Auditing new plugins for fun - terrible experience in general (usability, compatibility, buggy)

[yul]

I was looking for a recent, modern take on digital VA's to replace older ones I felt I liked and to test out the latest and greatest.

At first glance, it seems to me there is an overload of wavetable and vintage emulations. Nothing against it but what about plain old digital subtractive? This seems overlooked while Korg is still selling their Microkorg like donuts.

Anyhow, downloading is terrible. Such big huge downloads it's insane (and highly suspicious may I add). Why so many hundreds of megs for one sofsynth?

I also get the copy protection requirements but some of the software managers and cloud managers are so insanely bloated it's really mind numbing.

Now, installers!! What a nightmare!! Who today will install resources in an admin protected zone without giving the ability to select a user account instead? The pluging won't work if you are not admin (I am not admin for security reasons). So many plugins I tried I could not use unless I was admin. This is really bad. Some do however allow to manuall change the resource folder but it's really tedious.

Now, get to the action. The GUI's...how terrible in general. Really. My biggest complaint is ...why do you still need to hold shift or ctrl for fine tuning. Why isn't just the right click set up for this? Noo! Right click is for options I will never use. Many of the GUIs are now set up for big screens. Very few for the laptop user !

Now the uninstall. What a train wreck! Some won't even uninstall at all, or don't provide uninstall procedure or have no uninstallers!

I will leave this here, hopefully developers will notice.

Right now I have only a limited number of plugins that I can actually use as a musician composer...too bad.

[acYm]

I'd suggest to get a modern mouse, you can either use the extra buttons to put shift and ctrl under your thumb, or just use an extra button to make a shift+click macro, that solves that problem.

[chk071]

No offense, but, what kind of generalized nonsense is this? Every plugin behaves differently... some will install the ressource files in the plugin folder, some will prompt you for a installation location, and many install the resource files in the installing user's folder. There isn't the one way modern plugins will behave... and they aren't any worse than they used to be either in that regard.

Seriously, either name the plugins you mean, or don't start such a generalized rant thread. Complete nonsense.

[Teksonik]

Yet there are thousands of us who happily use those very same plugins every day.

Nothing is perfect you just need to learn to appreciate things for what they are.....

what about plain old digital subtractive? This seems overlooked

The market is bloated with subtractive synthesis. Not sure what you mean by "digital subtractive".

The thing I find odd is that you've been a member here since 2002 but your post reads like something a newbie would write. Very strange.

[psynical]

wow.
> why aren't developers designing plugins for meeeeeeeeeeee?

sounds to me like you really need to just give up using modern technology if these are your complaints.

[yul]

I'd suggest to get a modern mouse, you can either use the extra buttons to put shift and ctrl under your thumb, or just use an extra button to make a shift+click macro, that solves that problem.

Thanks for the only meaningful response!

Everyone else is really nasty. Actually I don't want a response.

This is feedback for developpers in general.

I just think at the time spent fine tuning my ITB setup vs actual musical output, sometimes it's just too much heavy lifting.

[Teksonik]

Nasty posts tend to generate "nasty" responses.

Like I said you've been a member since 2002 and you act like everything is new to you. I just find that strange.

Installers, license managers, and downloads more than a few megabytes are nothing new. We've all been dealing with them for years.

Anyway I doubt very much developers asked your feedback so you might as well just learn to live with things the way they are....just like the rest of us.....

[BONES]

It would be interesting to know which plugins in particular because I must have more than a hundred installed on my machine and I've never really had any of the issues you mention.

I don't understand why you wouldn't be the Admin on your own computer, you still need to give permission for things to install.

I always get to choose installation paths and I don't install anything in the default locations.

I work on a laptop and I don't have too many serious issues with GUIs. Many today are resizable, certainly all my most used plugins.

I like holding SHIFT for fine-tuning. It's been around for so long it's just second nature now. Right-click would be annoying and it would come at the expense of handy menus for important things like MIDI Learn and modulation assignment.

If you want a good, modern V/A, try Thorn. The download isn't too big, the GUI is resizable and it sounds amazing.

[yul]

Thanks. I am not admin because of security risks. I do howerver run installers as admin when needed. Some plugins do not offer the option to install their resources outside of c:/users/admin.

I don't want to throw anyone under the bus but (all great plugins really) from the top of my head:

Fxpansion Cypher 2...can't uninstall whatsoever. GUI refresh a bit slow, hard to use
Rob Papen Predator 2 - cannot resize GUI
Hive..don't see it in my install list
Dune 3..can't uninstall. It's stuck in my list.
Synthmaster...crashed upon loading. Unusable. Possible user access issues who knows
Discovery Pro...admin folder issues. Unusable.
Roland Cloud..thanks but no thanks
ANA2 ..789Megs? Really? I didn't bother at that point.
Waves elements 2: Where was the plugin even installed? What's the path? Very hard to figure out.
Synth1 64 bit ..it crashes. Can you believe it??
PPG Apps: before it got sold.. couldn't get the resources other than user admin folder.
+ a few others I coulnd't get the correct user folder and couldn't even load the plug.

Viper was actually quite straightforward but some of the features were a bit redundant for me.

I am leaving aside others where only the right click/fine tuning issues bothered me as the mostly worked well otherwise.

Plugs that I own that are great but hard to use:

V-Station : a bit unstable, few quirks drives me nuts (Where's Supernova..really? what a waste)
Tera 3: great stuff but abandonware I know..

Plugs that I use that DO work quite well under most circumstances:

M1, Wavestation 2.0
Reaktor stuff (Razor etc)
FM8
Tranzistow (lockrefresh option)
New K1 plugin
K3 experimental plugin
Hybrid 3 + Xpand2 (click+shift required but I get by..)
XHIP (this is actually nearly flawless)
mostly other free plugs


There are possibly more on the list above. Just from the top of my head.

[Teksonik]

Rob Papen Predator 2 - cannot resize GUI

Predator 2 has two GUI sizes.

Hive..don't see it in my install list

I've had it installed on at least four different systems and in five different DAWs. No problem with installation at all.

Dune 3..can't uninstall. It's stuck in my list.

You can uninstall it from within the Apps list like all other Apps:

D3 071420-1.png

ANA2 ..789Megs? Really? I didn't bother at that point.

ANA 2 contains samples and the installer contains both the Mac and PC versions. 789 Megs is nothing in 2020.

Synth1 64 bit ..it crashes. Can you believe it??

No I can't. In the nearly 20 years I've been using Synth 1 I don't remember it ever crashing on me on at least a dozen systems from WinXP to Win 10.

[yellowmix]

Reaktor... If you think Native Access isn't "bloated" and works perfectly, there are many others that do. What people are finding disagreeable is these are individual technical issues and preferences that can largely be resolved directly with the respective developer's tech support options. They're not widespread issues, but they are presented as an industry-wide problem.

Having named the plugins that are posing issues for you, this post isn't providing much value to other people. The resolution remains the same: contact the respective tech support.

If you wanted to complain about plugin subscriptions, that wasn't in the original rant. And again, that provides no value to anyone. People are either okay with it or not and it's a personal decision. If you want to talk about subscriptions as a broad industry issue, then there are existing threads about that.

Some of the criteria are arbitrary. What is your exact cutoff for "too big" if 789MB is unreasonable? Reaktor is about 800 MB, you just might not notice it when Native Access is downloading it. If a plugin uses samples or wavetables the installer can get large, it's the nature of the data. If you're on a metered connection then I can understand, but for many people it simply is not an issue. If you're out of hard drive space, the solution is to buy more space.

[k2006]

Hive and other U-he synths don't use uninstaller.just delete the folder.

[Urs]

Hive..don't see it in my install list

What does that mean? (I'm not a Win developer)

I hope people don't expect us to register our software with an operating system that isn't aware of the kind of service that our software provides. Because that would defy the easy uninstallation process as described in the user guide. To take the argument further, a lot of the support required on macOS are specifically due to system awareness of the AU plug-in format and thus we think it may be counter productive to have such a requirement.

Speaking from my experience, the rise in software size over the past 20 years is probably due to

- larger UI assets due to scalable or simply higher resolution user interfaces
- adding 64 bit versions which have larger binary footprint
- adding further services such as preset database management which came with significant code additions
- larger assets also in better, more thorough documentation
- can't remember synths having 2000-3000 presets in the year 2000

Yet, Hive particularly, should be considered small with its 60MB for the Win version, simply also because we worked around 200MB worth of wavetable content by developing our own wavetable description language (.uhm) which means 1 kB of text file instead of 2MB of .wav file for most large wavetables. We furthermore made wavetable dependencies extremely robust so we don't need to embed them in presets. If a plug-in needs to embed wavetable data in presets (e.g. because, errrrm, editors...), you get a lot of bloat.

As for the installation procedure, we made our Windows installer very determined to install into your user location. Support incidents have decreased dramatically since we introduced strict policies. SO I guess that's aligned positively with your criticism. But of course our installer still needs to access the Vstplugins directory, and that can be wherever someone put it.

That said, uninstallers and optional download managers are frequent requests, but we could not yet spare a developer for several months to work on this. These are non-trivial tasks since most if not all pre-fab solutions are designed for applications, not VST plug-ins.

Lastly, yeah, guilty of shift-drag for fine control. Haven't worked out the ultimate remedy. But that's not really anything that happened lately, it's always been a problem.

[AnX]

looks to me like the OP doesn't know how to use a computer

[yul]

Many thanks for your kind response Urs. Your company is truly top notch and revolutionary. I was hoping to not have to go into details as my comments were meant to be general.

I do know your stuff to be very clean as I have ran a few demos over time but I am puzzled by what files get copied and where as I do stumble on some U-He folders here and there after uninstalling your demos. I understand now that Windows isn't your primary platform so that makes sense. I will look at the manual next time

Hoping that the right click+shift would become an option eventually as it would bring it quite close to an actual hardware synth never having to touch the keyboard for inspiration. In the meanwhile I have set up a middle button macro on my mouse which does the job.

All the best and to your continued success with U-He.