“Try Before You Buy” was a thing of the ’00s. Today there is so much top quality freeware, and free DAWs like Tracktion that puts anybody in position to make serious music without the need of payware IMO. Or just buy a Mac with Logic included, back in the day Alchemy cost a lot of money, now it is free for them.

respect for being correct and honest, but sadly the major part of humanity is not, so i can understand the need for copy protection in general.

i also understand that for many people a physical dongle is an annoying thing, but it can be quite comfortable to have licenses disconnected from the computer you are working on.
and i guess most people dont like to be charged for the usb stick, but for running professional level software it is still affordable compared to prices of daws and plugins in general.
ok i have to admit: i just checked the price for ilok dongles, and it went up a lot since i bought mine. i think i paid 30euros, now it is 50 euros for the usb-a version and even 60 for usb-c…
yeah, it is maybe not the most elegant way to implement protection, but in the end you buy it once and you never need to think about it anymore.
some music stuff is still expensive, but actually a large amount of people nowadays can afford to make their own music, that was not always possible so easily.
then theres also probably countless alternatives to software that wants ilok-usb-thingy.

so i probably missed the whole point, because this topic was actually about freeware that uses ilok protection. i just told my opinion because usually all you see in comments about ilok is people complainig.

Thanks for the heads up on Celestial Strings, Gery.

Hello, I am runing Synchron on Windows 7 Ultimate, no problem.

I am 100% legit. For me that is a mission, as I have come to know or be in touch with devs directly over the years I do not want to take anything from them. But as such I find copy protection intrusive and especially iLOK which for a long time required physical dongles. Being 100% legit is a gentleman’s agreement, I do not break my word.

I think they need some protection for their own sample player so they provided free iLok code instead.

As a way to encourage customers, old and new, to use ilok.