i bought an ilok so you never need one

on 14 march a customer sent me one line: “will you guys be making these all AAX?” i did not have a good answer. today i do. all six KERN plugins now run in pro tools, as AAX, on macOS and windows. same key, same sound, and KERN still needs no ilok. this is the story of the one ilok involved, which is mine.

the question that kept coming back

it came back in april from someone who had just upgraded to the bundle. in june, someone who works in pro tools ultimate every day asked for his money back on smooth, because it would not open there. in july another wrote: “it’s not even AAX so it’s unusable.” fair. pro tools is where a lot of records get finished, and it was the one door KERN could not walk through.

what i got wrong

KERN’s first rule is no ilok, ever. for months i believed AAX needed one, so the answer was no. in june i finally read the fine print. there are two separate things with an ilok in them. one is copy protection, the dongle and the account that some plugins ask you for. KERN does not use it and never will. the other is code signing: pro tools only loads a plugin that has been signed, and the signing is done by the developer, with a key only the developer holds. that part does not touch your computer at all. and if you run pro tools, you already have an ilok account, because avid licenses pro tools through it. KERN adds nothing to it.

45 days of silence

on 27 june i wrote to avid to ask how a one-person company gets access. nothing came back. i read the silence as a big company being slow. when i followed up, the answer was that my first email had never arrived. 45 days, spent waiting for a reply to a message nobody received. the same reply put the important part in writing: “There is no requirement for an iLok account.”

one ilok

so i bought one. an ilok 3 on usb-c, 524 kroner from thomann, registered to KERN on 31 august. PACE, the company that makes the signing tools, gave me access on 18 september. on 22 september at 19:21 the first KERN plugin came back signed, notarized by apple and stapled, from a single command. it was CHECK, the free one.

yesterday it went through the whole chain. six plugins, signed on my mac and on a windows pc, loaded into a retail copy of pro tools on both, with audio running through every one. that windows pc does not trust my signing certificate, and pro tools opened them anyway. that is the test that matters, because your computer does not trust it either.

the ilok stays on my desk. it moves between my mac and my pc when i build a release. it never goes anywhere near yours.

what did not change

the sound. every plugin in this release was rendered against the version you already have, on mac and on windows, across sample rates and buffer sizes, and compared sample by sample. none of them differed. AAX is a new door into pro tools. the plugin behind it is the same one.

the licence did not change either. your KERN key works in pro tools the same way it works everywhere else. no second purchase, nothing added to your ilok account, no KERN account, and after activation it never needs the internet again.

how to get it

if you own a KERN plugin, download it again from your order. lost the email? lemon squeezy’s order page sends a link to the address you bought with. the zip now has an AAX folder inside both macOS and Windows, and the INSTALL.txt next to it shows where the .aaxplugin goes.

if you have never tried KERN, every plugin has a free demo, and CHECK is free for good. the plugins are $29 each, and the bundle of all five stays at $69 through monday 5 october.

see all six plugins

from the studio

this one belongs to everyone who asked since march. if you put a KERN plugin into a pro tools session this week, reply and tell me what it was on. i read every one.

jonas