Worst purchase

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I ended up buying three delay plugins near the end of last year, because I never thought I'd see any of them for the price I wanted to pay. But if I knew I'd be able to find the third one, I probably wouldn't have bought the first two. And then Soundtoys gave away Little Echoboy, and QDelay was released. So now I have way too many delay plugins. The upside is that they're all great, though!

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DCrown wrote: Mon Jan 26, 2026 9:54 pm all Softube plugins were disappointing to me, couldn't find any use, always had better options, especially their guitar plugins are horrible, and I still don't know why I bought Tone2 synths, luckily could re-sell.
I don't mind their transient shaper, honestly. It works well, I compared it to NI Transient Master (which I like because it's set and forget) and I can get similar results.

But yeah, their stuff is overpriced really.

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Resing
Intel Core i7 8700K, 16gb, Windows 10 Pro, Focusrite Scarlet 6i6

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Dual Chambers by Softube. Have spent 3 months trying to download and install. Fails every time ...

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Bluecat Spinal Vibe - which I made the mistake of purchasing without demoing first - it's a (up to three 3-band) rotary speaker emu - without the speaker (&also the amp) emu though... :dog: :lol:

Dev says we simply can add a speaker emu of our choice in front of it. :dog: :shock: :lol:

Great dev - unless it comes to modelling acoustic phenomena. :hihi:

I tried to come up with ways to make any kind of use of the thing but completely failed. It just sounds bad (and in a bad way :lol:) & wrong to me. I think even the decades old MDA Leslie would probably mop my studio floor with it if need be.

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morelia wrote: Tue Jan 27, 2026 12:40 amResing
already?...interesting...curious to hear why
Music had a one night stand with sound design.....And the condom broke

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All Acustica Audio especially Nebula. I am not going to get into it. Shitty company, shitty leadership and shitty products. Avoid.

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Id say mostly Izotope stuff. They rarely add features to point versions, and instead just update to new versions. I still use RX a lot for work but have phased out everything else from them. The pricing structure from Waves doesn't bother me as I have been using some of their plugins for close to 20 years and they still work at a very minimal cost.

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ik multimedia (no one would buy at any price after i sorted it out, total waste of money), acustica audio (managed to sell at least everything, including all nebula things and libs), boz, SKnote, wuzik (test was free but got spammed for years), gBsound (dev disappeared into obscurity), Baby Audio (nothing really wrong with them but were never the first choice here for anything and the plugins are no longer installed)
Last edited by UltraByte on Tue Jan 27, 2026 10:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Decisions create art. Options create anxiety.

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MattLeschuck wrote: Tue Jan 27, 2026 3:51 am Id say mostly Izotope stuff. They rarely add features to point versions, and instead just update to new versions. I still use RX a lot for work but have phased out everything else from them. The pricing structure from Waves doesn't bother me as I have been using some of their plugins for close to 20 years and they still work at a very minimal cost.
I was going to say iZotope too...when I had RX Essentials or whatever, the plugins had so much latency Logic couldn't handle it, and everything drifted out of time. They took the Exponential Audio reverbs - which IMO were not gorgeous looking, but functional UI-wise - and ditched the realtime display, made the fonts smaller (Stratus/Symphony) or left out a few key controls like Width on Neutron...Axing Iris, that kind of stuff.

Sucks because pre-sellout iZotope, was a creative band of MIT Media Lab hackers.

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Tracktion Collective 2.0.
Appealed by the fact I could have an average and powered rompler on Linux.
I found it quite unstable and crash-prone, and support is mostly non existant.
The sound quality is below average.
Unfiltered audio seemed interesting, Byome especially, but I found a couple of things I couldn't do with it, and the answer I got from support was not so great (they could have implemented it, but they didn't even manifest any intention).

EDIT: some AiR stuff (from Drum Synth 500 and later) I bought on aggressive offers. Never used them...
Last edited by mabian on Tue Jan 27, 2026 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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after 3 decades, it's a very easy answer :

every RE for Reason and Reason itself, it was a waste of money and time only driven by appealing fancy UI that just hide a very weak dev strategies, a very poor customer experience and certainly the most agressive and sectarian users comunauty I ever experienced.

aside that, every penny I put in korg gadget (great product), Ableton LIve (great product, good user comunauty), UAD (great product, great users comunauty and amazing customer experience) and NI (unbelievable content for the price) are a great investment.
Win 11, UAD Octo satellite usb, Yamaha AG06 mk2, IK multimedia iLoud MTM x2, Ableton Live 12, Push 2, Reason 12, NI Komplete.

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dreamvoid wrote: Mon Jan 26, 2026 7:26 pm Vengance "Avenger" VSTi, because they changed the copy protection scheme afterwards in a way that only hobbiest can adore.
+1. Also because of the selfish attitude of msvs on this forum.

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bermudagold wrote: Tue Jan 27, 2026 3:03 am
morelia wrote: Tue Jan 27, 2026 12:40 amResing
already?...interesting...curious to hear why
I have not used it successfully since preorder. Standalone and plugin both fail to work or crash.
Intel Core i7 8700K, 16gb, Windows 10 Pro, Focusrite Scarlet 6i6

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Acustica plugins is an obvious choice here, but I did get some use out of them back in the day. Same for Waves, so not a total loss.

One plugin I really had high hopes for but was ultra disappointed in is Fog Convolver. It looks so perfect - modern interface, all the params you'd want and expect, 2 convolutions per patch - but theres's something about using it I just can't stand. It's clunky AF. Used it maybe three times and gave up.

Also the 5 or 6 drum machines I've bought over the years. Starting with NI Macshine and ending with Triaz. Triaz is SO good, but it was the final straw to realize that I'm just not a drum machine guy. I find it way easier to just program midi or samples directly in the DAW's arranger.

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