on software musical instruments
#tl;dr: Audio plugins are musical instruments, not just software, and the expectations towards them regarding longevity and continuity are dictated by musical instruments, not software development. Avoid vendors who appear not to honour this.
Yesterday I spent 8+ hours trying to reopen Σym – a track from five years ago. The plugins I had used in that project had had new versions released under the same product numbers, with the old versions no longer available.
Running oldish Intel audiounits on Apple Silicon macOS is really painful. It requires restarts between installation or other changes, and if Logic would see them at all, let alone load them, is a throw of the dice. Most often they simply don't work.
There is a lot that goes wrong in New Sonic Arts' plugins. It is not limited to their plugins, but theirs is a great example of not sweating some very important details:
- Vice 2 won't load a preset saved from Vice
- Nuance 2 loads presets saved from Nuance but loses the multichannel mapping (I could even hack my project to use the v2 plugin, using a hex editor)
- but Nuance 2 renames its multichannel outs to include a space and Logic then can't remap aux busses automatically.
- Nuance—the plugin—shows as version 1.0.0 in the Finder, regardless of its exact version (e.g. 1.6.522), so I can't know what version I'm even looking at, or for.
- Nuance is not available to download. Neither is Vice. Only versions 2 and newer.
- When Nuance and Vice ask for authorisation, and I authorise them with my own email and serial number, that zaps my Nuance 2 and Vice 2 authorisation. When I authorise V2, the V1 plugins ask for auth again on next open.
- All New Sonic Arts plugins open in low resolution on my retina display, unless I fully disconnect my secondary non-retina display.
- And last but not least: cracks – yes, I searched – won't read the data saved with the official versions. I had last seen this in... Reaktor 3 encrypting its ensembles with some forsaken key that would have absolutely stopped working down the line (it did).
Alas, these are not just bugs.
Here's what the plugins look like in auval -l, where Apple's spec allows 4 characters (bytes) for Manufacturer ID, and another 4 for the Product ID.
type subtype manufacturer
aumu 000C240A NSA_ - New Sonic Arts: Nuance (unknown URL) [AUv2]
aumu 000CB881 NSA_ - New Sonic Arts: Vice (unknown URL) [AUv2]
aumu nuan NSA_ - New Sonic Arts: Nuance 2 (file://…/Nuance%202.component/) [AUv2]
aumu vice NSA_ - New Sonic Arts: Vice 2 (file://…/Vice%202.component/) [AUv2]
aumu NSA0 NSA_ - New Sonic Arts: Granite (file://…/Granite.component/) [AUv2]Not even a readable 4-byte ID.
And that NSA0, You know who else does this? Native Instruments
type subt manu
aufx Ni$I -NI- - Native Instruments: Choral (file://…/Choral.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$J -NI- - Native Instruments: Phasis (file://…/Phasis.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$K -NI- - Native Instruments: Flair (file://…/Flair.component/) [AUv2]
aufx Ni$L -NI- - Native Instruments: Dirt (file://…/Dirt.component/) [AUv2]Yep, $1, $2, $3,... all the way till the alphabet runs out.
Which brings me to the main points:
Longevity
If I sit down at a piano today, it has likely existed for a while, and it's a good bet that it will continue for a while, and it's basically a given that it will play, and – when looked after – it will play the same. Pick up a tambourine, guitar, bass, flute, much more fragile stuff like a trumpet or a violin, they work. Same for an electric piano, a Novation synth, M8 tracker, heck even an OP1 will likely function. Maybe swap a battery.
But the issue we have with software plugins, and this I have seen with big names like Waldorf (3E00 ?), or Air Music (AIRm and Wzoo), to obscure unmaintained plugins like The Mangle, the big issue is that these all come across as software first, and musical instruments second. UX basics like longevity and reliability go missing, not to mention continuity. There are exceptions: small like dBlue Glitch, bigger like Valhalla and PSP Audioware, or not to mention huge names like Waves or Universal Audio.
For a terrific example, look at ES1 in Logic Pro itself: As of Logic 11, ES1 is as old as Logic 5, it doesn't even have retina graphics, it has never "improved" its sound, or changed its UI. It has been superseded by Retro Synth. But, in my experience, projects from way back that use it still open and the tracks sound the same.
NI Battery 4 and 3 both add a ton of features and feel like complex software applications that I need to allow patience for, somehow forgetting that they're merely plugins that play existing sounds from my drive.
Continuity
This is the second biggest problem but the number one most frustrating thing of all:
aumu Ni$D -NI- - Native Instruments: Kontakt (file://.../Kontakt.component/) [AUv2]
aumu NiK7 -NI- - Native Instruments: Kontakt 7 (file://…/Kontakt%207.component/) [AUv2]Why‽ Imagine modifying something as complex as a Kontakt patch and then only saving the patch with the project. I do it all the time. And if you use Kontakt, you'd know the relentless march of Kontakt versions. What is a stray version 7 doing even?
iZotope Ozone 9 (iZtp Zn09) is not the same plugin as Ozone 10 (iZtp ZnOZ). RX 9 plugins.. you get the idea.
Waldorf Attack (Windows VST) simply wouldn't save any presets, and Attack (Mac Audiounit), when it finally came out, simply wouldn't read Windows version projects.
And then there's the software that was too hard/expensive/complicated to maintain, of which there are too many examples to mention. And then there's macOS itself (and sometimes Windows), marching forward and removing compatibility from previous OS versions.
So how are we meant to open old projects tomorrow, without obsessively "printing" everything to inert audio tracks today?
For how it should be done, look to Synplant 2, which replaces version 1 (same IDs), and not only loads old data, but is nice enough to prompt you to update the patch to use its newer engine. FabFilter – one of the best – install new plugin versions side by side, but theirs do read old presets, and the legacy installers are available on their website.
Bugs
And then there are the bugs. If you're putting a brand new plugin out there, but didn't bother testing that it actually works with something as basic as DAW presets, then what exactly is it you're offering me other than distraction and to do your beta testing for you? I don't want a free new exciting (buggy) thing for a few months. I'd gladly take a costly thing that I will have in my life for years going forward.
To Air Music's credit, Loom 2 overtakes Loom, but before releasing an Apple Silicon beta, Loom 2 would fail validation on ARM, and 1 didn't even work. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Music
It's about making music. It's about picking up a thing, and playing it, and having fun, and decorating a piece of time. It's about not feeling frustrated. These are musical instruments. The same goes for the effects.
When stored in projects, plugin settings uses are archived, but not for days or months. Sometimes we reopen these works years later to search for a specific patch, to extract a track, or a sound, to answer the question "how did I do this?". These archived representations should just work.
Successors should provide continuity.
The paid ones especially simply don't get to draw a bridge or shut a door without causing massive frustration or, worse, breaking trust.
But it happens. All the time. And the time that we have for making music is spent on IT maintenance. And this needs change.