Sausage Fattener deserves a mention.

 

The gui and workflow are linked beyond just the appearance. They are also people's first impressions. Other people probably feel this same way; but I generally do not like software I did not like using right off the bat. If I have to force myself to learn them, instead of wanting to learn them; I will go with something else. Most effects plugins are easily replaced by equally capable and good sounding alternatives.

If Melodyne was not almost mandatory to know, I would never have forced myself to learn it. It's a necessary evil. Melda are not.

 

Arturia was winning the design game until their Augmented Series which lacks dark mode like PIgments. Preset management is also unmatched in my opinion.

 

As far as the just drop-in-the-bucket sad ass crappy award goes, I'm still of a mind to make a dual offering to "mixing night audio" and "safari pedals". Both of of these dev's have their entire lines of plugins that are consistently lame, it seems, by design.

 

I think Melda and Airwindows suffer from the same evil, besides the fact that Melda has worst GUIs than a "no-GUI" dev.

It's a huge amount of plugins that are more scientifical than musical. I mean, fuck it, it's hard to understand and find a proper use. But thanks to Chris i understood the nature of those plugins and that i can avoid them without a single regret. But the fact that Melda is paid can put you in the rabbit hole of some plugins of the bundle because you payed for it.

 

All the "if Melda had good GUI they would dominate the market" thing falls apart when you think about United Plugins, which is essentially Melda code with better UI. Or is it? It has to be, right? They got the exact same marketing blahblah, so Vojtek is behind both, right?

 

Thanks, mate.
You need to use WINE + a VST bridge to make Melda plugins work and making that work properly takes some nerdmenship, indeed.

 

Okay, haven't done any deep research but I'm not convinced this United Plugins = Melda thing is totally accurate. Here's what it seems to me: 'United Plugins' is more of a conglomerate house (ala Plugin Alliance) that unites several developers under one name/house. This conglomerate is owned and operated by Melda Production, but each plugin is developed by separate teams: JMG Sound, Fire Sonic, Soundevice Digital, Muramasa, Instant Audio, etc... Are any of these teams containing members or coders from Melda? That I'm not sure of.

I haven't tried many, but there definitely seems to be a mixed bag of quality or targeted demographics. The one I've tried the most from is Soundevice Digital (Front DAW, whatever the Altec comp one was). The Front DAW plug does indeed sound good, but I remember battling with and reading about how buggy it was (oversampling fucking up frequency response, crashing DAW, etc), so I was surprised to hear it was coded by Melda. I doubt it was. It's now on version 4.x I think, hopefully it's better. Not sure I'll try it again.

 

Nothing fall apart most of United Plugins have equivalently awful and goofy design, you can even see design elements from Melda series the developer does not understand very basic rules of designing interfaces and interferes an area in which he is a duffer with the expected result.

As for Melda, the plugins themselves are so complex and include so many elements that presenting them all in a way that would be convenient and usable is a non-trivial task even for a professional interface engineer, and what about a non-professional who has decided that he can do it.

 

Last edited: Jun 2, 2025 at 12:56 PM

Yeah, but i dig Melda plugins and hate SoundDevice, both are UP.