MusicMan

For what it's worth, I prefer SPL Iron and Elysia Alpha Comp more than any SSL Buss compressor I've used. Once again both of these are different to each other. Iron I use more for buss duties and glue, Alpha I use more for mastering, as it's so versatile and great sounding. I'll often A-B Iron against some of the various SSLs from a number of Devs on a song and end up using Iron more often. But sometimes the SSL sound just fits better. That's why it's good having a few different options ? Personally I prefer both of these to Shadow Hills as well, even though I know the Shadow Hills are lots of people's favourite.

Different animals. Townhouse is like an older, coloured, grungy (in a good way!) kind of vibe. Great on drum buss, or master buss in particular. 9000J is punchy, modern, wide and nice highs. Great on the same busses and versatile enough to use on tracks as well. If they're the same price I'd go 9000J as it's a strip, so more versatile, but if you're more interested in the compressor side only, then both are good choices, just different ?

When I tested all the SSLs I preferred that one. The others weren't bad and I might pick up the E, or G at some stage, but not feeling a need yet. I've got a few SSL G style compressors etc, including Townhouse Buss Compressor from PA which does that OK too.

My wallet and free space on my hard drive isn't grateful to you.. but I am ? Quite a nice plugin. I really like the IKM Tapes and I'd say this holds its own with them. What I wasn't expecting from Acustica was for it to be less of a CPU hit than the IK Tapes! Given the price wasn't far off Reelight Pro which is on sale now and I was considering, this wasn't too hard to pull the trigger on.

The trial is VST2 only, but was only updated last year, whereas the full product was recently updated for Monterey. Does anyone know if the paid/full version is VST3? It seems hard to find a conclusive answer in Aquarius or on their site... the manual says VST2, but I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't updated.

Haha.. really? MasterComp is the other one I'm waiting on! Seriously underrated compressor. I was really quite surprised when I tried that one ? PianoVerb hasn't seen too much use from me, but if they update it I might give it another shot too.

That's so good to see! I knew it was going to be around that time and checked right before posting and it still wasn't up yet. Just got the email from them today and installing now ?

An oldie, but a goodie ? VST3 should be very close for this one too ?

I thought what they were saying is that these are being given away for free, as they're older versions, but prior to that and also with their current versions, the demos are a perpetual trial.

It would be nice, but then it's the internal oversampling that causes that from my understanding, so if they dropped that, the aliasing police and Plugindoctor brigade would be up in arms, so either way they'll get a hard time ?

I picked up Autoformer for free too and really should go back and spend some more time checking that one out. Thanks for the reminder! Most of their plugins are quite decent ?

I got this free a while back, but I really like this one! Holds its own against many of the popular choices. Very underrated ?

If everyone stops paying them, they will stop charging for them.. bad PR for no WUP income is an even worse business model than they already have ?

That's how I got my copy of Vertigo VSM-3 too.. it was the bundle on a deeper discount than normal and then loyalty voucher.. a ridiculously good deal ? This stacked with a loyalty, or survey voucher is a no brainer.

I picked it up from Plugin Boutique for $95 and got Audiority Polycomp multiband compressor free. It was the cheapest I'd ever seen it. Not by much and was a pricing mistake they corrected a few hours later.. I do wish they made more of a mistake and it was $49 though ?

It's a Swiss army knife of a compressor with mid/side, built in clipper and some controls for shaping the tone. It can be really transparent, but also allow you to modify the overall sound quite heavily in a direction you choose. The workflow is fluid. I do get your point about the interface! Haha.. for me this in ways reminds me of Tokyo Dawn Labs TDR Kotelnikov.. these two are probably the only compressors where I've felt I need to read the manual.. and maybe watch a tutorial ? And not everyone gets mid/side either.. but spend the time learning this one and it's got great power and versatility and of course the most important.. great sound ?

They've released so many flashy compressors since this one, yet whenever I test them, this still holds its own and I often reach for it in preference to many of their others ?

Great synth. Surprised the latest version is still only VST2.

Is there a particular reason you're needing WUP and how many plugins are you looking at covering? Sometimes it's cheaper to just buy the plugs again, or upgrade to a bundle ?

Oh that is what I was thinking of! I do remember vaguely there was a workaround. Seemed odd they wouldn't just allow people to add more paths, but at least the workarounds were pretty effective.

I'm sure we've advised people enough times not to buy Waves plugins ??

That's a good point. For me where they sit inside the VST folder on the hard drive shouldn't matter, as all DAWs should allow for custom groups/folders. Some plugins aren't just a compressor, or just a saturator, they could be looked at as both, or more, so I might want them in multiple categories. For some reason ages ago, I seem to remember Live only allowing me to configure one VST folder path.. doesn't sound right though, so I may be remembering that incorrectly ?

Haha.. no apologies needed for the rant ? It's good to look at all sides. I think you somewhat misinterpreted me there. I in no way said that VST3 is better in every regard. There are definitely some benefits though beyond the VST2 standard. But I'm more saying adopting a single standard makes more sense. I also don't think SB is doing it to make the lives of other Devs easier, that's just an incidental benefit that comes with it. Incidentally, VST2 was released in 1999, while VST3 was 2008, so it really is quite a bit older. I definitely agree it should be an open standard. Maybe that would also help adoption in Protools etc. Having multiple standards in general, makes little sense and just leads to extra coding, testing and disk space. I did have a good laugh at the Apple comment too ? That is somewhat something they would do! I also agree they shouldn't be commodity, but that's the nature of computers, software and tech. Analogue hardware wins that battle for sure. I do half wonder if they might have fired it off as a threat to get some of the Devs moving and then there could be an extension, but I guess we'll have to see ?

Some valid points for sure and I definitely won't be happy losing access to some, but VST3 has been around since about 2008 I think, so that's plenty of time for developers to pull their finger out. SB stopped issuing licences for the SDK for VST2 in 2018(?) If they don't do it, they will need to support them for the next 20 years! It was the same as dropping support for Windows XP that many developers eventually did, almost some 20 years after its release as well ? Same with dropping 32bit plugins. There's some annoyance to get there, but once everything is just x64/VST3 (and some other formats for those other crappy DAWs (Jokes!), then it will be so much less work for all of the Devs and they can focus on core compatibilities. Probably even release new Mac compatible updates faster as they don't need to dev and test VST2, VST3, etc. It will also stop Devs installing VST2 plugins by default that I end up having to delete as I only use VST3 if they've got it! It will reduce the myriad of random folders around my hard drive that these guys install into as well, as there's only one file path for the standard (two if you include 32bit) ? So yep, it sucks a little, but will actually be a lot better in so many ways ?

Completely agreed and a good workaround especially for some of those great plugins we already own and will never get updated. Im going to go out on a limb here and guess that almost none of us really need any more plugins.. of course that doesn't seem to be stopping us though! Haha.. I have plenty in this space and if it was VST3, I suspect I probably would have bought it anyway at that price ?