If You can only keep Four VST Synths You have. Which Ones ?

VST, AU, AAX, CLAP, etc. Plugin Virtual Instruments Discussion
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_leras wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 2:22 am
Teksonik wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 1:21 am One of my biggest regrets is that you punked out meeting me in Vegas because I'd love to see you talk to my face like that you little princess. :lol:
Chill out Princess ;-). Aren't you talking about how a UI looks?
Oh we hear from another non-player character. Stay out of it junior. Bones and I have been at each over for two and a half decades. It's not likely to stop until one of us passes away.

Yes I was talking about how a UI looks. Someone called PolyAna the ugliest UI and I posted a screenshot showing that when properly skinned it can be attractive. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now I'll leave you to the one millionth edition of "what's your favorite" whatever plugin since some people seem to have a pathological need to know what other people like.

Such threads are just argument incubators. Someone says "I like XYZ synth", someone else responds "Why, XYZ synth sucks" and off it goes......... :wheee:
None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Tj Shredder wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:48 am
SMH wrote: Wed May 20, 2026 1:52 am I asked AQ Mike he said I can tell you-

'I barely make enough to pay for the website and have to take other work to survive. The Admiralty has grossed only about $90 so far this year and we haven't sold a single Stunning Phaser since the 1.0 update came out 2 months ago. The latest Russian cracks that were just updated a couple weeks ago have been driving lots of traffic to the site, but of course none of them are buying. (I should turn the ads back on.) Enjoy your malware! '

:(
Tell him half the price will more than double the sales. If its that little as quoted, the $89 is just way way too much… Its a non supported 20 year old software. If he even doesn’t have a friend with an actual Mac, its a hobby project anyway… For a 20 year old hobby project to tell its worth $179 is just a joke…
Mikes customer support is incredible!! He replys usually in a few minutes!

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I made an error
Last edited by Aloysius on Thu May 21, 2026 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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Serum 2
Omnisphere 3
Zebra 3
Refx Nexus 5

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NI Kontakt
Roland Zenology Pro
Roland XV-5080
Dreamtonics Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

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SMH wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 1:56 pm
Tj Shredder wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:48 am
SMH wrote: Wed May 20, 2026 1:52 am I asked AQ Mike he said I can tell you-

'I barely make enough to pay for the website and have to take other work to survive. The Admiralty has grossed only about $90 so far this year and we haven't sold a single Stunning Phaser since the 1.0 update came out 2 months ago. The latest Russian cracks that were just updated a couple weeks ago have been driving lots of traffic to the site, but of course none of them are buying. (I should turn the ads back on.) Enjoy your malware! '

:(
Tell him half the price will more than double the sales. If its that little as quoted, the $89 is just way way too much… Its a non supported 20 year old software. If he even doesn’t have a friend with an actual Mac, its a hobby project anyway… For a 20 year old hobby project to tell its worth $179 is just a joke…
Mikes customer support is incredible!! He replys usually in a few minutes!
Mike says : ' Tell him double nothing is nothing and it's the pirates that made it a "hobby", I spent a year of 70 hour weeks getting Poly-Ana just to version 1.0, not to mention the 36 updates it's had since. It's up to date, 100% bug-free, no products are better supported and nobody supports their customers better. But for some reason these people think they have a right to steal from me because I'm a little guy and not a big corporation, which I've never been able to understand. I treated my customers the way I wanted software companies to treat me, and this is the thanks I get!
'

:(

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_leras wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 2:18 am Massive X
Strobe 2

Reakor, but if that's a cheat two of the following?

Serum 2, diva, phosycon, Uad opal
Agreed on Phoscyon, they absolutely nailed it with version 2, sounds fantastic.

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Synth1
WaveOSC
FilterscapeVA
UA Opal
FL Studio 25 | AudioThing JULY - Deimos - U-he Filterscape - NI Kontour - Softube Model 80 - LUSH-2 - UAD Opal - WaveOSC

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SMH wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 2:26 pm
SMH wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 1:56 pm
Tj Shredder wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 4:48 am
SMH wrote: Wed May 20, 2026 1:52 am I asked AQ Mike he said I can tell you-

'I barely make enough to pay for the website and have to take other work to survive. The Admiralty has grossed only about $90 so far this year and we haven't sold a single Stunning Phaser since the 1.0 update came out 2 months ago. The latest Russian cracks that were just updated a couple weeks ago have been driving lots of traffic to the site, but of course none of them are buying. (I should turn the ads back on.) Enjoy your malware! '

:(
Tell him half the price will more than double the sales. If its that little as quoted, the $89 is just way way too much… Its a non supported 20 year old software. If he even doesn’t have a friend with an actual Mac, its a hobby project anyway… For a 20 year old hobby project to tell its worth $179 is just a joke…
Mikes customer support is incredible!! He replys usually in a few minutes!
Mike says : ' Tell him double nothing is nothing and it's the pirates that made it a "hobby", I spent a year of 70 hour weeks getting Poly-Ana just to version 1.0, not to mention the 36 updates it's had since. It's up to date, 100% bug-free, no products are better supported and nobody supports their customers better. But for some reason these people think they have a right to steal from me because I'm a little guy and not a big corporation, which I've never been able to understand. I treated my customers the way I wanted software companies to treat me, and this is the thanks I get!
'

:(
It has nothing to do with Piracy.
The market is oversaturated so people vote with their wallet and most musicians have more than they need in their setup now.

Why buy something just to buy it when you discover that you already have those sounds covered in another plugin.

The competition and constant sales that are as low as $20 to $50 for many Vst Synthesizers on the market now is what most people are aiming for in todays economy and overcrowded market.

I see similar trend in the Used Hardware Synth market where people show very little interest unless you price your products dirt cheap and you can't blame it on Piracy there.

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Mostly it just reminds me that developers can sometimes be terrible at marketing and GUIs.

I’ve never thought about buying PolyAna because it looks like ass, it’s frequently brought up as the final blow, as an exemplary example of why skeuomorphism is not a logical way to present controls on computers. They’ve been around for 20 years now with three products, the website is near unreadable with the ads, and it really seems like they might go out of business tomorrow.

He can change all this pretty quickly, but he’s too busy worrying about cracked versions to think about how to present his product in the first place. It looks like downloading his plugins will instal malware with how flooded he made his site with ads. If he didn’t get any sales before, he’s certainly not getting any now.

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I wouldn’t really argue with Mike from AQ, he’s got a long history of being a contrarian figure and used to argue on KVR all the time until he got banned. Very little of what he said in that response is true. It’s not piracy that has made it into a hobby, it’s a competitive market and many competing synths have done tremendously better even in just the VA subcategory of synths both before and after Poly-Ana. Many of which have also been subject to piracy, and from both big and small companies. Poly-Ana is not the most bug free and well supported synth of all time (lol), many developers support their products well. Etc etc. Mike argues a lot, I would just leave him on the island he has chosen to make for himself and not engage.

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BONES wrote: Sun May 17, 2026 10:43 pm
OzoneJunkie wrote: Sun May 17, 2026 1:45 amReveal Sound Spire (don't like the editing but the presets are nice)
Really? I don't mind patching Spire at all. It's well laid out, everything is easy enough to access and you can see plenty of what's going on from the front panel. It's not as good as DS-Thorn in that regard but it's better than synths like Dune or Hive, with those annoying "screen" panels in the middle.
Yeah, that's true - and to be more specific, the editing itself is easy enough. I just prefer having more visual feedback like we get from Serum and Vital. And sure that's not necessary, but I do prefer those 2 over Spire in that regard.

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Vital doesn't feel like a music instrument to me at all, it's more like some piece of analytical software or something. Spire looks like a synth.
NOVAkILL : Legion GO, AMD Z1x, 16GB RAM, Win11 | Audient EVO 8 | Lumi Keys | Studio Pro 8
Korg Odyssey, bx-oberhausen, Proxima, PolyMax, GR8, JP6K, Union, Atomika,
Invader 2, Flow Motion, Olga, TRK 01, Thorn, Spire, VG Iron

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BONES wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 11:30 pm Vital doesn't feel like a music instrument to me at all, it's more like some piece of analytical software or something. Spire looks like a synth.
That's a pretty crazy comment there Mr Bones...

Everybody is entitled to their point of view,but that doesn't make them right :wink:

I think Vital has one of the best GUI's of any soft synth on the planet...

Everything is laid out logically and the visual feedback makes it a pleasure to drive :tu:
No auto tune...

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Personally I find Vital to be the most pleasing to my eyes, and how I want to work with a synth. I've changed the skin to the attached image, and if I was picking only one synth to keep, that would be it. I don't like the feeling I get about it maybe being abandoned, but at the same time the synth works well for me, without issues.
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