I have totally different experience. I have 2 PCIe cards now (one 8 and one 4 DSPs) and I think plugins are amazing. Of course you can find something similar on sister site but biggest advantage is that you save CPU power for other native plugins.
Of course plugins are not cheap - but they really sound great and little different than natvie ones. So for me no single negative issues with PCIe cards and I collect money for some offers they sometimes do

 

Last edited: Dec 8, 2021

Yeah, at this point it's just a big money grab for them. I see them pushing new interfaces with the Volt series, but doing fuck all to fix issues with their existing interfaces. They're leveraging their past reputation to sell as much hardware as possible and lock as many users into that closed system as they can.

And no matter how much someone with actual UAD user experience warns others to stay away, just like @anon69 said, people still buy it. At this point I believe if you're buying UAD, it has less to do with spending money to buy something actually useful and more about bragging rights and the perception of prestige.

 

Don't waste your time on threads about UAD crack. It either won't happen or will be a very distant future.

 

The day UA goes completely native for all DAWs, without requiring any DSP hardware to run, is a sure sign that they are desperate (DSP sales dried up, no ability to market a new DSP platform as people have spent so much money on UAD2 hardware and don't want it made worthless overnight), no chips that will give a reasonable price/performance ratio compared to computer CPUs etc...

Honestly, imo their long-term native strategy is Luna. We've already seen plugins that are impractical to run on DSP because of latency or power (eg, the instruments, or the multi-instance tape saturation stuff) running natively - inside Luna. Only. *If* they start giving options for UAD users to run their plugins on the DSP card, *or* the host, my guess (all imo) this will go with one or both of these two options:

- You can run your UAD plugins natively in Luna, but it requires Luna and will validate your plugins either by connected DSP hardware, or directly via their non-DSP protection (I can't remember if the Luna native stuff is iLok?). Part of the copy-protection for this will be built into Luna.

- You could run your UAD plugins natively in your DAW, but *only* if you have a connected DSP card to act as a dongle (and they still use the card for a little bit of processing, to stop people ripping the card check out of the plugins). There will be no option to run UAD plugins in your non-Luna DAW as 100% native, for copy-protection reasons.

(This will be primarily to let existing UAD users make their resources go further by spreading their DSP load onto the computer's CPU, *not* to let people not need to buy DSP hardware to buy into the UAD ecosystem.)

Like I say, the only reason UA decide to go *fully* native, as regular plugins, is desperation and a declining business...

 

a good programmer can reverse their code and put it into native plugins easily

 

Innovations in 2022.

Robots and a humans can reproduce.
R2R and UAD sharc together produce a beautiful healthy crack baby .

 

erm they are first in c and run natively then they are recoded to run on their antiquated chips because

they are a hardware company

the only hardware that will sell in the long run

clever move

 

I'm using one hardware that is based on the same SHARC processors used by UAD which is called XITE-1, but it differs on the software that runs behind it that is called Scope. It allows effects and synthesis and it is based on a visual modular environment similar to Reaktor that gives the user total freedom on routing. I doubt it can be emulated on native CPU due to the different architecture and the required processing power, but plug-ins can be developed from scratch for the native operating systems not emulated. Today I agree, most of the plug-ins based on the SHARC architecture can be developed for native systems and on modern CPUs we can run many plug-ins together without any trouble, unless we need to work in real-time and by real-time I mean 1ms or lower. On my XITE-1 I can process external signals in less than 0.2 ms, it doesn't matter if I have loaded 50 compressors or only 1 and this is also true for the older Creamware hardware which is based on the legacy DSP SHARC processors and it's is independent from the computer CPU, you can run it from a Pentium 2 on windows XP and it will process everything in real-time. But on a native system, I can set a low buffer for example on the RME card, but as soon as I add plug-ins, it starts with the glitches. In my opinion the real-time factor is still an advantage of using DSP based hardware and in the case of my XITE-1 and the Scope software, I think that it is more convincing on clipping and saturation and also mixing on it adds more character than mixing natively, so I usually send some audio busses for the final touch to the DSP based system. I also forgot to mention that I can also develop my own SHARC based plug-ins thanks to the SCOPE SDK developing software which is the one used for the first plug-in developed by Brainworx (today Plugin Alliance) called BX Digital, also the first SPL Transient designer plug-in and the first Softube plug-ins. Even if today's computers are very powerful, having a DSP based system can be helpful.

 

Yeah those people are Universal Audio's devs. At the very most you can maybe emulate their chips but I doubt these things will happen as that is way too much work for some plugins with endless alternatives that work just as good if not better.

 

exclusivity is also a pillar of their business model, and they reinforce that exclusivity through their hardware, their cost, and their branding partnerships with audio giants like neve, api, etc.

we're all trying to improve our work by razor thin percentage points, and UAD capitalizes on those of us with the money to gamble on UAD being the pathway to that improvement. there is a status symbol component baked into all of this as well. i'm not positive that native operation exists in harmony with the nature of their business as it currently stands

 

Let me ask you a question. Do you think that you own your cell phone? Seeing as how, without a cellular network service provider agreement, the phone is almost useless. Yes you can use most of the apps and surf the web but you cannot make cellular calls without wifi. The whole point of the phone is to be able to do this.

We think we own these devices but that is becoming less and less literal and less and less tangible. Our entire life has been redirected to a "service" based model, so that these tech companies can milk every last dollar they can. Here is a good comparison..... Did you know that the fast food company McDonalds isn't a food company..... it makes the majority of money off of real estate. They are the biggest landlord in the world.... and it just so happens that the best way for their tenants to make rent, is to sell burgers and fries. Apple's main source of income is Apple Care and Icloud storage space. They make more off of that than they do iPhone sales.

 

There's alot of Brainworx plugins that are available UAD and native and they sound identical...

 

wow that means UAD2 Pcie cards will increase in price; i have 3 of em here

 

I'm pretty sure that using the phone as an actual phone is way down the list of what people use them for.
I have a phone without cell service that I use for all kinds of things. And for a phone with service, I've probably made five calls on it in the last few years. Very few people I know are making phone calls, it's generally all media, messaging, web browsing 99% of the time.

I also have an iPad, which I use all the time too. It's an iPhone, without cell service. Neither is that almost useless.

Sorry, that is factually incorrect. Look up Apple's earnings call data, and you can see the revenue graph between iPhone sales, and Services (which include Applecare, iCloud, and all of Apple's other services). Maybe one day Services revenue (all of services, not just iCloud) will dwarf iPhone revenue, but it's not remotely there yet.