Ever since Apple announced they were developing their own chips for Mac computers, the team at PACE, the people behind iLok, have been hard at work developing the software to enable iLok to work natively on Apple Silicon powered computers. We have an exclusive update.

The History

In December 2020, not long after the first entry-level M1 powered Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac mini were announced, PACE Anti-Piracy issued the following statement on Rosetta 2 compatibility for all users of their products and services…

“PACE technologies including iLok are Rosetta 2 compliant and have been since end of August.

Since August 24th all developers have had access to Eden 5.3.0 SDKs and end-user software. This release includes many enhancements, these include;

• iLok Cloud improvements

• Service status info for end-users

• Big Sur macOS 11.0 and Xcode 12 support

• Digital signing of arm64 and universal binaries

• Faster logins for large iLok.com accounts

Furthermore, PACE are hard at work on native ARM support and working with all developer partners as they make the transition to new Silicon powered Apple Macs.”

Regardless of what you think about PACE and iLok, software developers like Avid, Dolby, Slate Digital, Sonnox, McDSP, UAD and many more use iLok to protect their investment in developing products.

If you are not sure why this is so important then read our article Why Software Piracy Is Wrong - It Costs Someone in which Russ wrote this…

“I have just got off the phone with a developer that has left me feeling sad, angry, and depressed.

It’s a small plug-in developer, just a few of them, all working out of a passion for music and great audio and at the same time trying to pay the rent, put the kids through school and take one holiday a year.

It was when he told me that one of their plug-ins has only 3% of the users who are legal owners. Perhaps like me you think ‘f*ck off, tell me that again’ which is exactly what I did, I asked him to repeat it. Yes I heard it right, just 3% of those using it have paid for it.

That means that most of the time the guys spent working on that plug-in, they are not getting paid. This is scary especially when you have family responsibilities and the average plug-in takes around a year for the team to develop.”

But to continue to support their customers so they can protect their investment, software developers need PACE’s software to be able to run natively on Apple Silicon before they can release a native version.

Protecting software with bulletproof technologies isn’t simple. PACE has had to rewrite considerable parts of its systems from the ground up to make its architecture work with Apple Silicon. They have to be sure that everything works all of the time. Their clients are the software developers like Avid and not us, the end-users, their job is to protect their clients from piracy. A reliable system means they can be confident that their intellectual property is safe from software piracy. For many developers, PACE is the only one they fully trust.

The Latest Developments

We can now exclusively reveal that PACE has been working round the clock to complete development on a fully Apple Silicon compatible version of their iLok copy protection tools. In a statement released exclusively to Production Expert, they told us…

“We at PACE Anti-Piracy, know that the audio industry is eager to reap the benefits of the new Apple Silicon devices, especially with the just-announced M1 Pro and M1 Pro Max devices. We also know that our customers depend on us to keep their software absolutely secure from piracy, tampering, and IP theft, and that if we don't support Apple Silicon, they can't either. To that end, we have been working aggressively to deliver this support.

We delivered initial support to our licensing ("Eden") customers in August of 2021 and some of those customers have since published new versions that run natively on Apple Silicon, which has been very well-received by their users.

We have also reorganized our development schedule to bring Apple Silicon support into our high-security tamper-protection product, Fusion. This work is extremely complex given the significant changes at the OS level. We’re happy to now announce that we expect to have a beta version of Fusion in publishers' hands in November, and a final version before the end of the year. For our customers [software developers] who depend on us for strong protection on Apple Silicon, the wait is nearly over, and we expect that their end users will see new versions soon thereafter.”

What Will This Mean?

This will mean that software developers who depend on PACE products will be able to produce and release Apple Silicon Native versions of their DAWs and plugins very soon enabling us to be to run more and more of our audio tools fully natively on Apple Silicon, rather than having to depend on Rosetta 2.

In conversations with the team at PACE, it has been a major accomplishment to migrate the iLok infrastructure onto the new Apple Silicon System on a Chip hardware, which has not been without its challenges, the last handful of which have only just been resolved in the last couple of days. We also understand that PACE has been able to make its Mac-based products even more secure than before.

All being well, PACE is aiming to release the beta version of Fusion to their clients before the 7th Audio Developer Conference, which will be in person in London and online on November 15th and 16th 2021 for the conference and November 19th 2021 for online workshops.

UPDATE: February 2022

Liquidsonics has released public preview versions using the latest beta versions of the iLok Fusion protection software. On Feb 2nd 2022, they released an email to users saying…

“This email is a short note to advise that the builds have recently been refreshed - the new 'Release 3 / 02-02-2022' set have been rebuilt using an updated protection suite from Pace intended to address some stability issues.”

From this, it would appear iLok is busy working with their developer clients, like Liquidsonics improving the Apple Silicon versions of their protection software.

Windows 11

Back in October 2021, whilst we were talking to the team at PACE we asked them about developments to support Windows 11, released earlier this month. PACE told us in an exclusive statement…

“Our QA and engineering teams have tested and found no problems with Windows 11. Some of our publisher clients have had issues but it is our view that these have more to do with issues not related to our developer tools specifically. But so far we have not had any reports from customers with Windows 11 issues that are related to PACE.”

If you want to learn more about Windows 11 then check out our article Windows 11 - What You Need To Know.

In Conclusion

There you have it. As a result of these announcements, we should expect to start seeing software developers releasing versions of their software and plugins that will run natively on Apple Silicon late this year or early next year. With regard to Windows 11, software developers can add Windows 11 support into their product release plans from now on.