In that case it’ll certainly be worth it! I paid more for the UAD Distressor & Manley plugins alone!
Yikes!
Plugins sure are a crazy world!
If you have enough stuff in the bundle you need and buying the bundle becomes cheaper than getting said stuff individually, then yes. If you’re buying it for one or two things it is probably cheaper to get one of those “choose a few” bundle deals UAD has.
Yeah there was a fair few I wanted so bit the bullet. Been enjoying playing the Rhodes (Electra) for the last hour!!
The most annoying thing about UAD plugins may have just been rectified.
From an email that went out to customers today:
You no longer need an iLok USB or internet connection to use your native UAD plug‑ins or LUNA. Simply open the UA Connect app and follow the steps to move UAD activations to your computer, then start creating.
I’m not entirely clear yet as to whether this means you no longer need an iLok account at all, but from what I can tell, it looks like you may be able to finally download and activate plugins using only your UAD account (unless you’re on a Spark subscription).
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I think you do need iLok, but you won’t be forced to choose between a dongle and an iLok cloud activation. Like Softube and others you can just drag the license to your machine, but I don’t think it does away with iLok completely.
I just confirmed by finally installing UA Connect on my main computer (I had only ever installed it on my secondary before) and I have good news and bad news:
The good:
- All I had to download was UA Connect
- The only thing I had to sign into was my UAD account
- Downloading and activating Native plugins was basically as painless as Arturia
The bad:
- It still installs iLok system extensions (although I guess I could go and take them out of Login Items if I really wanted to)
- UA Connect still launches every time you load a UAD plugin (although the plugins won’t complain if you close it)
Overall, a big improvement for UAD. Having to sign into two different accounts with two different license managers was kind of ridiculous, and it’s great to see them finally ship a better solution.
Now maybe they can work on making UA Connect less thirsty for attention. 
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Just wish UAD hurried up with the native ports. Still plenty of my fave plugs remain as DSP-only…
I was already using iLok, so the new auth change didnt do much for me. I suppose now I can also use them on my macbook even without being online, that might come in handy some day…
One tip I got from here is to rename it on Mac. So if you put a random character like &UAConnect it won’t launch.