My plugin folder has a lot of plugins in it, and to be frank many of them are gathering dust and remain unused. Some of them were impulse buys, others were needed for a project and never got used again. I don’t think I’m alone, take a look in your plugin folder and I bet at least 10% of the contents are not used anymore.

In this article I want to outline three types of audio plugins I regret buying.

The Complicated Ones

You may have a plugin that sounds amazing and can do everything including make coffee, but if you need a Master’s degree from Caltech to be able to use it then it doesn’t take long before the learning curve outweighs the benefits. When I was younger, milk came in those cardboard cartons. However hard you tried to open the carton with care, the milk went everywhere. The same goes for automatic taps in public bathrooms (washrooms) - they were designed to save water and also perhaps to reduce the transmission of germs. One thing they are not good at is delivering enough water for long enough to wash one’s hands. I could add numerous other things to the list.

I came to the conclusion that whoever invented those things never used them. They couldn’t possibly have. Otherwise they would have decided they were a bad idea.

It seems some plugins are designed by people who can’t possibly mix in the real world. They don’t appreciate that on a good day some of us have around 5 minutes to decide if a plugin is really going to help.

I work with quite a lot of plugin developers, many are my friends. There’s something I drum into them when plugins are being developed. They have to sound great, that’s a given, but after that only three things matter; workflow, workflow and workflow.

So the first plugins I regret buying are the ones that ignore that mantra, they are just too hard to use and that far outweighs their benefit.

There’s something to be said for the single knob plugins that just do one thing well - for me anything that just works is staying in my machine.

The ‘All You Can Eat Buffet’ Plugins

There’s some killer VIs on the market, they can give you any sound you need, from a bell in a dark room played with water to a soaring string solo. Or they can give you every percussion sound possible, from an ant farting in a bucket to a huge kick drum.

Here’s my problem, some of these plugins have so much stuff in them that you can spend weeks just auditioning the sounds. That task is the listening equivalent of painting the Golden Gate Bridge, by the time you get to the end you’ve forgotten where you started. It’s another huge time suck.

Put it another way. Here are some Netflix stats which illustrate the same issue. According to What's On Netflix and correct as of March 31st 2020;

“Netflix has 2.2 million minutes of content currently available.

Translated into years, that’s just over four years of continuous content if you were to sit down and watch it all in a single sitting. That roughly translates to 36,000 hours in total.”

One can sometimes feel that some of these VIs are the music production equivalent, offering people something that they couldn’t possibly review, let alone use.

Again, like single purpose plugins, I tend to gravitate to single use VIs for the same reason. I’d much rather have one great piano than have to spend time trawling through the numerous ones I have on my hard drive. I talk about it in more detail in my article Has The Home Studio Dream Become A Nightmare?

VIs are not the only culprits - there are plugin collections that are exactly the same. I posted on my Facebook page today “My plugin collection is much the same as my Facebook friends. Hundreds I hardly know and a few I can trust to deliver every time.” It got a lot of likes, so again, I don’t think I’m the only one.

One small point, we can’t blame the developers if all they ever hear is ‘give us more for less’ shouted at them in every forum or social media. Perhaps it’s time we started thinking about getting less stuff, that’s better?

The Crash Test Dummies

I’ve spent enough time around software developers to know that shipping bug-free software is almost impossible. That’s not because developers produce shoddy work, it’s simply because the permutations that exist on different computers make the task a fast moving target.

Bugs, I can live with, if I have to. Ones that crash my machine and lose me work are different.

What developers needs to understand is that professionals are literally staking their reputation on software working. If you are working on a top movie or TV show, or even an album with a tight deadline, then every minute, hour, day and week lost is a killer. If a plugin crash means a deadline isn’t met then it’s a serious issue. I asked Mike Thornton, who worked on a lot of TV if he had ever missed TX (transmission) he replied, ‘you can’t!’

Any reasonable buyer has to expect there may be silly bugs in software, any developer who ships software that can crash needs to think again. Those crashes have serious consequences in the real world.

One small word to anyone on a beta team. Some of you do great work helping developers in making sure their software ships in great shape. Conversely, some people on beta teams are freeloaders, thinking to be on one is all about getting free stuff or seeing the software before everyone else. A good beta tester makes sure that with every release they spend hours putting the thing through its paces and reporting their findings. Does the plugin actually do what it claims? Are there bugs? How do you reproduce them? These are just a few of the questions that need answering on every build of any new software. You can be sure if you don’t find it, the public will. Only this week I’ve been working with a developer uncovering bugs, sometimes it means pulling a release until they are fixed.

If you don’t have either the time or inclination to support developers as a solid beta tester, then get off their team, you are dead weight and part of the reason buggy software ships.

What About You?

Have I covered them all, or is there anything that drives you crazy? I have intentionally avoided naming brands and plugins, but we can’t stop you. 😉