There are too many plugins on my hard drive.

[LeVzi]

This is why I buy bigger hard drives ...

[Bulbizarre]

Be careful with the Arturia plugins, they install millions of little pictures for all formats. I can't even install the whole collection, it smokes my remaining SSD space. When I removed most of them emptying the bin it took 10 minutes or something. Lol.

[keys_au1]

It's so hard to delete them though

[MrJubbly]

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.

Wow! Is Windows really that quick to install now? I'm guessing you are using Windows 10? I've been using the same old Windows 7 device for around a decade now, although I have replaced much of the hardware in that time, including cloning my old failing HDD over to a fast SSD in the interim.

But 10-15 minutes for a fresh install of Windows 10? Still sounds pretty impressive to me.

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 am dreading the inevitable day I will need to migrate everything over to a new device with a new OS. Just keeping track of how many plugins I will need to first deactivate from my current device before reinstalling will be a pain.

However, I was conscious when purchasing my products to avoid any that use iLok and I backed out of several 'would-be' purchases at the checkout stage after double-checking the specs and discovering they would require iLok. Damn, I hate that antiquated draconian DRM system. I've had a nightmare removing it previously while trying out some so-called 'freebie' plugins, which in my experience were not worth having (even for 'free) because of the imposition of having to install and use iLok.

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.

Interesting to hear that perspective on Native Instrument's DRM (Native Access), as I'd heard other users claim it caused them similar issues to iLok. I've stayed away from NI's products due to that. Since I also had frustration with Arturia's 'ASC' DRM system myself.

Although, my main gripe with Arturia's DRM is how it always opens up in the background whenever you load and use one of 'already activated' plugins in a DAW (which seems overkill to me). I wouldn't mind, but this causes a very noticeable delay for the load times of Arturia's plugins on my (admittedly older Win 7 system).

However, I still blame the DRM for that performance access delay, as none of my other plugins are effected with similar slow load times. As such, I have even uninstalled both my Arturia V Collections (v7 and v8 - both slow loading on Windows 7) and also Pigments 3. I just got too sick of waiting for them to load in my projects, I'll probably eventually sell them on, purely because of the 'ASC' DRM, which sucks!

[MrJubbly]

Be careful with the Arturia plugins, they install millions of little pictures for all formats. I can't even install the whole collection, it smokes my remaining SSD space. When I removed most of them emptying the bin it took 10 minutes or something. Lol.

Yo, for real! I own Pigments and V Collections v8 and v7. The ASC installation process is hella long, since it is an online installer (downloading all content from their servers). Bloated up my system big time. And I even have a quick SSD and 5G internet. Still takes too long, imho.

But the main issue I had with the ASC is how it's constantly opening up in the background (as a DRM protection) whenever using Arturia plugins in my DAW, which really slows down the load access times of those plugins 'instantiating' within my DAW on my (admittedly ancient Windows 7 device). As the plugin communicated and authorises back and forth with that damn ASC!

When I compare the performance (on that same device) of Arturia's stuff with other synths I have like several from U-He, Kilohearts, and also Dune 3, Spire, sylenth1, Synthmaster, PianoTeq, etc... Arturia always feels slow and sluggish in comparison. Perhaps, it's not so noticeable on a modern high-spec device. But it really frustrates me.

Also, I'm not the biggest fan of the skeuomorphic bitmap designs of their user interfaces. But all power to anyone who does like them. I much prefer my other synths instead, which I will stick with.

[xoxos]

But 10-15 minutes for a fresh install of Windows 10? Still sounds pretty impressive to me.

i bought a win 10 machine in march to replace my defunct xp boxes, it's taken me all year to do anything with it, after i got it set up i had to do it again because national instruments multisim install totally screws up everything it can,

but win 10 set up was good experience, instant option to shut up the speech interaction, fast, looks nice and tidy, behaves like i want instead of insisting on giving me movie reviews like i thought it would from my experiences with someone else's install.

i paid $210 for .. i think it's the asus L210... haha "L".. benchmarks a couple dozen times faster than what i was using. and runs all my old XP/win32 software including host and plugs.

surprisingly much nicer than it could have been.