115 AAX plugins included?
 

Quick question

The sales page for carbon at online retailers states that it Includes 115 AAX DSP plugs from the Avid Complete Collection. Now along with the free Perpetual Ultimate license, do you get to keep all 115 plugins if you don’t renew your update plan after the first year?

Re: 115 AAX plugins included?
 

I will answer my own question here since I just read the FAQ which I should have done in the first place. It looks like if I let the included 1-year subscription/plan expire into perpetual, I will lose a good portion of the plugins unless I renew or rent the complete plugin package. That just blows me away that if you buy a Carbon ($4000) and then buy the Ultimate perpetual ($2600), you'll still lose access to plugins like Reverb One, Eleven MK II, and Green JRC Overdrive after a year unless you keep paying. Yes, the plugins are only $50 a year, but again, I don’t do subscriptions. I would buy them outright if they gave me the choice. It sure sucks that you almost have to get a lawyer to go over the fine print when buying something from Avid;)

Re: 115 AAX plugins included?
 

You don't have to buy the Ultimate perpetual. It's included in the price of the Carbon for at least the rest of this year. So there's $2600 you don't have to spend. That covers the $50 a year for the plugins for 52 years.

Re: 115 AAX plugins included?
 

Thanks for your response. That is definitely one way to think about it but my statement was more of a generalization. I’m aware that Ultimate is free at the moment but not forever and as far as the plugins, a subscription is still a subscription which I wont do. My point was that after spending all that money you still end up having to pay a subscription for those plugins that should actually just come with PT, especially Ultimate. Plus, the sales page says that they come with the unit. I’m not really too worried about it because I own a perpetual license for the Eleven MKII pack and there is great third party AAX DSP reverb plugins that I can purchase. And now I should be receiving my Carbon in the next few days, and with the two licenses I’ll receive, I won’t have to worry about any of this for a few years.

It’s not very inspiring musically to have to worry about subscriptions, renewals, reinstatement, licenses, and the monetization of parts of PT that you’ve been accustom to having, but I have hope. Avid will come around and do what’s right. With all the competition I don’t see how they couldn’t. There should really be only 2 types of plans, a subscription/membership and perpetual with options for paid upgrades when needed. Not being able to update your computers OS due to a frozen perpetual license opens your system up to vulnerabilities and with Windows Home, I don’t think you can even turn off system updates which could make your system incompatible with your version of PT.

The two PT licenses with the Carbon is a generous thing to do, even though it is probably just to hit their sales quota for the year but it made me really happy. I haven’t been this excited about Pro Tool since I bought my Digi001 back in 1999. The Carbon definitely gives me that vibe and with the perpetual licenses I can kind of forget about the whole subscription thing for a while. I could ramble on forever about my past with Digidesign and my hopes for Avid but I need to go make room for my Carbon.