Crow Hill Your Black Friday Gift Is Here!

[cclarry]

Use this code for $15 off

BANKOFCROW-BF15

https://thecrowhillcompany.com/shop/

[cclarry]

I can't add anything to my cart...weird

EDIT:  I had to be logged in...

Edited 6 hours ago by cclarry

[cclarry]

Pocket Strings for FREE!

[BTP]

Their website is very slow at the moment.

You can't use this on the old freebies, which aren't free anymore.

[MusicMan]

Small String Gestures is really quite nice for the price.

[Starship Krupa]

Very nice products, and it's hard to beat the price, but why oh why do we have to install yet another service just to install the product(s)?

I got the free Antelope EQ and it installed a service. I think Softube installs one too. None of these is necessary in order to use the plug-ins, they're only required during the install process.

<rant>

These are plug-ins. All an installer needs to do is download the VST3 package and copy it to the VST3 directory. If your installer needs to install its own service just to perform a download and file copy, something is WRONG with your installer. And they never install with manual startup, always automatic, so they're always sitting there waiting for another installation.

I don't mind a well-designed omnibus installer shell, in the case of companies whose plug-ins a have many of I even like the ones that work well. But I draw the line at installer services. In practice, it just means that I have to go in and set the startup to manual, or in the case of really aggressive ones where instantiating the plug-in(s) triggers a start, disabled. Then the installer pitches a fuss next time I try to install one of their products. None of this rigmarole is endearing, really the opposite.

My computer is probably capable of running these stupid things without my noticing any performance hit, but as with any running program, it's just another thing to go wrong, another bit of complexity that nudges the system closer to error. No matter how benign they think these things are, if there's a mistake in the code they could have memory leaks or any number of other issues. Or someone else's program could have a conflict.

I used to work in the commercial software biz, I get that the corporate ego says that one's own product is the most important program on a user's computer, and that the user should welcome multiple entries in the Start menu, etc., but if you really must flex, just dump an unasked for shortcut on my desktop like everyone else.

</rant>