Who has the worst plugin manager/install experience?

[VladK]

It is much easier to say what is the best manager. VSL by far IMO. Pretty much each of more than dozen of other managers I have installed has minor or major issues or is missing important features.

[11118]

Unpopular opinion, but Arturia Software Center. Logging in is awfully slow and sometimes straight up doesn't work.

[seangm]

My vote is IK MM, closely followed by Native Access

[mixyguy2]

I forgot Crow Hill, and surprised no one else mentioned.

[jamcat]

Probably because we've never heard of it.

[skarvika]

Melda by a mile. It's bizarre that you have to go through and check plugins you've already installed when installing a new plugin otherwise it automatically uninstalls them.

[jamcat]

Yeah, I forgot about Melda. The entire Melda ecosystem is such a clusterfluff that I uninstalled even the "free" plugins and walked away forever.

[Starbright]

Ok, you all have luxury problems. If really want to know the worst plugin manger/install experience: Steinberg without a dongle - it's hell!
Even ilok can't compare to their crappy license manger. Last time (2 years ago) when I tired to install a demo version of Cubase and a seperate version for a friend, it took me 3 hours to install everything. Nothing beats that!

[whyterabbyt]

I am currently very unimpressed by Native Access. Having had to rebuild a system just over a week ago, I tried to reinstall a small number of what I own, ie the various effects plugins, plus Reaktor. I had NA on this before, I have had no previous problems with these plugins installing.
But now, NA doesnt want to do its job.
It has decided that it will not install some plugins properly, always flagging them as in need of update afterwards, but with nothing actually present on disk. Neither NA's update, or reinstall, or a manual reinstall (from the individual download that NA desperately tries to stop you getting access to) will work. Restarts of NA, full reboots etc, and clearing every last file I can find related to NA changes nothing.
A week later, it did decide it would randomly let me install another couple of them, but not all of them.

[enCiphered]

I am currently very unimpressed by Native Access. Having had to rebuild a system just over a week ago, I tried to reinstall a small number of what I own, ie the various effects plugins, plus Reaktor. I had NA on this before, I have had no previous problems with these plugins installing.
But now, NA doesnt want to do its job.
It has decided that it will not install some plugins properly, always flagging them as in need of update afterwards, but with nothing actually present on disk. Neither NA's update, or reinstall, or a manual reinstall (from the individual download that NA desperately tries to stop you getting access to) will work. Restarts of NA, full reboots etc, and clearing every last file I can find related to NA changes nothing.
A week later, it did decide it would randomly let me install another couple of them, but not all of them.

Yeah, something definitely seems wrong with Native Access. I updated Absynth 6 yesterday and it completely broke. I can’t open it in any project because my DAW can’t locate the plugin anymore. Today I tried to uninstall Absynth to reinstall it, and the uninstallation itself failed halfway through. Really weird.

[Chicken Drummy]

A handful of others have already mentioned them here so my answer isn't all that original but I can confidently say that Waves is by far the worst in my experience.

From the Waves Central app to the annoying Waveshell (WavesHell) to their "voluntary" WUP, I was compelled to move on from their products years ago and I haven't looked back.

Good riddance.

[Awats]

Melda by a mile. It's bizarre that you have to go through and check plugins you've already installed when installing a new plugin otherwise it automatically uninstalls them.

Mine always knows and doesn’t do that. It just updates and installs new ones. You mine want to update your installer.

[mixyguy2]

Probably because we've never heard of it.

Then I'm surprised no one has heard of it.

[CircuitWaves]

I own two licenses to plugins from Roland Cloud that I got to keep after I got a year subscription to their service. I can't even use those plugins anymore because I had to uninstall Roland Cloud. Not only was the UX just confusing as hell, I kept getting SSL errors of all sorts. Every couple of months I try to reinstall it so that I can use those two plugins and every time after a bit I start getting those SSL errors.

My favourite is just the Korg Software Pass because of how stupid simple it is, closely followed by Arturia Software Center which as an only annoyance has that it takes a while to start up and sync stuff. Other than that again stupid simple to use.

[lukeio]

I couldn't agree more on the 'one screen' philosophy.

It feels like too many devs nowadays try to force a whole 'ecosystem' or launcher on you when you just want to use a single tool. Good UX should be invisible—install, done, get to work.