Sooo.... What did everyone get? (Not A Deal, Full Kontakt Not Required)

[kitekrazy]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Saverio gives the user the choice of using the omnibus installer or not. So depending on your comfort level with installers, how many licenses you own, you get to choose what method you think works best. Would that they all operated that way.

Are his UI's "bland?" I guess they are compared to IK Multimedia T-RackS. They're flat, but have color.

Ever notice most plugins in a DAW never win an eye candy award.

I am always attracted to Live's 8bit look.

All of those former Sony now Magix,  I always want the GUI look like it was 20 years ago.

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy said:

I always want the GUI look like it was 20 years ago

What did you think of the Addictive Drums 2 facelift of a couple years ago? Going from that faux brushed aluminum 3-D fantasy spaceship control panel paradigm to the current crisp, flat look.

I neglected AD2 for a long time because the UI made me feel like if I turned away and then looked back it would be 1992 and I'd be running GeoWorks on a 386. I made a new skin for Session Drummer 3 so that I didn't have to look at that faux metal panel complete with drop shadows and two little vents (or speaker grills) up at top left and right. Putting vents in the panel of something that's not even supposed to resemble an actual real world object is weird. It's worse than rack screws on FX plug-in panels.

No wonder so much recent music has been so boring. The people who designed our music software UI's once dreamed of sending us to the stars. No wonder that the music made now sounds two dimensional like the current UI fashion.😁

Seriously, I reeeeeallly don't like the embossed metallic plastic 3-D look for software UI's in 2025. Maybe it was the hot thing 20 years ago but we now seem to have less need for our computer programs to look like physical objects.

I used to tease Acoustica about the "woodgrain" side panels on Mixcraft's mixer. Maybe I'll live long enough to feel nostalgia for that sort of thing.

Or....do you mean the Spartan, plain, homely as hell look, like the DXi plug-ins that still ship with Vegas Pro and Sound Forge? The ones that make the Sonitus fx suite look fancy? The ReaPlugs look. I think AirWindows must be the masters of that, where the plug-ins don't even have UI's, rather it's supplied by the DAW presenting the user with a generic page of labeled sliders. Do most DAW's even still let you run plug-ins using the "generic" UI?

It might be fun to try a few modern plug-ins with the generic UI turned on just to see how they look. Especially something weird like Motion: Fractal or whatever.

[Cookie Jarvis]

Personally I hate the flat cartoon thing. I like a mixer to look like a mixer, a compressor to look like one, etc. I have Abelton Lite....opened it once and thought it was nice that Fisher-Price had a music application for children

Moving the unicorns tale to increase volume or rotating the triangle with the dot in it to increase modulation isn't something I'm going to do.

Nostalgia on the other hand is fun....the old Cakewalk and Cubase interfaces, the really cool synths(at least we thought so for the times), just making music on the computer was such a good feeling! But over the years I've gotten more serious about creating music and need an environment conducive to that...but that's me

Edited Friday at 06:40 PM by Cookie Jarvis
The word on does not have an i in it :)

[Salvatore Sorice]

I have Izotope/Native Instruments Music Production Suite 6. They're offering me upgrade to 8 for $275.40

Anyone have 8? If so, think it is materially better than 6 and worth that price?

[Starship Krupa]

Okay, I need to set something straight here, as I got a fact wrong about a line of virtual instruments that I really like.

Chromaphone is NOT the only A|A|S synth that lets the user mark favorite patches. There is a valid reason that I got it wrong, which is that the synths' UI's differ and it can be difficult to find whatever they are calling the preset manager.

I've been using them more in the past few days, and poking at them more. As I discovered, 3 of them actually allow the user to set favorites among the zillions of presets. That amounts to less than half the line if you count Player, which a lot of people use.

Details, in order of modernity:

Chromaphone 3 has the most contemporary UI and has the ability to mark favorites.

Ultra Analog VA-3's editing panels still party like it's 2015, but the front-facing UI looks similar to Chromaphone 3, complete with a similar browser that allows marking favorites.

Lounge Lizard EP-5 has most elements of the newer look, including being able to mark favorites, but it varies from the above in that you click on a button labeled "Library" in order to open the view that the others call "Browser." There aren't as many editing options with this one anyway, 

Multiphonics CV-33 has elements of the new UI but as far as I can tell, only has a list of patches, not the full-featured browser that the above 3 have, missing the very important (to me) ability to mark favorites.

String Studio VS-3 has the old "Session" style UI, but it does have a browser that allows you some of the category sorting that the other newer browsers do, but no favorites and the browser is hard to find, the button for it is just an unmarked down arrow next to the previous/next patch buttons.

Strum GS-2 looks and functions like Strum Session, except it can also load soundpacks. No favorites here either. It's the one most in need of a UI refresh.

Overall it looks like they got the Chromaphone 3 UI just like they wanted it, then transplanted elements of it down the rest of the line never making it down to Strum GS.

[bitflipper]

I spent 30 years designing user interfaces for complex systems. Of particular interest to me was sitting down with a new user and observing which parts they figured out right away versus which parts required explanation. My goal was to always to give them a clean layout that made sense from the get-go, one that they could quickly learn to navigate without instruction. I wanted the most-used features up front and obvious, while providing a logical way to drill down into the more advanced features.

What came as a huge surprise (and disappointment) to me was that users generally did not give a damn about easy-to-use UIs. Even if they needed help initially to perform certain tasks, once they learned how to do it they whisked through the procedures like they were born into it.

To my surprise, users cared about one thing only: does the software do what they want it to do? Knowing what it was capable of, they had no problem figuring out how to get there.

The first really big project I worked on was a Windows/SQL Server-based replacement for an aging Burroughs mini and text-based dumb terminal user interfaces. Yes, I was unashamedly cashing in on the Y2K mass psychosis. But I saw an opportunity to be a hero by making the system more user-friendly. Dropdown menus instead of memorizing obscure codes, the ability to display multiple accounts at once, better data validation, helpful popup hints. They're gonna love this, I thought. They were unimpressed.

I found myself creating "shortcuts" for them such as just typing in a classification code rather than selecting it from a menu, because it was faster.

As a consumer of virtual audio devices, I find that I am applying the same skepticism toward fancy UIs, favoring  the straightforward designs of Valhalla, Meldaproduction and Voxengo products over pretty shaded knobs. Even Kontakt, with arguably the worst UI in the business, eventually proved to be no problem. Ditto for U-He's obtuse UI for Zebra and Spectrasonics' disjointed windows in Omnisphere.

The point being that the UI is overrated as a selling point. As long as I can figure it out, and it does what I want, then I'm happy. I love Fabfilter's UIs, none of which resemble the hardware they emulate, but are quick and easy to navigate. At the same time, I am not offended by D16 Group's photorealistic portrayals and mystery knobs because their effects work so well.

 

[Carl Ewing]

On 12/6/2025 at 1:39 AM, Cookie Jarvis said:

Personally I hate the flat cartoon thing. I like a mixer to look like a mixer, a compressor to look like one, etc. I have Abelton Lite....opened it once and thought it was nice that Fisher-Price had a music application for children

This can be done well though. For example, I much prefer this cleaner / flatter UI style for SSL channel strip: 

Versus the more rough UI "vintage" style: 



Although - ideally - I prefer this - the SL 4000 E console channel strip for Console 1. At least...I like the UI style. I *really* don't like the horizontal scrolling of parameters. They should have kept it rotary.

Edited 23 hours ago by Carl Ewing

[TracingArcs]

I had intended to go for the Spitfire TON this year. But there were none. And I felt the confusion over pricing and codes just muddied the waters.

So bought Fracture Sounds - Orchestral Atmospheres (Kontakt - £29 from £49) as I have got a lot of use out of their Blueprint freebies and felt it was worth throwing some money their way as I can't afford the bigger stuff from them (It's very useful by the way).

And got from Cinematique Instruments - Marble (Kontakt). As it is now down to 19 euros  and now in their archive series. Had used the free version. But this has over 900 presets. And a big drop in price (and again very versatile). So spent far less than budgeted for.

[husker]

28 minutes ago, TracingArcs said:

I had intended to go for the Spitfire TON this year. But there were none. And I felt the confusion over pricing and codes just muddied the waters.. 

+100.  I picked up the Ton for the past several years, and probably would have done the same this year. I really don't understand why they didn't have it. I saw some thread on VI control stating they may not have one, but I didn't understand the reason why.

 

[Starship Krupa]

On 12/7/2025 at 9:57 AM, bitflipper said:

My goal was to always to give them a clean layout that made sense from the get-go, one that they could quickly learn to navigate without instruction. I wanted the most-used features up front and obvious, while providing a logical way to drill down into the more advanced features.

What came as a huge surprise (and disappointment) to me was that users generally did not give a damn about easy-to-use UIs.

I'll claim here that there's a difference between "easy-to-use" and "easy-to-learn." There's also a difference between (what used to be called "shrink wrap") software like Sonar or Vegas where there are a zillion features, some of which may be touched by the user only once over a matter of weeks or months, or even never, and software designed for a more specific task like data entry or point of sale.

In the second type of software, the user is expected to be given intensive hands-on training and then probably at least at first, operate it with an experienced user close at hand, ready to answer any questions and give useful advice. In the former type, the user will have nowhere to turn to except documentation and Reddit /YouTube/forum (if the program has a large enough user base to have a useful Reddit/YouTube/forum community).

With these two types of software, there's a big difference in the importance of how easy features are to figure out. In the case of DAW or NLE software, the user could go long enough between using a certain feature that they don't remember how to access and use it the first few times they need it. In the case of DAW software, it's important for the export/render features to be easy to figure out because of how infrequently a user may actually get a project to the point where it's suitable for rendering.😒

Deciding which features, options and operations should be the more "front-facing" vs. buried behind menus is important.

Case in point: MeldaProduction's MDynamics vs. MCompressor, MModernCompressor and MLimiterX. MDynamics is the flagship and wins hands down in the "will it do what I want it to do" category, but I have used it on exactly zero projects despite having access to every MeldaProduction processor (and instrument). On the other hand, I use MCompressor and MLimiterX all the time, and even use MModernCompressor (MeldaProduction's Edsel) occasionally.

Why, when MDynamics will do any dynamics processing task you'd ever want to do? Its feature set eclipses the other three.

The answer is that MCompressor and MLimiterX are easy to learn and easy to use, and MModernCompressor has one important feature front-facing (this would be the ability to select different types of detection algorithm, including "psychoacoustic," which is buried 3 configuration screens deep in MDynamics).

It saves me time and loss of flow to be able to set up the less capable processors so quickly and easily vs. the more complex and capable one. Of course, if my task were to do nothing but set up dynamics all day long, and I had to choose only one of them, MDynamics would win hands down because once you get good at it, you can do everything with it that the other three do, and probably just as quickly if it were the only choice. Despite having to negotiate multiple menus to do the same thing, I could get good at it to the point where it wouldn't matter.

Much of MeldaProduction's product line has been revolutionized by the addition of "devices" that present subsets of the products' features in a variety of simplified formats with more skeuomorphic UI's. You can still ignore those and use the products in their "under the hood" mode, but I am sure that the devices have helped sell a lot of plug-ins and have helped a lot of existing users make more use of them.

So software isn't always just software, design philosophies and objectives can vary depending on the intended audience and function of the program.

[Cookie Jarvis]

Hey Carl, I have to say of the 3 versions you posted for me it's-

1. SSL- exactly the type of interface I enjoy!

2. Brainworx- not as elegant as the SSL but still has good seperation and legibility.

3. Softube- the type of interface I tolerate....a huge black background with a little grey here and there and some small white lettering and invisible sideway faders for manipulation.

When it gets past 3, you know full on circus peanuts and spongebob I'm out!

[Starship Krupa]

Regarding @Carl Ewing's visual comparison of channel strips, I really like the most recent iteration of Eventide's UltraChannel.

There are knobs, buttons, and sliders, and they look enough like those things for their functions to be clear. However, there's no imitation 3-D stuff, no drop shadows or reflections.

I think it fits between the bx and the Softube. I don't like the Softube, I don't really want to learn a new control paradigm, knobs and sliders are fine. I just prefer the flat look over the 3-D. No offense intended to those who prefer them (even I love my T-RackS processors), but those screws and 3-D controls feel like 70's simulated woodgrain to me these days.