Universal Audio's 1176 Compressor is Free Through 3/31/25. Excellent Comp for Vocals.

[PaulieDC]

I find the UA "system" terrible. I don't use the 1176, but I do have their Distressor and LA-2A collection, and I'm constantly having authorization problems and other "errors" with them. I like, especially the LA-2A's but I'm pretty much at the point where I don't think its worth the hassle, because opening an existing project, I never know whether they'll be working or not.

That app and the authorization is definitely a big stinkpot. I attribute it to UAD going native only two years ago and that was their best attempt, but they need to rethink how that works. To me the audio quality makes it worth it but given enough time I'll start wanting to punt it all through the uprights as well.

So I read in a forum that someone disabled the Universal Audio Helper Service (this is in Windows) and the authorizations stopped. I just did that on my PC today. So the next thing we'll find out is, how long will the plugins run before it pops up wanting to re-verify? If it's once a month, I can live with that.

If anyone running Windows wants to try that and isn't sure how (sorry, I don't know how that all works in a Mac), just do this:

• Hit Win + R to popup the Run dialog box
• Type services.msc and hit Enter
• Find Universal Audio Helper Service in the list... right-click and choose Properties
• On the popup form, change dropdown to Disabled, THEN click the Stop button and the service will terminate
• Click OK and you're done

My hope is that being the polling of the UA Helper service isn't running, the UAD app will go by the date and ask us to authenticate once a month which is reasonable. I'm pretty sure OT does that with the SINE player.

We'll see!