Demos and licenses

If you purchase a plug-in from a reseller, you will receive a code, usually called a redeem or registration code. Enter this code on our redeem page to register your name, e-mail address and the plug-in in our customer database. Once redeemed, the code you received from the reseller has served its purpose – it has lost its value, you will never need it again. Note that redeem codes are not required when you purchase directly from u-he’s own web store.

Whether you purchased the plug-in from a reseller or from our own web store, you will receive an e-mail containing your license. This license consists of your user name and a serial number. Remember: Your user name is NOT your email address.

After you have installed the plug-in, you can load it in your preferred DAW or host software. The plug-in will display a dialog window where you can enter your user name and serial number: This removes the demo restriction. If you have installed the plug-in on multiple computers, you will need to unlock it on each computer in the same way.

If you lose your license details, simply go to the My Licenses page and enter your registered e-mail address. Within minutes you should receive an e-mail containing your u-he license details i.e. user name and serial number/s for your purchased plug-ins, as well as fresh download links for your purchased u-he soundsets.

Demo versions of our plug-ins are available on each product page. Read the system requirements to make sure the plug-in is compatible with your computer setup.

All u-he demo versions are fully functional, there are no time or functionality restrictions.

Unregistered demo installations of commercial u-he plug-ins will start playing back a vinyl-like static sound after a few minutes of use. The sound is played back roughly every 30 seconds and lasts 3-5 seconds each time.

Zebra2 is the only product with a different demo limitation: after about 15 minutes of use, it will start playing quasi-random notes, instead of the notes you send to it. The notes Zebra2 plays are restricted to C-E-B-R-A, where R stands for a randomly chosen note.

The demo limitations can be removed by authorizing the plug-in installation with your registered name and purchased serial number.
See: Q: How do I remove the demo limitation?

To remove all demo limitations, enter your name and a valid serial number as shown in your product license email. We recommend using copy & paste to enter the serial number to avoid any typos or regional encoding problems.

A serial number can be purchased via the respective product page. Once you have your serial number, open the plug-in in your DAW/host. Demo versions of the plug-in will show a nag screen on launch. Select the the middle option that reads enter your serial number, and copy & paste the details from your product license email.

If you do not see the nag screen, then click on the plug-in’s Data Display (the information window usually along the top of the interface which shows the current patch name, parameter values etc) and select Enter serial number from the top of the list.

When using copy & paste, please avoid copying empty spaces at the start and/or end of the codes.

If your host software doesn’t allow pasting text via keyboard command, please right-click into the text entry fields in the registration dialog window and choose the paste command from the context menu.

Our products use a serial number based copy protection method.

You’ll need an Internet connection to download installers and receive emails with your license information, that’s it. Everything else happens offline, you don’t need an active Internet connection to install, activate or use our products.

When you enter your registered name and serial number into the plug-in, it writes a key file with the license to your hard drive. When you open the plug-in, it will load its license from that file. That’s all.

We don’t use:

• Internet-based challenge/response,
• Background services/daemons,
• Activation counters,
• Hardware dongles,
• Machine IDs,

… nor any other intrusive or bloated protection methods.

When entering your name and serial number, please type them in exactly as they were sent to you in the license email. Do not include any quotation marks ".

Entering another name (abbreviation, initials, artist name, etc.) or mistaking the letter O for the number 0 will make the registration fail. We recommend that you copy & paste the license information directly from the email into the registration text fields instead of typing each letter and number by hand.

When using copy & paste, please avoid copying empty spaces at the start and/or end of the codes.

If your host software doesn’t allow pasting text via keyboard command, please right-click into the text entry fields in the registration dialog window and choose the paste command from the context menu.

If you are still having problems registering your plug-in, please contact support.

You can retrieve your serial numbers by visiting the My Licenses page on our website. Enter the email address you used to purchase your u-he software and our system will send you a list of all your registered serial numbers.

Note: A previous version of u-he.com required a login and password. We have removed this feature and the older accounts no longer exist.

NFR is short for Not For Resale.

If you have an NFR license, you likely received it for free from us so you can test, review or demonstrate a certain product, or for any other previously agreed-upon purpose. You may use an NFR license just like a regular license - but you can not sell or transfer it, nor otherwise pass it on to someone else.

An NFR license remains your license forever, or until we decide to revoke it. (Which we usually won’t do, unless we have a really good reason to.)

If you received an NFR license for one of our products, and at some point we release a new major version of that product, your original NFR license will remain valid for the original major version, but you will not usually be able to use it with the newer major version.

If we offer a paid-for upgrade path from the old major version to the new major version of the product, you can and may purchase the paid-for upgrade to modify your NFR license so that it also covers the newer version of the product, just as if the NFR license were a regular license.

Important:
If you purchase a paid-for upgrade for an NFR license, your upgraded license for the new major version will still be NFR. You can not “buy out” your license from its NFR state, unless you purchase a full regular license.

Generally yes, you can.

License transfers are free of charge beginning nine months after the date of purchase in our website store, or nine months after the license was redeemed using a registration code.

If you wish to transfer a license earlier than nine months after its date of purchase, you will need to purchase a transfer token for 15€ from our online store, one token per premature license to transfer.

Please note that license transfers are not possible earlier than six weeks after the date of purchase.

Transfer tokens are not listed in our online store. If you need to purchase a transfer token, our support staff will notify you of this, and send you a link to purchase the token with.

If a token is required for your transfer, and you know from a past transfer how and where to purchase transfer tokens, then please do not purchase any tokens without contacting us about the transfer first.

After purchasing a transfer token, please contact us again and let us know that you have done so.

Please note that you (i.e. the current owner of the license/s) need to be the person to purchase the transfer token, otherwise the token purchase can not be correctly assigned.

Soundsets do not require transfer tokens, as they are automatically transferred with the corresponding plug-in. It is not possible to transfer soundsets on their own, including The Dark Zebra.

The only exception to the above rules are NFR (not for resale) licenses, those can not be transferred at all.

To initiate a license transfer, please read and follow the instructions in this FAQ article: Q: How do I request a license transfer?

Some important details the buyer of a transferred license should be aware of:

License transfers will be processed manually by our support team. You (the buyer) will always receive your license (user name and serial number) directly from us, never from the seller. If the seller sends you their user name and serial number, you need to decline the transfer. Likewise, if the seller sends you a registration code that you need to enter on our redeem page, you should decline the transfer, as the code will most likely have been obtained in a fraudulent manner.

Licenses for our products are issued to people, not machines. You can install, activate and use your u-he products on any computers you personally own and use without having to purchase extra licenses—as long as you are the one using them.

Also, we do not differentiate between macOS, Windows and Linux—one license covers everything.

To unregister a u-he plug-in, you only need to delete one file from your computer.

The following example uses our product Bazille, but it will work for any other u-he plug-in, simply substitute Bazille with the corresponding product name.

On macOS delete this file:

Mac HD/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/u-he/com.u-he.Bazille.plist

On Windows delete this file:

*YOUR DATA DIRECTORY INSTALL PATH*\Bazille.data\Support\com.u-he.Bazille.user.txt

For more info on our recommended install paths, see this FAQ article

If you are not sure which path you chose for the Data directory during installation, simply use your computer’s search function and enter Bazille.data and it will appear in the search results.

After removing the previous registration, to register with different information load a new instance of the plug-in. You will be presented with the demo nag screen where you can enter your name and serial number.

The user name is the name you provided during purchase, or when entering your redeem code. Typically, your user name will simply be your regular name.

If you wish to not have your full name displayed when the plugin is first loaded, e.g. because you want to use the plugin in videos or live streams, then you have multiple options.

• The name disappears once you load a preset. Simply load a preset before the stream starts.

• Alternatively, save a project file that you load in your DAW, which contains the plugin with a preset already loaded.

• Or use your host’s function to save a default preset for the plugin, so it gets loaded whenever you load the plugin.

If none of these options are sufficient for you, then please contact us and we will provide you with an alternative user name of your choice.

Note: There are some conventions a user name must fulfill to be valid:

• The name must consist of at least two words, with a combined minimum of five characters.

• Valid characters contain umlaut characters (ä, ö, ü) as well as pretty much any other UTF-8 compatible symbols.

• Special characters like dots, dashes, at-symbols (.,-@) and numbers are valid characters, but they do not count towards the five character minimum. You are welcome to use your company or artist name, as long as it satisfies the above requirements.

Examples of valid user names:

• John Doe
• John D
• A N0NyM0US€
• Anonymous Inc.
• J0hnny 5
• ゴリラ クジラ

Examples of invalid user names:

• J – only one word
• Johnny – only one word
• J Doe – fewer than five valid characters
• John @ – fewer than five valid characters
• J D1O2E3 – fewer than five valid characters
• @ @@@@ – no valid characters at all
• 1 2345 – no valid characters at all