How to force opening regular Pro Tools with an Ultimate license bundle?

[XJENSEN]

Does anyone know how to force opening regular Pro Tools with an Ultimate license bundle? Couldn't immediately find out how to do this.

[cwsand]

Hi, What exactly is happening?

[Darryl Ramm]

Regular Pro Tools is Ultimate, what you get all depends on the license used, you cannot change this any other way. And what exact licenses do you have on the iLok... and what exact version of Pro Tools are you trying to run. If you have an ultimate license for that applicable version it should open as Ultimate, standard as standard. Try removing all other Iloks containing other licenses if you are not seeing what you expect.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by cwsand

Hi, What exactly is happening?

IOW, why do you need to lose features?

[JFreak]

cannot do that. if you have ultimate license on your ilok, you will have ultimate features when the software launches

[XJENSEN]

Originally Posted by albee1952

IOW, why do you need to lose features?

Well, let's not discuss the meaning of life here, but I got a legit case for testing regular PT with some Avid HD interfaces. To check whether an additional PT license will suffice for some stereo music recording/mixing work, aside our Ultimate rig.

I got feedback from Avid, but it's confusing. I own the Protools Ultimate Perpetual Bundle, which includes licenses for 10, 11, 12, HD10, HD11, HD12, DigiLink I/O, Pro Tools and Pro Tools Ultimate.

For legacy PT versions, it would depend whether you have Avid HD hardware connected to launch the HD version. Otherwise, it would fall back to regular PT.

In recent PT versions, this changed, because both PT and PT Ultimate can now use third-party interfaces.

However, although my bundle thus includes a regular PT license, there is no way to launch the program in the regular, non-ultimate version. They really should have made this an option with a modifier key on startup, or something like that.

Current workaround is that, for my testing, Avid provided me with a regular PT trial. I have to unload the PT Ultimate license from my iLok and then I'm able to test regular PT with an Avid HD interface.

[DetroitT]

Teaching regular would be another benefit of non-ultimate launching.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by DetroitT

Teaching regular would be another benefit of non-ultimate launching.

Sure. I've been "fighting" with this problem for a decade already. One would think some simple key combo like cmd-R would do it but so far no luck.

[XJENSEN]

Yeah, I have no idea why Avid didn't incorporate this possibility in the first place..

But I'm still not proceeding with my test (or am I). After I got the regular PT license, and deactivated the Ultimate bundle, I could launch regular PT. But as soon as PT launches, it 'claims' my HD Native interface and makes it unavailable to use, complaining that the DigiLink I/O license is missing.

This, I think, is really odd. Any other software (e.g. Logic) can use my HD Native interface over Core Audio, not even limited to 32 I/O (it reports 40 ins, 42 outs).

So, Pro Tools itself can't use its own Core Audio driver without the DigiLink I/O license, while all other software can? On the other hand, it can use any other 3rd party interfaces. This doesn't seem right?

[BScout]

HD Native card/HDX can see up to 64 channels in/out (up to that depending on what interfaces you have hooked up to the minidigilink on the first card only -- HDX's case) as CoreAudio/ASIO. Written clearly on Avid's website.

Pro Tools does not use CoreAudio/ASIO to talk to Native cards/thunderbolt or HDX. There is a separate service for other programs to talk to them that presents Avid hardware as a CoreAudo device. You can even kill that service to eliminate other DAWs/programs from being able to talk to the HD Native/HDX card over CoreAudio/ASIO and Pro Tools will continue to work. So Pro Tools is never using the CoreAudio driver to talk to these devices. For that reason, it has better performance under ProTools than other DAWs talking to it via CoreAudio/ASIO.

You are only running into the first hurdle with the digilink license alert. You can only use Ultimate with HD Native cards/TB/interfaces. This is already well written on Avid's website.