In June 2018 we ran a poll asking the Production Expert Community three important questions about your plug-in libraries:
- Without Looking, Guess How Many Audio Plug-ins Are On Your Computer?
- How Many Audio Plug-ins Are Actually On Your Computer?
- How Many Audio Plug-ins Do You Regularly Use In Your Mixes?
Read the original post: Audio Plug-ins - Are You A Producer Or A Collector? Take Our Quick Test Now To Reveal Who You Are
The results are in:
How Many Plug-ins Do You Think You Have On Your Computer?
How Many Plug-ins Are Actually On Your Computer?
How Many Audio Plug-ins Do You Regularly Use In Your Mixes?
The results from this poll suggest a couple of things:
The Majority Of Us Have No Idea How Many Plug-ins We Have On Our Computers
Let's start by analysing the results from the second poll How Many Plug-ins Are Actually On Your Computer? The top result tells us that over 29% of the Production Expert Community has over 300 plug-ins on their systems. That's a pretty sizable plug-in collection by anyone's standards but it appears the vast majority of the voters had no idea that their plug-in collection had grown so big.
If we look at results from the first poll How Many Plug-ins Do You Think You Have On Your Computer? and add up all the results from the options under the 300 plug-in count we get a very different result. The combined percentage of voters who guessed their plug-in count to be under 300 comes to 83%. This suggests that the majority of us are blissfully unaware of how many plug-ins we actually have on our computers.
Proof - We Don't Need More Than 50 Plug-ins
Now that we have established that the first two polls suggest that many of us don't know how many plug-ins we've collected over the years let's now turn our attention to the third poll How Many Audio Plug-ins Do You Regularly Use In Your Mixes?
70%, is a significant majority of the Production Expert community that voted, state that they only use between 10-50 plug-ins regularly in their workflows but the results from How Many Plug-ins Are Actually On Your Computer? tell us that 89% of the voters have between 50 - 300+ plug-ins on their computers. So why then, if the vast majority of us who believe we only need a humble collection of 10-50 plug-ins have huge plug-ins libraries collecting binary dust?
We could speculate and try to draw more conclusions from these results, instead, let's discuss these results in the comments below as a community. How do you interpret these results?
Why do many of us collect so many plug-ins over the years when in reality we only ever need a select few?