I'll go first:

Rack Ears On Plugins

Absolutely loathe and despise them.

 

Loose screws.

 

Automagic "black box" processes.

 

Wasted space on any of them.

 

Then how do you keep them from falling out of their virtual racks when you transport them to gigs?

 

Design-wise, these little screws to change a value. Annoying AF, especially when there's enough space in the GUI for a bigger knob.

 

Huge keyboards on synths (if it's not touchscreen, wtf?), colors that make your eyes bleed and cannot be changed, wasted space on gui, when the gui is so huge it does not fit my laptop screen and I cannot access some parameters.

These are especially painful when the plugin sounds good (because if it sounds bad, I just trash it with no remorse).

 

Last edited: Oct 15, 2022

that one feature you love

 

Knobs that only turn when you make a circle with your mouse, instead of just up and down.
Plugin instantly goes on the chopping block.

 

Probably my prejudices at work here, but when I see a synth where 1/3 of its real estate is used my effects, to me it screams limited, unimaginative synth. You'd think in this day and age, they'd stop producing synths with just two oscillators, two LFO's, an ADSR and a rudimentary routing matrix. And, oh yeah, like @jennyblack just wrote, huge keyboards are a useless waste of space.

 

Artificial intelligence

 

Unstable VST's that will crash your mixing session.
Nothing worse than not having a back up and you decide to load one more plugin into your effect chain.

 

no GUI scale option

 

I always considered this a luxury :D
Maybe I should think more about my choice of plugins

 

I don't like effects gratuitously included with synths. Delay, reverb, EQ, compression, chorus, phasing... I turn them all off. I have plenty of nice fx VSTs I know and love, and I'll add them if I want to. I don't want substandard ones forced on me, so off they go!

(First post, long time lurker. )

 

Oh man that hit a nerve big time. Hate that with a passion...

 

super small guis on 20 year old plugins. i know that monitors used to only be 600 pixels wide back then but seriously what were they thinking?

 

I can't smell any of them when they've warmed up

AND also

There's never a satisfying jack-plug-going-into-the-socket noise that I can tut at and tell people off about.

other than that, I'm easy.

 

They're not there to trip over, grab and just work out an idea with.
When I was young there were no computers or plug-ins
I paid dearly for equipment back then and utililized it to its maximum.
Then came computers, plug-ins and warez.
Suddenly I had every tool on earth.
Ho-hum.
Took it all for granted and didn't make music.
Now I'm old and can afford real quality instruments and tools.
I don't take them for granted, they're beautiful and before my eyes to touch and caress.
Hardware (real instruments acoustic, electric) is like sex with a real girl.
Software is like wanking to online porn.
Forgive my crude analogy.
Ain't nothin like the real thing, baby

 

Marketing hype and bullshit talk like "they modeled their own SSL buscomp, and it might be different from another SSL bus comp,because all units are different".
Now fucking question:
If SSL buscomp are modeled by 20 vst developers, they are all different, so what is "that SSL sound" if all units of SSL buscomp are different? CYTOMIC's true emulation and Ik's true emulation are different and so on, timing, harmonics, mojo, color - so which is which is SSL buscomp? Ok. Also lets take Pultec or Neve or Api or 670 - what's wrong with all that difference and "that HW sound"?
If all units of same model are different, how do people match stereo pairs?

 

Last edited: Oct 17, 2022