a special extension, which worked well, but has been plagued with browser compatibility issues, especially with Firefox which hasn’t been supported for quite a while now, and there have been a number of things we couldn’t do like delete expired demo licenses.

New iLok License Manager Application
We can exclusively announce PACE, the manufacturers of iLok, who also manage the iLok.com site, have been working very hard over the past year or so, producing a solution to resolve the limitations of the browser based user interface. What the iLok.com Team has been working on is a dedicated application, called The iLok License Manager, to completely replace the web browser interface. But Team iLok haven’t been satisfied to simply do a like for like replacement they have added a load more features - see this comparison table….

But it doesn’t stop there, From the License Manager user interface it sorts all your licenses into tabs…

• All licenses 
• Available
• Activated
• Unavailable (expired, transferred to another user etc…)

They have added a Search feature for those of us who have more than a couple of licenses.

Zero Down Time Now Has Theft & Loss Cover
ZDT has remained at same price ($30 per iLok per year) but now it includes coverage for theft and loss (TLC). The way this will work is that a user can nominate an iLok and have all licenses on it expire every 90 days unless the iLok checks back in, so no need for the user to renew licenses every 90 days, just make sure that you run the License Manager so that iLok can see that you still have the iLok. This will help those of us who have hundreds of licenses not loose sleep worrying about the loss or theft of a very small iLok that can effectively be worth thousands of dollars or pounds.

Transfer Fees Capped
Team iLok have also capped the fees for transferring ownership of licenses from one account to another at $50.00. So it is still $25.00 per license but with a maximum of $50 per transaction, so if you need to transfer licenses when you sell them for example, then you no longer have to pay $25 for every license if there is more than two. Locked bundles (called Locked Groups from today forward) are also capped at $25.00.

Activate Licenses From Within Plug-ins
It is now possible to activate a license from within an application or plug-in, so no need to go to iLok.com or use the License Manager, if the plug-in vendor enables the feature, they can walk the user through accessing their account or using activation codes fro inside the plug-in after launching the un-activated application or plug-in. Expect to see this more and more as software vendors release new products.

Non iLok Licenses Possible
They have also added an option for software vendors to offer non-iLok licenses that activate to a machine. Now, software vendors may opt to offer non-iLok licenses for their products.  The licenses can be activated and de-activated and moving to an iLok USB Smart key will always an option.  But because machine based licenses are not as secure as iLok and then there can be problems with licenses when users loose their computers or give their computer to someone else without deactivating the license first, the software vendors may only offer this feature on their cheaper products.

More Help Available
To help you more you can download iLok’s Quick Start Guide to their new License Manager. We have had a sneak at the iLok License Manager and it is easy to use and we will have a video up very shortly.

UAD have announced what they describe as ‘an important update’ version 7.01.

UAD v7.0 software represented an update to our entire UAD codebase, and we’ve identified and fixed a few bugs in a new maintenance release, UAD software v7.0.1.

Here’s the specifics:

• UAD plug-in status display is restored in the UAD Meter & Control Panel application
• Resolved issue where plug-in controls could jump to maximum when using the scroll wheel under 32-bit hosts
• (UAD-2 Satellite) Resolved issue preventing adjustment of the UAD FireWire Bandwidth Allocation
• (Apollo 16) Important Apollo firmware update
• (Ocean Way Studios plug-in) Corrected behavior of Master Level fader in Reverb mode

Visit the UAD Software Download Page today to install v7.0.1 software. And feel free to contact our Customer Support team with any questions, using the links below.

SoundToys seem to be taking advantage of this weekend’s developments and taking their site down too this weekend. This is what they have said….

We will be doing some necessary website maintenance tonight in conjunction with iLok.com. From 6pm Friday, June 7th until 6pm Saturday, June 8th PDT (and possibly some time before and after) our store, user accounts, as well as the iLok.com site will be unavailable. This may also affect your access to installers. If you need to make a purchase, move authorizations, get installers, or perform any other account-related activity, we encourage you to do that right away. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We will work to get everything back to normal as soon as possible. Thanks, The SoundToys Team

Now it may be they need to make changes to their site in conjuncton with the changes at iLok or they may be taking the opportunity to do a major overhaul of their site. Personally I am waiting for their range of plug-ins to be released as AAX 64 bit, after all Apple take their site down when they announce new products, somehow I don’t think it translates to plug-ins, but I can hope…

There’s some predictions coming from previously credible sources that a new Mac Pro may be unveiled at WWDC 2013, although it’s fair to also say there are also some concerns that we may never see one.

Some of the rumours are suggesting the wait was tied to the release of the new Intel chips and also the updated Thunderbolt protocol, who knows?

So we want to know what you hope to see in a new Mac Pro, speed, size price - we are guessing all three!

Let us know… wish away!

Softube has announced that they will deliver compatible 64-bit AAX DSP and AAX Native plug-ins in time for the forthcoming Avid Pro Tools 11 release. They say…

The latest version of Pro Tools, the most used and trusted DAW in the industry, provides exponentially improved AAX plug-in performance over prior versions, time-saving capabilities such as offline bounce to disk, as well as complete sound parity when sharing sessions between DSP-accelerated and native-based Pro Tools systems.

So we have another software developer ready for the Pro Tools 11 launch, although perhaps with Softube, it doesn’t come as such a surprise as they had AAX plug-ins ready when Pro Tools 10 launched. But with more and more plug-in developers announcing, they are ready with 64 bit plug-ins, we can look forward to a smoother transition to the brave new 64bit world that Pro Tools 11 will bring, bring it on.

Russ shows a simple but effective tip for getting separate outputs from Structure FREE.

• Members watch it here
• Or watch on demand for $1