Mr eel
The Problem with Synth and EFX Plugins
Most audio plugins seem to have been made by developers with a hardware fetish. The interfaces seek to replicate the look and feel of a piece of hardware. Wood-panelling, LEDs, knobs, tiny abbreviated control labels.
Yikes. It all makes for a pretty miserable experience. For starters most of ‘em look like poo. Just kinda nasty, certainly nothing like the hardware they are meant to evoke. They make themselves more difficult to use because screen space is given to eye-candy rather than controls. Behavior between one plugin and another is inconsistent. In some the knobs work by sliding your mouse up and down, in others you have to move it about in tiny circles — this is so brain-dead words escape me.
All this effort to replicate hardware and if anything they are worse. At least with some hardware you have actual controls to touch with your hands. Using soft synths is a bit like trying to program some hardware with one finger. After all a mouse is only one point.
Perhaps even worse, they replicate the obtuse and difficult interfaces found in hardware, for no real reason! It’s software. It doesn’t have the same limitations as hardware, so why aren’t we improving on the experience?
Bluntly, there are too many unimaginative types out there making plugins. Making the same mistakes. Don’t get me started on all the fucking faux-analogue plugins! So much for the possibilities of soft-synths.
I know it’s too much to hope for, but I really wish there was a standard for plugin interfaces. It would save me a hell of a lot of mucking about and go a long way to breaking this fascination with replicating hardware.
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