Is Total Studio MAX worth the money? (IK Multimedia)

[ralfrobert]

Penfever, thanks for this summary. Lot of insight, fair review.

I would like to add one thing on Sampletank 4: I got this product and had no bread and butter rompler before. NI is not present in my setup for several reasons, so I needed a collection to cover my everyday needs. If you get ST4 for this purpose (to cover lots of bases, to just have something you can use right away when sketching things out), I think it is a solid approach to get this at a low price. I am quite happy with it. However, (a) there is a learning curve, (b) some things could have been implemented in another, maybe better, way, and (3) you will not find completely exotic stuff, so there will be additional buys.

Completeness and perfection aside, Total Studio as offered in the sale can be useful and entertaining for years without the need to make lots of investments on top. I am a hobbyist (like many of us) and still happy about what I got for the amount of money spent.

[Distorted Horizon]

Only thing "worth the money" from ik is the hardware synth and drum machine. Imo ofc.

[MMaarrkk]

+1

I think IK is a hit or miss depending on what You need. Their products are great if it is what you need out of it. Some of their plugin libraries are great, just for a specific person. The same with hardware and etc.

[tbadeanu]

Penfever - thanks a lot for the detailed review. I might take my shot and buy it, i could always resell it if i won't find value in it.
IK Multimedia seems to get a lot of hate because of their business practices and response time in fixing issues and i must admit that alone puts me off big time.
Paying for re-downloads or licence transfers seems like a proper "you bought it, now screw you" approach which should no longer be accepted in today's age...

[peteredd]

Only thing "worth the money" from ik is the hardware synth and drum machine. Imo ofc.

And the iLoud monitors

[Distorted Horizon]

Only thing "worth the money" from ik is the hardware synth and drum machine. Imo ofc.

And the iLoud monitors

Hardware items generally

Maybe their software is worth the money too, but totally not worth the hassle

[ezrashanti]

I've been won over. I think T-Racks and MODO Bass are amazing. I also think ARC3 is awesome and is way better than sonarworks. They had Total Studio Max on sale for like 180 bucks if you owned one product, which I think is an insane price. T-Racks and the Tape collection are really really good. They do use a lot of CPU though. I also bought the MTM monitors which just arrived today that I'm going to test out soon and probably use as secondary monitors in my main studio.

[MMaarrkk]

Have to agree that T-Racks is great. We've covered T-Rack 5 Max a few months back and it's a really nice package that sounds great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wRAor9-EFQ

[Najimad]

IK Multimedia
Not everything is great, but a few things could be used. Like other devs (NI, Steven Slate, Arturia) , IK also has quite a lot of pretty bad or useless plugins

[PointOfDeparture]

I've been waiting for a while for Total Studio 3 to drop.

https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/t ... tsincluded

[DarkS474]

I've been waiting for a while for Total Studio 3 to drop.

https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/t ... tsincluded

Upgrading to Total Studio 3 MAX from Total Studio 2 MAX is way too expensive this time. Asking half of the package price for new customers as an upgrade price to existing customers is just way too much. Even when they will make the next sale if the maxgrade price is not getting discounted 90% it will still be too expensive to upgrade.. they usually do a 70% discount and probably they will do just 50% I think for the first year or so ? If that is the case I won't upgrade until the maxgrade upgrading price gets discounted a lot.

[SLiC]

Its even worse when (like me) you have many of the products as separate purchase. I have ST4, A5, Synthtronic, T Racks etc, no sensible upgrade route other than to see almost everything separately and just keep one to upgrade on (and I simply cant be arsed to do that). My upgrade is 500E + VAT (600E) just to add the Mondo stuff, the Organ (don't want), Arc (don't want) and Mixbox!

Edit- I put it in my basket to see if ay further discount was applied and it did apply a 100E discount, so it works about around 500E inc VAT for for Racks, Mondo Bass and Drum and Arc. So no real saving for me.

[Lairyboy]

They may have updated the discount. I have max 2 and when I put 3 in my cart it knocked $200 from the price bringing it to $299. Still pretty expensive unless you were going to (belatedly) drop on Amplitube 5 max or at least a couple of the other missing bits of software anyway.

[DarkS474]

They may have updated the discount. I have max 2 and when I put 3 in my cart it knocked $200 from the price bringing it to $299. Still pretty expensive unless you were going to (belatedly) drop on Amplitube 5 max or at least a couple of the other missing bits of software anyway.

Yes now they engaged a $200 or 200 Euros promo code automatically for owners of Total Studio 2 MAX.
However you can't use JamPoints to lower the price more this way. It won't let you.
And it still is too expensive.
If the upgrade price was between $130 and $200 and it let you use JamPoints to get a lower price then I might have considered upgrading right now. But that is not the case so I will skip it until they will do a 80% or 90% discount.

[SLiC]

If you have all the individual software in Total Studio 2 MAX (or even more stuff, its an old heavily discounted product) you still only get 100E off! I guess they cant please everyone, but I wish IK (and others) would all do what Kilohearts did and generate an automatic upgrade price based on what you actually own.