Working with thousands of end users, their devices as well as the devices I directly have to touch daily means I want nothing to do with touching a computer for my one hobby. Modelers barely make that cut as it is
what’s the benefit of all being inside one window? I can’t think of any that do this that are remotely enjoyable to use.
Everyone has a different workflow. I’d love “rack” my channel plugins Reason-style so when I click the inserts button everything is lined up right there. No rearranging independent windows, no randomly floating in front or behind stuff when something new is added. If I had all my tools in a vertical scroll where all the controls were accessible without clicking into a window that would make MY life easier since all of these tools interact with each other in a mix.
Well your perspective makes me think "okay... so what is software failing at, that this guy hasn't kept up with the advances in the last 20 years?" because genuinely - your NDSP plugins, your Fractal Icons, your Line6 Natives.. they're really not any different than the related hardware solution, as long as you have a decent-ish computer and soundcard, you can get amazing sounds straight into a DAW these days.Technically my opinion does still stand because I haven’t used one since, haha.
Which begs the question: why am I bothering to post in this thread if I haven’t used a plugin in 10 years?
And I have no good answer for that
I guess I should just see myself out
You’d need literally all of your favourite plugins to be within some idealised plugin. And supposing there’s anything 3rd party, then that internal rack style routing turns into a horrible mess. With plugins being the way they are, I’d imagine a large % of people will probably want to add a Valhalla Reverb, or Eventide Modulation, or some Soundtoys effect rather than settle for a constrained version. Being stuck within one brands ecosystem for all my processing doesn’t appeal at all, it kind of goes against what makes plugins so cool in the first place to me.
Sure there is always something else, but if I had all my “channel strip” plugins in one interface where they’re all accessible like a Kontact rack it would be easier FOR ME. Your ideal workflow might not be everyone’s ideal workflow. I’d be putting anything that wasn’t inline routed on a send track anyways. But if it was a one stop shop for eq, compression, smoothing, filtering, etc I would like that. You don’t have to.
Yeah, I totally understand that everyone will have their own take on it. Just trying to understand what the benefit/appeal is and whether I’m missing something obvious with why it appeals to people.
It's funny you mention UA, because I see it the exact opposite. Normally, I avoid many of their plugins because they're so close to the original hardware's experience (even when that experience sucks like how some API knobs are nested and upside down!). For example, I'd much rather see a frequency plot in FabFilter Pro-Q than deal with the lack of meaningful feedback from something like Manley's Massive Passive.
but everything is a tradeoff.
We can joke, but 17 individual plugins IS much nicer and quicker to work with in a DAW than some container with limited versions of those 17 plugins crammed into a clunky UI and all sounding 20% worse than your favourite emulations. The DAW is a container, we don’t need another one inside it.Mirror won’t be happy until everyone agrees that having 17 individual plugs loaded per track is optimal workflow.
Massive Passive with a Fabfilter UI is basically just a Fab Filter EQ though (or if we want to get more finicky, DMG Equilibrium in parallel bands mode). Once you strip away with original layout you lose most of the experience of using the Massive Passive to begin with - that plugin especially depends on having the same layout as the HW. Pulsar did a model of it with a graphical mode, I’m not sure if you’ve tried it, but if you ever do, I am certain you’d just think “well I might as well just use Pro Q if i’m working like this”.
Working with thousands of end users, their devices as well as the devices I directly have to touch daily means I want nothing to do with touching a computer for my one hobby. Modelers barely make that cut as it is
Yeah, if you're used to the real hardware in real studios and are confident in your abilities enough to just use your ears, I totally get the Massive Passive/Pultec/API skeuomorphic approach. But personally, I'd still rather be able to turn on an RTA to see what's actually happening and know what that particular instance is doing to my sound at a glance without having to squint at little dots on little knobs.
