A comment on Unified Installers like NA, Melda, etc.

[thesteven]

Taking a moment to vent, JMHO.
I’ve gotten to the point where I loathe plugin maintenance.  I.E. the process of locating whatever particluar updates I need on a particular plugin.

While some here dislike unified installers like NA, I view it as a small price to pay to be relieved of the chore individually locating, downloading and installing updates (sometime multiple updates) per plugin.

While I tolerate the lack of a unified installer when the developer only has a few products or when I only own one or two plugins from a particular developer – when I own multiple plugins it becomes a major irritant.

For example – I have always liked Blue Cat Audio and at this point I have purchased most of their plugins but every plugin has it’s own nonpublic specific download webpage and each plugin has a separate installer for each plugin format (VST2, VST3, etc.).  So having multiple DAWs often meant multiple downloads per plugin and if you run multiple computers even more joy.  In August they announced updates to 25 plugins – normally great news, but when I saw the announcement I cringed thinking there goes several hours of my life that I’ll never recoup and like a switch being thrown – I stopped caring about their stuff. I have opted out – I will not buy any new plugins they come out with; I will no longer be upgrading their plugins, I will not using any of their plugins on any project going forward. If Blue Cat doesn’t come out with a unified installer I will at some point remove them from my old projects and then sell off my collection.

At some point in the next couple of months I will be migrating my DAWs/plugins to new computers.
As far as which plugins I take with me I will be weighing various factors, one of the things I will be looking closely at is the maintenance factor.

As always YMMV
…Steven

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[LinkedMusicians]

I moved this out of the Deals Forum to the Music Gear Discussion Forum.

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1

[MagicRuss]

I think the issue people have with NA is that NA has issues for them.  My only complaint is that it takes a while to load.

For companies that have a large suite of software, unified installers make sense, although I could see people thinking it is a waste if they only have one of the products installed.

On the other hand, it seems like every sample company is starting to require installer programs.  I don’t want to have to install a program just to download the one sample pack from a company that I find interesting.

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