There are too many plugins on my hard drive.

[VitaminD]

And I learned this today while reinstalling everything.

Finally moved over to an SSD, it's rather quick but the installation process is not. Installing Windows took about 10 or 15 minutes tops. However, installing all the applications after the fact has taken over 8 hours and there is still a lot left to install.

I am conscious of not downloading just any plugin and trying to be careful to select only a few necessary tools. But today showed me how much I have blown that plan.

So far I've used 4 or 5 different Product Portal or other brand specific downloaders, plus a bevy of individual installers for the odds and ends. And I'm not done yet. I know of at least 2 more portals from which I need to install and a ton more individual plugins.

The worst part though is software ilok. Because I forgot to deactivate all of my plugins on the old hard drive. Thankfully, I still have that drive intact. But it will require me unplugging all the cables from the PC, pulling the giant, metal box from the desk enclosure, opening the case, and jiggling around drives just to boot into the old drive to deactivate these guys. And then swap drives and put it all back together.

Second worst part is the Steinberg Library Manager. Mostly because it appears to default to installing on the C: drive partition and does not give the user a way to chose otherwise. It downloads onto C:, it installs downloaded apps onto C:, and if you have an issue with the arrangement it says you can go pound sand.

I have a specific drive and drive letter for my Audio Production software and samples. And that specific drive and drive letter is not named "C:\" !!!

Oddly enough (imo) Kudos to the Native Instruments portal 'Native Access' for making it fairly easy to use. It lets one chose the default download and install paths. Then it just works. You click on the app you want, it downloads, it installs, it activates. Easy.

These are my thoughts today. Moving stinks and this feels a lot like moving. The move reminded me just how much bloat happens slowly, quietly over time.

[thecontrolcentre]

The worst part though is software ilok. Because I forgot to deactivate all of my plugins on the old hard drive. Thankfully, I still have that drive intact. But it will require me unplugging all the cables from the PC, pulling the giant, metal box from the desk enclosure, opening the case, and jiggling around drives just to boot into the old drive to deactivate these guys. And then swap drives and put it all back together.

Thanks for that. I only recently installed the soft I-Lok and had no idea you could lose licenses like that. Last time I changed PCs I swore I wouldn't install so many plugins as I had on the previous one. Over 7 years I've added 100s ... it's like an addiction. Good luck kicking that habit

[VitaminD]

I'm glad it was of some benefit to others!

The ilok situation wasn't on my radar until I tried to activate one of these plugins and it said all my activations are in use (on the old PC), and if I needed another I'd have to contact the developer of the plugin to request one. Doing that for a list of plugins seems like more work than just pulling the desktop and deactivating the licenses myself.

I'd say I'd like to scale back my plugin use, but the damage is already done as I'll need what is present if I want to work on past projects (and I do). Other big nightmare are when developers create an entirely new version of a plugin. OnePing1.dll and OnePing2.dll and OnePing3.dll instead of just OnePing.dll and having the features backwards compatible. Bloat!

[OzoneJunkie]

I have a new machine recently and have re-installed everything. I've done this enough times that I usually remember to deactivate the few plugins on my machine that have such a feature. Most of what I own doesn't, though: I lean towards serial number or license file as my first choice of copy protection.

I have 20 folders that contain VSTs (I create a folder per company). But I still feel like this is too much for my tastes. There's some stuff that I will always keep: Serum, Vital, FabFilter. And some of the Native Instruments stuff - some of the sample libraries I have bought.

After that, I find that I keep some soft synths based on the presets themselves, more so than the features they provide. At some point, there's a large amount of redundancy - how many subtractive synths do we actually need? The presets are a reflection of the creativity of the creators, and are often a big difference over what I tend to make myself.

But, I am still considering reducing my overall set. Not just because of the re-install factor, but because I like having less distractions, and there is a optimal count for each of us, and I'm not at mine yet.

[xoxos]

must be some setup!

[VitaminD]

After that, I find that I keep some soft synths based on the presets themselves, more so than the features they provide. At some point, there's a large amount of redundancy - how many subtractive synths do we actually need? The presets are a reflection of the creativity of the creators, and are often a big difference over what I tend to make myself.

But, I am still considering reducing my overall set. Not just because of the re-install factor, but because I like having less distractions, and there is a optimal count for each of us, and I'm not at mine yet.

Yes, I have run into this in the past few years. I have ended up with a few synths that I use primarily for a handful of presets that have become central to projects.

It's far too easy to accumulate. I think I'd like to pair down, but certain companies do certain things better than each other. So I end up with a mishmash of installer managers and products.

[VitaminD]

must be some setup!

I would say it is an ever increasingly convoluted one due to bloat. That said, sound quality is better than it's ever been. Ideas are more fully and easily realized with more advanced tools. Just a pain in the keester to deal with in reinstalling it all.

Windows isn't a friend on this, due to the registry. If it had sidecar files in the installed directory and simply a 'registry' of installed items for a start menu list, it would be SO much easier to maintain. Could make the installations portable even.

That was Microsoft's mistake in creating a registry. I remember about 20 or 25 years ago there were rumors about them pondering ditching the registry system, but I think they got pushback and kept it. To think how less hassle there would be today had they gone through with it!

[Truckerbob]

I'm still very new and mildly worried about the intense urgency I feel to download every free thingamajig that I catch wind of. I tell myself I'll organize them when I get a bit more settled in (probably) Live, but if I'm honest I'm not entirely sure what a bunch of them do. BUT THEY'RE FREE!!

And what if it turns out I need CheeseGraterMegatrax9000 some time down the line and then it's $50, eh, then what?!

[thecontrolcentre]

CheeseGraterMegatrax9000 is one my go-to effects. Don't know how I managed before I got it. Total no-brainer

[jancivil]

I lost a few iLok items from stolen computers. I didn't have much invested, some were freebies, none saw much use.
The only excess here is these free BlueCat ones I like the idea of just in case. I didn't re-up those when I re-established a setup last year.
It took around 8 hrs to get up and running on a new computer 'from scratch', a lot of that time was downloading.

[kritikon]

I feel your pain. This time around (break of a few years) I made a very conscious effort not to get bogged down in loads of s/w. So far I managed to stick to it - Korg Collection, MVocoder, Valhalla, and a convolution plugin with a limited set of IRs that I know I'll use. I did relent recently to get a freebie compressor from TDR but not entirely sure I even need to keep that TBH. And whatever's in Cubase.

I went down the route of h/w for synths instead and there are pros and cons, but this installing shite is definitely one of the pros for h/w IMO. And it's been quite liberating not to have shitloads of choice of umpteen plugins all doing the same thing. And I discovered that actually...most of the Cubase stuff is perfectly useable, doesn't clag up mixes and the constant search for plugin "character and magic dust" is self-defeating and makes mixing harder - simple clean FX that don't get in the way suits me fine nowadays. In fact their multitap delay has become a firm favourite once I made myself use it properly.

Have to say though, that I have to firmly control my GAS for h/w, and it's way more expensive going that route despite the price drops over recent years for analogues. I haven't yet found a h/w synth company that give away freebies, more's the pity.

[pekbro]

I redid my pc about a month ago. Out of, I dunno, a couple thousand plugins, so far, I've installed about 50. It's not procrastination, I just don't even care about re-installing them. They are not cheap plugin's either, fab filter etc. It's quite nice not to have to wade through thousands of plugin's to do stuff that could be done well enough by any of them, really.

[chk071]

I am conscious of not downloading just any plugin and trying to be careful to select only a few necessary tools.

That's what I always do in such a case as well. Over time, it maximizes itself, of course, and stuff will add up. But, I don't have nearly as much stuff as some others installed. Would suck anyway. Already enough stuff I hardly use installed.

The worst part though is software ilok. Because I forgot to deactivate all of my plugins on the old hard drive. Thankfully, I still have that drive intact. But it will require me unplugging all the cables from the PC, pulling the giant, metal box from the desk enclosure, opening the case, and jiggling around drives just to boot into the old drive to deactivate these guys. And then swap drives and put it all back together.

I only use the iLok dongle for that reason.

[FapFilter]

Linux is also worth considering if you want to free yourself from pluginitis.
I did some research lately and i was surprised that from all plugins i own and still use, only a good algorithmic reverb would be missing.
compressors are also a bit underrepresented, but getting Presswerk would fix that.
That would of course mean another purchase i wouldn't need to make on Windows, but the situation is actually still not too bad.

Fun fact though: at least at the moment, Linux would actually offer me more synths from my current arsenal, than M1 native on MacOS.
This might change of course, since it is not too unlikely that some of these get native M1 support in the not so distant future aswell

Out of curiosity though: how well is Linux equipped for low latency ASIO (or equivalent) and how many audio interfaces are supported to run as efficient as on Windows or MacOS?

[audiojunkie]

The worst part though is software ilok. Because I forgot to deactivate all of my plugins on the old hard drive. Thankfully, I still have that drive intact. But it will require me unplugging all the cables from the PC, pulling the giant, metal box from the desk enclosure, opening the case, and jiggling around drives just to boot into the old drive to deactivate these guys. And then swap drives and put it all back together.

Thanks for that. I only recently installed the soft I-Lok and had no idea you could lose licenses like that. Last time I changed PCs I swore I wouldn't install so many plugins as I had on the previous one. Over 7 years I've added 100s ... it's like an addiction. Good luck kicking that habit

I don't have a single piece of software that I use that has this problem. I only purchase software that requires a serial number or a keyfile. There are still plenty of developers out there, whose software is of excellent quality, and doesn't require you as a consumer to jump through hoops. I purchase only from these developers.

When it comes down to it, One only needs the following:

* An easy sampler for simple sample patches (like the kind you would make yourself)
* An advanced sample player for deep sample sets (like the kind you purchase from others)
* An easy drum sampler for quick custom drum kits (like the kind you would make yourself)
* An advanced drum sample player for deep sample sets (like the kind you purchase from others)
* A quality synth for each synthesis type you use (ie FM, Wavetable, subtractive, etc)
* A quality set of effects, covering whatever you may ever need
* A quality host

The above should give you an excellent and varied sound palette that should cover most of what you may ever need.

If it truly came right down to it, one get by completely with just the following: a quality host and a quality sampler.

The beauty of it, is that all three computer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) have sufficient tools to easily cover the above listed basics.

I would suggest starting by getting rid of anything that uses any copy protection other than serial number or keyfile protection. Look into Open Source plugins like Surge, Vital, Dexed, DrumGizmo, Sfizz and Airwindows. Lighten your load to the essentials and not worry about the iLOK nonsense.