We all have them: plugins we bough because they were either free for a short time or had a low introductory price and then they sit on your hard drive and you never use them.

Here are some of mine, which I rarely or never use:

AIR Music Technology: I got Xpand 2, Loom 2, Hybrid, Vacuum Pro for dirt cheap and most of them suck ass. Either for Sounds/Presets or handling/control. The Riser is a really great and useful tool,though.
Cableguys Halftime: A special use plugin which makes a relatively complicated process of time shifting playback real simple… it's just that I almost never have any use for it. :D
Eventide Newfangled Audio Equivocate: got it for free. It tries to be a revolutionary 26 band linear phase graphic EQ, but despite the marketing claims, it's actually not very useable and has some strange resonances at times.
Eventide Ultra Channel: Got this for free, it has some pretty unique features. I never use it. I was a bit shocked that it costs 249 $…
Eventide Ultra Reverb: Really versatile Reverb. I seldom use it though. Just too many parameters to fiddle with most of the times.
Eventide Quadravox: Interesting Delay/Pitch thingy I used once whe I got it for free.
Focusrite Red and Scarlett Plugin Suites > long forgotten :D
Boz Digital Sasquatch 2: I just prefer picking the right kick instead of tweaking one to make it work. But besides that it's a great tool for mixing.I prefer Version 1, though.
D16 Group: Decimort 2, Devastor, Frontier, Sigmund. Great Company, great tools, I just don't use them any more.
IK Multimedia: Black 76, White 2A, Quad Comp. Got them for dirt cheap also. I actually prefer CLA 76 and CLA 2A over these. And more important: they are unreliable and crash Maschine often.
McDSP Plugins: 6020 Ultimate EQ. One of these plugins you buy in a sale where you think it's a nice Idea to can switch through various EQ models until you realize, that you don't like the sonics of it that much. Same goes for the 6030 Comp. But that's actually useful. Active Equalizer AE400. A dynamic EQ but just too complicated to set up. The last time I wanted to use it it took me several minutes to find the threshold and make it do what I wanted it to. I even had to check youtube to figure it out again. And that's no good.
Nomad Factory Analog Studio Rack > Not bad, just not as good as top notch channel strips
Plugin Alliance: MAAG EQ 2 and 4. Highly Praised by everybody. Never use it. bx_stereomaker > never use it. Lindell 7-X 500 > useless. Almost everythything from unfiltered Audio
Softube: Drawmer 73 > what a useless plugin. I wonder what I was thinking when I bought that… Softube Tape > boooring… too clean.
Soundspot KickBox - Another one of those super cheap pluginboutique deals (2 Dollars or so). Unnecessary. Doesn't really impress me.
Waves: Scheps Parallel Particles > great idea for parallal processing. I just never use it. Leapwing nailed it. H-Reverb > Too many paramerts. Abbey Road Mastering Chain: useless. J37 Tape: distorts too quickly and doesn't sound nice while doing it. The delay is nice though. Never use it. Element 2 and Flow Motion Synths: never remembers settings in Maschine. WTF WAVES??. Same goes for Scheps Omni Channel. Which is really incredible. But what good is a channel strip which resets on reload… Waves SSL Comp one of these waves fucking plugins which don't work as audio units in Maschine. They never fixed it. Fuck Waves!
There are at least 50 more plugins I got either for free or real cheap which are not even worth mentioning here.

I hope this is helpful for people looking into buying plugins they are not certain about getting.

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2020

#blessed

 

i try before i buy

 

No! We all don't. Speak for yourself, friend. I'm not stupid enough to buy something that hasn't established itself as being integral to my workflow. Mainly because i don't have a dollar to my name. In other words. i would never buy a bunch of saws and then turn around and not cut any wood. How foolish that would be...

 

uffffffffff, a thread about buying shit on a forum with members that come from an audio plugin pirating site...

These are my fav threads. Hol up don't start arguing yet, imma need some snacks...

 

okay go...

 

It's actually about NOT buyng stuff you may not need. But I feel #blessed for creating another gem of a thread you liked ;)

 

Okay, you are the exception to the rule. You're so #blessed

 

Interesting that every plugin on the list has try before you buy 'enabled'.wich makes a mistake buy extra... but that aside,

what is your main genre? halftime is working over-time here.
And I can imagine that plugins like Xpand isn't sufficient for you because you got a better sampler/rompler? (kontakt?)

 

Don't get me wrong, 99 % of theses plugins I didn't pay the fulll retail prices for. They were either free, part of a bundle deal or were on sale or had an introductory price. It's not like I have money to burn either. It's just. Sometimes you buy stuff and then it turns out that you don't use it, or it gets replaced by something else, etc.

I produce Hip-Hop, Synthwave, Trap/Cloud mainly. I use Serum, Massive and Unify a lot now. The more I produce the more I stick to some goto plugins that work fine for me.

When XPand was on sale for a buck in 2016, I used it for some tracks but I soon realized that most of the sounds feel really cheap, harsh and dated and not suited for my genre. Usually, I spent more time trying to find decent sounds than actually beeing inspired by them. That goes for almost all AIR Instruments besides of The Riser which is really outstanding.

What do you use Halftime for? Transitions, Breakdowns?

 

Hybrid, Loom and Waves' synths (not a big fan of their effects though, I would rather use Melda or something else) are actually good, imo. Maybe not the best, but they can do the job.
D16 effects are considered to be good, I think (I don't have them).

 

I tend to agree on the Eventide stuff. I like Ultraverb a lot but I always go for other verbs first. Even though they're all pretty good the only Eventide plug I use all the time is Blackhole.

 

I feel bad about burning so much space on my external hard drive for samples, libraries etc. that I will probably never use

 

D16 Plugins are pretty good actually. It's just that I noticed that I don't use them any more. They are really nice for saturating the input into the plugin. Decimort is just bit reduction which I am not a fan of a any more, Devesatator is a nice Distortion, which I just skip through some of the presets from time to time, Fontier has been replaced by Little Clipper for me and Sigmund is just waaaaaaaaaay too complex for my needs of a Delay. Both were freebies btw.

 

Same here. I usually go for SP2016 on Drums and Blackhole on Synths. And I currently use N.I. Raum a lot.

 

samples got me too. i have built up so many over the years and its hard to choose which ones to throw away!
i recently gave my computer a spa day and started cleaning it up. removing unwanted samples is one of the big jobs still on my todo list. i cant bring myself to do it

 

The issue is that samples that sound bad now can be great for the next project.
Thanks to XLN XO you can simply search through this massive sample library and add samples that you really like as favorite.
Collecting Samples, Kontakt Libraries and all these plugins feels like an addiction to me.
Having 120GB of one shot samples and yet thinking "I dont have enough yet"

 

You don't like the Eventide SP2016 Reverb?I find it very nice for small room reverbs.

 

Yes man,good stuff!Same here!I also like the older Native Instruments RC24 and RC48 reverbs,the D16 Toraverb2 is nice sometimes too.

If you don't know it,the Polyverse music Comet reverb is very cool too,from hall to cathedral,big lush reverbs.It's ultra easy and quick to find a nice setting,that's what I like much in this reverb.