What were the most popular vst instruments 2000 - 2008?

[CrystalWizard]

Are you thinking of Spectrasonics' Atmosphere? That was a definitely a nice rompler for trance pads (and many other genres).

I didn't use it until years later (as Omnisphere. i suppose iy was "just" a rompler back then?

Yeah, Atmosphere was just a rompler, but they included the entire sample library in Omnisphere, which opened it up to all of Omni's synthesis power.

no doubt a good combination, works for me.

[noiseboyuk]

It was just a hobby back then for me until the end of that time frame, so I had a lot of freebies. Computer Music magazine was a joy. Kore Player was great, had some fantastic sounds in it with CM expansions (and was functionally far better than Komplete Kontrol is today). CM Zebra was a real goodie. Even back then you could go a long way with free - now it's crazy how much good free stuff is around.

[osiris]

It wasn't Atmosphere. I keep remembering something called Eve. Found it :
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/wusik-eve-v5-by-wusik
It didn't look anything like that back in the day. LOVED Kore Player. I think it morphed into Guitar Rig. Toxic should be in here but I think that was released in 2005.

[masterhiggins]

Ultra Analog (which has almost the same dsp code as it did 20 years ago).
Tassman
Reaktor 3
Bitheadz unity and retro
Gigasampler
EmulatorX
I remember bomb factory plugins being huge on TDM systems.
Waves renaissance was friggin’ massive when it came out. The reverb was one of the best at the time.

It’s a shame how many great plugins we lost because if piss poor business management.

[briefcasemanx]

The new Korg Microkorg plugin is an exact copy of hardware that was incredibly popular back then (Korg MicroKorg and MS2000 which both had the same sound engine).

[osiris]

I found a Microkorg in a pawn shop for $200. LOVED the vocoder on it. Bomb Factory was huge, then there was GRM(?) Tools. Some of the Pluggo stuff was insanely brilliant. Gigasampler rings a bell. It was YellowTools that had Independence. There was also something called GalaxyX or GalacticX that was great. ZynaddsubFX(?), SyncModular(talent migrated to NI). I also remember a company putting out an Alpha Juno and got into trouble, I think because the UI because AJ is a pretty basic synth. I've been trying to remember a sampler with a white GUI that could load DX7 .syx files. I think the name started with an S and Google is useless. It sounded great but was pretty buggy. Dev was abandoned.

[vurt]

I found a Microkorg in a pawn shop for $200. LOVED the vocoder on it. Bomb Factory was huge, then there was GRM(?) Tools. Some of the Pluggo stuff was insanely brilliant. Gigasampler rings a bell. It was YellowTools that had Independence. There was also something called GalaxyX or GalacticX that was great. ZynaddsubFX(?), SyncModular(talent migrated to NI). I also remember a company putting out an Alpha Juno and got into trouble, I think because the UI because AJ is a pretty basic synth. I've been trying to remember a sampler with a white GUI that could load DX7 .syx files. I think the name started with an S and Google is useless. It sounded great but was pretty buggy. Dev was abandoned.

short circuit?

i think the surge team are looking at it?

[Ah_Dziz]

The first 3 gforce synths, vstation, and the first wave of NI stuff. That's mostly what I was using to make all types of stuff. Seems like it was around 2003 before I could really lean on plugins though so I was using my nords, a bass station and an an1x along with a couple samplers for most things.

[osiris]

Remembered it last night. I think it was called Speedsoft VSampler. How I remember it, they came out first version very buggy. Second release was better, but it was still a 50/50 chance the DX .syx would load properly, then NI came out with FM7 and it was game over.