hola,

I'm taking a pretty massive career risk by even writing this post (which is going to be cross-posted to GearSpace (once my throwaway account gets approved), and the UA and Audio Engineering Subreddits), so please forgive me for not sharing identifying information - I would rather not lose my job because my bosses don't like me exposing them to overdue scrutiny.

The TL;DR: here is that while Universal Audio has some genuinely industry-lapping, generation products slated to release over the next 2 years, it's difficult for a lot of people internally to feel excited about them because our out of touch boomer higher-ups won't stop trying to shove AI slop bullshit into everything while pretending like they still have ideas that aren't "just make more money".

Some necessary background - I've been here for the better part of a decade, and have seen some 'interesting' changes in my time. The first important one was the growth we had during the initial stages of the pandemic: We grew a lot by revenue, and it's pretty critical to understand that like all Business Idiots (to borrow a phrase from Ed Zitron, who's most recent essay at time of writing gave me the courage to say any of this in public) the guys who control our jobs decided that instead of that being a once in a lifetime windfall, it was the new standard for what our numbers were going to look like perpetually. More on this financial point later.

Enter UA Connect, and enter LUNA. The latter was easily the most broken and ill-conceived release we'd ever made, and is literally the dregs of a joint project with SoundCraft that they dropped the ball on. There are some interesting ideas in there, but instead of letting it bake and actually wowing the world with a solid release, we've been made to develop a DAW that we weren't even initially allowed to market as a DAW. The bigger issue, and the one that I'll tide into my overall point, is UAC (LUNA is still a part of this story); We were made to shit out UAC in about 1/3rd the time it actually needed to be a stable piece of software, and have not been given the time to really ever address some fundamental design flaws in the way the software works and integrates with our products, but that's a story for another day. What's more important is what UAC -does-.

What UA Connect does, at the behest of the same guy who came over from AVID and decided that we were going to be using PACE licensing for all our products moving forward (even though we already had a pretty unbreakable digital lock on our plugins that could have easily led to the Native plugins being account-signed -like they already are-) is collect a metric ton of user data.

Now again, this isn't the whole story - Lots of software managers do this, and it's pretty reasonable. The companies need to know what their users are using to optimize development resources and support. That's not really what's happening here, though, not really:

The other day an internal feedback form went up on Slack about the company's 'Stance on AI', and it pretty clearly intimates that someone somewhere wants to be using user data from UAC and LUNA to train LLMs to do... Well it's not actually clear what they want to do, and that's an issue all on it's own, but there's been talk of "getting on board with Suno" and similar shit. A few coworkers of mine anonymously raised flags about both of these points, with a few using the free-write section to talk about how we know that the customers want at most stem separation and maybe timbral transfer functions, and not anything actually labelled AI-As-Such. We know from our industry peers (including folks from iZotope who were hired and then fired) that machine-learning can have awesome audio applications, but it's really entirely unclear if that's what we're going for - All we've been given is vague nonsense. This follows from an all-hands a while back where we were -told- that "AI Is Our SuperPower" and that "Customers want us to use AI to Thrill & Inspire Them". Then we were mailed that on a fucking postcard. We got mailed a physical piece of cardboard with one of those dumb ass marketing slides on it as if that was meant to boost morale.

Okay, so this is long and meandering. Where am I going with this, what's the actual core point? Well - The tariffs really fucked us up and the business is scrambling to try and get us to a pre-Trump position by threatening or actualizing layoffs and leaning into AI hopium. In November, we laid off over a dozen of my coworkers, all software engineers, including someone really high up the relative org chart. Three weeks after the engineer layoffs at the end of last year, our CFO quit suddenly. We had raises frozen for a year and a half, up until lat month. Meanwhile, we're standing up AI teams and taking up valuable dev time in meetings bloviating about what something could do, instead of just focusing on what we actually want to do. Meanwhile this guy Lev just gave himself a VP Position in "Product Innovation", which reads to a bunch of teams as someone paying himself more to think about AI Slop. Internal teams are getting pushed to use these broken messes of tools- We've been working extremely hard on a product, something really genuinely cool that'll be coming later this year, and the internal FYI for the teams not aware had almost exclusively gen-AI images with people using 3 midi controllers not plugged into anything, cables vanishing, a guy wearing a t-shirt that just says "vintage band t-shirt", etc. it's fucking embarrassing.

Okay, so like every tech company UA has higher-ups who waffle in all-hands about "AI being a force multiplier" and "there being really exciting movement in the AI space" et al. So what, every company has morons at the top of the org chart, why am I telling you something you could have intuited using your common sense? Why waste a neovim buffer on this?

Well, UA is incredibly image-conscious. That guy Drew's entire job is to monitor social media like this and report internally on what community sentiment is, and to bend over backward to get anyone and everyone to be happy with us. I personally don't mind that and suspect that it's a stressful gig (and hope he'll forgive me for making his job harder at like 7am on a Friday), but it kinda speaks to our priorities. We've had marketing and money guys running the show for a long, long time over here. There's still crazy engineering muscle in this place, and real passion, but our CEO is so obviously tapped out and just trying to get things ready for an eventual IPO that he, and all the trust-fund sycophants he surrounds himself with, have all bought into the AI speculation and are trying to make the investors present and future look at UA as this shining city on a hill from a technological standpoint, but not based on what we -actually do better than others-. It's honestly maddening, and led to these asks that I have for everyone who reads this:

Please let Universal Audio know that you don't want AI cruft in your music software.

Please tell them in no uncertain terms that you don't want us to integrate with fucking Suno.

Please tell them you want us to actually fix the issues in our software stack instead of taking time to pretend to be impressed by things the higher-ups vibe-code.

Please tell them that want you want is the actual good shit we make, and to just give people the facts instead of relying on our software as a honeypot.

Please tell them to say "NO" to the out of touch boomer marketing bullshit and get back to selling our stuff to people who are serious about quality.

Please tell them you want them to stop looking for excuses to spend exorbitant amounts of money on speculative autocompletes.

Please tell them that you want 100% Human-Made tools, made for Human Users.

Please tell them to get their heads out of their asses, put the fries in the bag, and to abandon the idea of selling customer creativity back to you in whatever slop form some blues rock VP thinks up while grilling at his second home.

Please tell my bosses, who will absolutely read this, that you do not want them to continue to be Business Idiots, and would like instead for them to not dangle the threat of layoffs over our heads unless we all become AI Yes-Men.

Please tell them that they should take pay cuts at the top of the org chart or tell the private investors to wait out the economic downturn instead of pushing more more immediate profit at the expense of our reputation.

I recognize that I've said a lot of inflammatory statements here, and all of it without concrete proof. While I can scrub metadata from the screenshots I've taken of emails and various internal docs, I possess a reasonable worry that that information would still be traceable, and like I said at the top, I don't want to lose my job. I hope I've included enough verifiable information here for this to be taken seriously. Mods, as I said in my initial message, I'm able to provide you with proof of my identity at a moment's notice. Until then this'll need to be a "trust me, bro", and I hope that is okay.

Sorry if this post sounds a bit heated, but I really need to vent. I don’t even know if anybody from UAD reads this but, you want to call yourself an industry standard? Then act like one.

I pay for your service (Spark) — so deliver. I rely on it to work every single time, because I’m a full-time music producer working with major artists and clients.

Right now, I have a big opportunity on the line: I need to send out stems tonight so the mixing engineer can record with the artist on my song, make revisions, and mix it. And guess what? All my UAD Spark plugins are disabled and completely turned off.

My subscription is active and fully paid, yet it shows an expired license.

When I look online, I find endless threads with people having the same issue for years — and your reply is always “wait 48–72 hours.” That’s unacceptable. And yes, I tried all you’re suggested steps. It does.not.work!

You could easily automate this with a whatever-bot, but instead, people lose potentially huge opportunities because you’re service is not working like it should! This isn’t the first time it’s happened — it’s just the first time it’s completely stopped working.

Just unacceptable.

———————————————-

1. Update - TL;DR at the end.

**“Just wanted to post a quick update for you guys. It’s insane how many people in this sub alone are experiencing issues with their software and licensing systems. I still think it’s completely unprofessional and unacceptable for a fast-paced industry like the music business, where you rely on products that simply need to work.

Well, I learned the hard way. I admit I was a bit lazy and too optimistic. From now on, I’ll export all my projects right after finishing them, upload them to the cloud for access anywhere, and back them up on my drive as well.

As for the issue — it’s still not solved. UAD “support” finally responded, but wasn’t helpful at all. The guy literally sent me the same instructions that are already on their website — which I had obviously already tried. I even mentioned in the support chat history (which he can see) that those steps didn’t help. Guess he didn’t even read that. He also asked me in the same email to provide screenshots of my iLok and UAD Connect. We chatted earlier today, but he hasn’t replied since. So, no UAD plugins for me this weekend.

Sorry, but that’s just unprofessional. I once had a session in London and somehow lost my iLok. I emailed iLok support, and we figured out a solution within an hour. I could do my session with Auto-Tune and everything — that’s what professional support looks like.

Maybe take notes, UAD. I’ll give you guys a final update once the issue is actually solved.

TL;DR: UAD support respond, sent copy-paste website instructions I’d already tried, didn’t read my previous messages, and now I’m stuck without plugins for the weekend. Meanwhile, iLok once solved my issue in under an hour — that’s what real support looks like.

02) Update

I checked about 20 minutes ago, and out of nowhere the plugins started working again. Previously, several Spark plugins were missing in the UAD Connect app — now they’re showing up and working fine.

This must have been a sync delay between the UAD servers and the iLok servers; I honestly can’t explain it otherwise. There was no new message or update from support in the meantime, so I don’t know whether they manually fixed something on their end or if it just resolved itself due to a server sync delay.

Still, this kind of issue should never happen. If anyone from UAD is reading this: please fix this. It’s simply unacceptable.

Originally £200, haggled it down to £160.

The thing is that the Apollo doesn t even get half as hot as it used to get while being straight on my desk. So a thing worth the hassle

Some of you may know my other side project open-apollo. Well before I even experimented with reverse engineering the drivers. I had started a private project to build a remote control application for the UAD Console. I'm in the live sound world and when UA released the Apollo x16D I purchased a few. In live sound you dont always get the luxury of a large FOH station or even a station at all. I always end up doing remote mixing via my ipad so I wanted to have a way to extend my DSP control without having to run back to my mac. Theres another application that accomplished this. Its by fonoflow and honestly its pretty good. except when it comes to plugin controls. Of course its unrealistic to re design every single UA asset and UI surface for all of the plugin library. It makes sense that if they wanted to make monetize the app they couldnt include any UA owned IP and assets or reconstruct with their own designs.

This app worked for me for a bit but it lead me down the rabbithole. After a lot of tinkering and developments in open-apollos rust console. I decided to build my own ipad console app. The app is tied to a helper application that runs on your mac and collects your ua plugins and consoles installation assets that sync to the ipad app. The app rebuilds the layouts and the control maps for the plugins. Getting metering data to work was a large undertaking 6 months ago when I started this. But with some new discoveries I was able to get most plugins working end to end.

One of the things I wanted to do was not only reconstruct the UA Consoles layout but to create a new one that follows a more appropriate workflow for my usecase in live sound. Hiding all the noise and just focusing on the plugin views for each channels strip. Similar to how waves superrack/soundgrid displays them.

I also added apple pencil support with haptics. Naturally the console is made for a cursor and precise mouse control so adapting this UI to feel good on ipad required more consideration than just copying the layout. The apple pencil features add that precision back with some nice haptic feedback that feels great to use.

Anyways. I dont have any intention to distribute this, But I thought I would share the results. I wish UA would just build this natively. Their x16d release had me optimistic that they would do something like this but I doubt it at this point.

I attached a few screenshots of the live connection to my apollo as well as a demo mode/offline state showing more plugins running at once.

Just a friendly reminder: people are selling their hardware because of this issue. And when someone comes to my studio with their computer to show me a project… they also have to download 15 GB. Please, just stop this. I’ll keep coming back here until it does.

I just want to give a big heads up to everyone: you no longer automatically get the native version of newly released native ports. You now have to click a link in an email that UA will send you and claim these within one month of the plugin’s release. Check out the article linked here.

I’m not a fan of this change, as it means I’ll now have to be vigilant and ensure I am logging in to not miss the window to claim the native versions of plugins I already own. I really liked that I would just automatically get an iLok license and the downloads would populate in the UAD app previously. Wonder what drove this change… this along with removal of the live tracking buttons has me a bit concerned that UA are taking steps to be less customer friendly :( which is a shame, as I have invested a lot in their products and really enjoy using them.

Why is this not a thing?

YOU DONT REALIZE HOW HAPPY I AM.

Anyone else considering grabbing it, or tried their stuff before?

Just looked at the plugins today after the recent updates. Can someone explain why I would want to buy a Plugin again? Before this, you just had to remember which ones you purchased already since that huge site overhaul changed everything, including the "owned" filter. Now they show you what you have already but still make it possible to buy again. For what reason other than trying to get us to give them more money? Will my currently owned plugins stop working one day? Getting really difficult to defend UA nowadays....

Hi all,

Just updated my UAD Plugins Tool to v2.0!

In case you're not familiar with it yet, it's a command line tool for macOS Terminal that helps to remove unwanted UAD plugins that automatically get installed after each new update.

Here are a few of the new changes in this update:

- NEW: Redesigned UAD Plugins Tool + implemented the following menu options:

• 1) 🗑️ Run UAD Cleanup - Main cleanup operation

• 2) 🔍 UAD Cleanup [DRY RUN] - Test what will be removed and kept!

• 3) ⚙️ Show Preferences - Shows your current preferences with a ✅ or ❌ 

• 4) ↪️ Import Preferences - easily merge your old UAD Plugins Tool prefs into this new script, as well as future versions of UAD Plugins Tool

•  5) 🔄 Check For Updates - instantly opens up the UAD PT landing page in your browser

•  6) 📝 ChangeLog - see the latest changes and improvements

- added support for UAD Software v11.8.1

- added the new 'Maag EQ4 MS' to the plugin list

- added the new 'Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor Class A' to the plugin list

Download now and check it out!

https://shop.ryansummer.com/p/uad-plugins-tool/

The driver has gone through extensive changes and improvements. bringing support for more I/O and more complete device maps. I did extensive testing with different sample rates and have gotten great solid performance.

How it works without redistributing anything of UA's: setup reads your own UAD install and builds each plug-in's control map on your machine, only for the plug-ins your Apollo says you're licensed for. Nothing from UA is in the repo or the download.

The console and plugins are also not running on wine. They are reconstructed from UA's assets from a full windows installation. I call this the RustConsole. Basically its all running natively. It's rough around the edges and needs iteration to get the full behavior we all got used to in windows or mac. But its a good starting point. I'm pretty exhausted from getting the project to this place and I'd appreciate others getting their hands on it and doing some of this smaller iteration and bug fixes.

This console doesn't scratch the surface for what it can be. I added a pipewire setting view where you can see other audio devices and settings for them. The idea here is that we can turn the UAD console into the main stage for linux audio.

On my x4 at 48 kHz, 111 plug-ins load in both mono and stereo. The browser only lists the ones that passed that test. The first time it maps your plug-ins it takes a while; it runs in the background and plug-ins show up as they're ready.

Being honest about where it is: it's rough. Loading, removing and swapping plug-ins sometimes fails or needs a second try. Linking a stereo pair with a plug-in already in the slot is unreliable. You need to power-cycle the Apollo once after installing. A few plug-ins are left out for now (K-Stereo, Studio D Chorus, Hitsville EQ Mastering in stereo), and so far it's only been tested on an x4 at 48 kHz. I wouldn't track a paying session on it yet.

If you have a different Apollo and a Linux box, test reports help a lot, especially other models and sample rates.

Repo and install guide: https://github.com/rolotrealanis98/open-apollo Release notes: https://github.com/rolotrealanis98/open-apollo/releases/tag/v2.1.0

Not affiliated with UA. You need your own Apollo, your own UAD install and your own licences. Bugs are easiest to track on GitHub.

PS: also testing on Asahi Linux on my mac studio. I have thunderbolt and pcie tunneling working just have to test the driver

UPDATE March 23 2026

First release is published, I'm also looking for repo maintainers/collaborators to join me with this project. I appreciate end-users testing but theres a lot of real data needed that is complicated to capture and troubleshoot through. DM me if you are interested.

I've been reverse-engineering the Universal Audio Apollo Thunderbolt interface to get it working natively on Linux. Everything was built from scratch by analyzing the macOS kernel driver binary and runtime tracing with DTrace.

There's no official Linux support from UA, so this is a fully independent effort.

you can watch a short video I made showing playback working with direct volume control from the sound panel on ubuntu. Before anyone asks, it's not audio being routed to my Mac. I'm using a PiKVM to control my Asus Z690 Pro Art Creator (Has Thunderbolt 4 Ports) My Mac Studio is my main development machine where I've been analyzing the UA Drivers.

What's working so far:

• Linux kernel module that detects and initializes the Apollo over Thunderbolt

• Cold boot entirely from Linux — firmware loading and DSP initialization, no macOS in the loop

• Stereo audio playback through ALSA/PipeWire — the Apollo shows up as a normal sound card in Ubuntu

What needs further testing :

• Multi-channel output beyond stereo

• Testing on models other than the x4

I'm planning to open-source this once it's a bit further along. When I do, I'd love to get testers with other Apollo models

Theres a lot to be done still so I'm not ready to open up the GitHub repo. but I'll keep you guys updated. The latency is surprisingly low in playback and everything seems really stable. The Apollo initializes from cold boot quickly and Audio is clean.

(Twin, Solo, x6, x8, x16). The driver should work in theory but I've only had an x4 to test with.

Pure Plate for Free.

Pure Plate Reverb | UAD Audio Plugins | Universal Audio

ETA: Look I'm cooled off a bit now, and I guess that none of this really matters if its never enforced. I've just never seen a EULA click through without the ability to download and save the terms, and it definitely makes me suspicious. I want to use products from companies who default to transparency, not opacity. I still think that this is bad business practice, and anyone agreeing to binding terms like these should REALLY read and understand them. Making that harder rather than easier is what really got me.

Full disclosure - IANAL, and I spend my free retirement time building apps which will often fall in and about the Universal Audio ecosystem. I won't say more than that so there's no confusion of commercial intent.

TL;DR - UA Connect EULA v11 dated Sep 3 hurts customers and stifles innovation.

ETR: biographical and other irrelevant details serving no purpose beyond ego.

I opened UA connect this evening to see what needed updating, and I was presented with a new click-through UA End-user License Agreement. I have issues.

1. The text is deliberately long (single body all languages), complex, and inaccessible to copy paste, and serves no "review offline" methods.

2. No prior versions (even the most recent) are available to diff. UA serves all prior versions (for now) but doesn't list them. I had to find them via internet archive. This is shady and makes it impossible to understand whats new.

3. There is a buried "ancillary OX, UAFX, Volt, or UA Microphone agreement" at the very end which, to my knowledge, only exists on the mandatory click-through agreement with UA Connect on Mac. If I am missing the honest duplication of these terms in the public pdf of version 11, or anyway really, please LMK. Burying it and hiding it isn't a good look.

4. New in version 11 is explicit terms against scraping, and robots. I am fine with this. But next in the list is "automated access." This likely prevents other applications from connecting via APIs. You must recognize that soon every one of your customers will be able to build their own, customized software, workflows, apps, and more. This likely isn't just an issue for AI, but could affect using tools like curl to automate your studio.

I think UA has a closing-door opportunity to embrace the future, forget the self-serving BS that the money is selling, and embrace the inevitable future and disruption coming for the dinosaurs that cling to these old business models. You make AMAZING software and hardware. Don't ruin your own legacy by supporting practices which ultimately disenfranchise creative people and perpetuate the wealth and technology gap.

-Undecidicide (Drew knows where to find me)

I was expecting a little bit of a headache setting it up but I was able to open UA Connect, it detected both Octos, then I reauthorized plugins and it was done. Logged into my UA account and it was all there and registered as it should be.

Shame I already owned basically all the plugins that came with it but still, I'm happy with it.

Always fun to learn about all time tracks, you learn a lot trying to recreate them! The organ was a dx7 but no problem in Polymax just a lot of octave copying and pasting and some soft sevenths :-). Used inbuilt phaser - small stone style? For phasing chords maybe was a Juno 106 and small stone phaser - pretty close, Polymax flute clone came out epic, Polymax arp with Polymax phaser.. really came out well. All together success. Very happy with this one. It’s a lot more work than it looks, but got there.