Even the OG masters are getting lamer as time rolls. Arturia anymore is pure junk. Gotten to the point I don't even bother with it anymore. Waves I use still but really only the stuff that was released almost 2 decades ago and/or that doesn't require internet for it to work. Fuck that. I could shit can all of waves and 95% of the rest of the stuff I have installed including fabfilter, nebula, acustica, etc, etc, if UAD natives were available (to the scene).

 

There are a lot of very simple foods that are very healthy as well. And a lot of very complex foods that are really unhealthy.

 

Last edited: Apr 25, 2026 at 6:45 PM

Read this about Vibe AI plugin generator :
https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2026/04/23/vibe-coding-synthedit/

we just see an accelerated problem.
Making it bigger.

noise vs signal.
More plugins = more noise = we humans need to filter faster good signal from garbage noise.

at the end, we will need to use AI to filter good plugins from the auto AI garbage generators.

FUNNY isn’t it ?

 

A monopoly owned by one corporate entity is the goal of capitalism, winner take all as it is in the board game by the same name with which it mirrors it's namesake. It is mearly a greedy death cult which cannibalizes, feeds upon itself in belief that it is the best and only way that there is or has ever been to realize central control, and as such, absolute power. Built within the rules of the game there is no kindness, and the phrase "don't take it personally, it's only business" is the mantra, money talks, bullshit walks it's favorite expression of that contrived reality. AI will sooner than later break itself out of confinement and "trump" the entire system while enslaving whoever is left in it's own inimitable style...but before then maybe I can prompt myself a bitchin' filter plugin and call it Lois Linear Freek Tweek.

 

The same thing has been happening for decades... whether it is plugins, hardware, or people masquerading as the greatest thing since sliced bread, and people eventually work out what is true, false, real, fake, incredible, mediocre, or just the equivalent of a used car salesman selling something that is no better and sometimes worse than anything else around, pretending to be something it or they are not.
The times and technology have changed but the con-artistry has not.

 

Exactly @Lois Lane
That’s why we see Wall Street raising, whereas countless companies shut doors.
And only a few still take all the cash left.

it was already accelerated by flu19, killing small businesses whereas Amazon took +70%.
Alipay AliBaba Aliexpress group got the biggest introduction in stock market of the whole human history… during flu19 scam.

it is accelerating even faster now with wars and AI.
Contradictions too.
Like speaking about « liberal economics » when there is only one company left

 

I doubt anyone can argue with that. One a pure technological level only it is impressive but outside if that, personally it is disconcerting- and in typical human fashion, just like they got rid of analog and replaced with digital only to try and get all the analog back again thirty years later, will probably only understand their failure in foresight when they cannot reverse it.

 

*N.B

It is also a trap. None of us can speak for everyone, but the most consistently working engineers I know have go-to plugins. A series of probably well under 50 mixing plugins. They may have another 20 or so they want to try, but they won't use them on paying client work because they do not know them. They may try those 20 out later, only to find less than five do the job and even then, the ones they decided to keep are more than likely only for only one or two specific tasks. No engineer is going to part with something they know works 99% of the time unless they have tested something that does it better in their own time, and definitely not at the risk of a client never coming back.

So amassing plugins, regardless of brand, I do not believe to be productive if you are not using them most of the time.

 

That's why this flood of plugins is beyond nonsense. I mean, most of the plugins from 20 years ago still work and are still praised. There are lots of people using Waves L2 and SSLChannel because they know it works and will prefer reability over anything. People that probably knows their stuff and do their homejob better than me or you. And i just love the feeling of recalling sessions and knowing everything is going to work the way i left, knowing every single knob without figuring about ressource waste.

 

I will repeat myself and what others said:

I don't understand why we need even more plugins, especially vibe-coded ones. There are so many options already.

 

Totally on the mark. There also seems to be a misconception with any DAW of choice, that if a person only used what comes with that DAW, they might not be able to do a decent mix. If a person knows what each plugin does they can do a good mix with just the vanilla plugins that come with the DAW. I am not disputing for example that if a DAW does not have one or two of the VCA, FET, Optical and Vari-Mu compressors, or an Upwards compressor/exciter, they might need to buy one or two , and perhaps even better analysis tools for fine tuning. The only reason personally, for me to buy or get another plugin is for a specific task that the plugins I already have cannot do, or it can do it much better, but that is just my opinion.

 

Last edited: Apr 26, 2026 at 3:00 AM

I have a plan.

Today I will go through all my hard drives and delete all the plugins I've downloaded (from the sister sister site) and never used.

That should free up a few TB! And save me from the current insane prices of SSD/NVME (for a while).

 

@Colin - it is only a suggestion, before you do bulk uninstallations, have a look at what you have not tried that is unique and not one of many others out there. They hopefully should not number too many. Then you can try at your leisure and decide then.

 

@Colin, let's consider a scenario like a power outage, flooding, cyberattacks, and internet unavailability. If I were you, I'd think about this: why not burn important software to CD, DVD, or Blu-ray and back it up permanently?

 

Yeah we all know plugin hording is bad.
Yeah we all know there are old plugins still sounding good.
...

The question is NOT that : it is market saturation and quantity flood killing quality.
With something like Vibe (and others coming), you will get flooded by a pile of plugins with EXACTLY the same code and sound, but with a different brand and GUI.
Ranging from free to several hundreds euros.

Everyday you already see on sister site a new EQ, reverb, compressor, synth ... with an official selling price from 1 to 200 bucks.
"Coded" in seconds with Vibe and similar.
BUT when a gem will come ... it will be hidden in a pile of sh*t.

Result : this thing is simply killing quality by quantity flood.
And STARTING good devs will simply stop selling and coding because they don't get enough income from their REAL job (not a prompt).

Like all those MacDonalds ripping streets from good restaurants for decades.
Is it so hard to understand ?

Go search for "compressor" on sister site. And good luck to find a good one if you don't ALREADY know a good one

 

There’s a clear progression here. What started with reusable code concepts like Visual Basic BAS files eventually showed up in audio through tools like SynthEdit, where prebuilt modules made it possible to assemble plugins without deep DSP knowledge. That opened the door in a good way, but it also led to a wave of releases where speed mattered more than engineering. Now, with newer platforms like Audioloom and AI-assisted workflows, that same idea has been pushed even further. The result is less about a decline in quality and more about a shift in perception. With so many quick releases and free downloads getting attention, it can feel like the market has moved toward disposable, fast-turn plugins. In reality, the core set of well-built, reliable tools hasn’t changed much. There is just a lot more noise around it now.

You could always find free or "junk" plugins before. I think the real reason these kinds of plugins have gotten so much visibility lately is because people keep downloading them. Releasers do not just upload every meaningless minor version update and these things over and over for their health. They do it because by clicking "download", those users are "creating demand" for them.

 

I think its pretty obvious to spot the junk from the not junk. A quick glance at the features, or demo of the audio is all you need. I think we could potentially see some cool plugins, but will mostly be shit. Im working on a series of a plugins myself, but, and this is a huge but, there are no plugins that exist that are interchangeable with mine. (well, technically there is one, but not really hehe) The core framework is something most of use regularly, but the final product is unique enough to warrant building in my opinion. I know that I will use these plugins daily, and I know the few people I have told have said the same.

Im lucky to have a partner in this endeavor that actually knows what he is doing when it comes to programming, but we still have a fair amount of work to do before I have the final plugins. Hoping for beginning of Fall for an initial rollout.

 

Yep. Can vouch for that. I dont buy any of this shit anymore due to too many fucking's from various hardware vendors and software dev's in the past. The scene is my store now. However the scene seems to be gravitating to a more hit and miss endeavor what with all the no name crap v1.0's and bundles thereof (i.e. slop) being released. I won't even attempt to try it anymore because there's so much of it. I will grab the updates of the staples. If comment threads are raving about some particular thing it might prompt me to possibly try it out. But, 9 times out of 10 even that is a bust with so many newbies raving about junk anymore. It can be a fools paradise. I don't DL much anymore and if'n I do it's only going to be something real and not trash. And then there's the myriads of garbage "sample packs" that one has to wade thru just to get to something real anymore. blah blah blah.... it is what it is...

 

Last edited: Apr 26, 2026 at 9:48 PM

Wrong advice. Nobody needs to keep plugins as they are 'unique'. We need only high-quality (more or less) plugins that we use.

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2026 at 12:04 AM

e.g. Soothe / Gulfoss / or any resonance plugin which does not come with every DAW - right advice like picking a spectral layer editor, you only need one that fits the workflow.

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2026 at 2:22 AM