Analog Lab is part of the V Collection. You can buy Analog Lab without the rest of the V Collection, but then you can only use the presets (with some minor tweaking ~ like in FLEX). V Collection is Arturia's suite of standalone synths. Which to be honest, like I said, I am now definitely not a fan of.xMrDragonx804 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 10:32 pmNextDAW wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 6:34 pmRecommended (Synths & Effects):
Image-Line - Sytrus, Harmor, Ogun, FLEX.
U-He - Diva, Hive 2, Zebra 2 / ZebraHZ, Repros
Fabfilter - Total Bundle
Kilohearts - Toolbox Ultimate
Modartt - PianoTeq
Synapse Audio - Dune 3
Matt Tytel - Vital (Free)
AAS - Lounge Lizard EP-4
RevealSound - Spire
discoDSP - Discovery Pro
ValhallaDSP - Delay, VintageVerb, Plate, Room, Shimmer, Supermassive (Free), FreqEcho (Free), SpaceModulator (Free).
Sonic Academy - ANA 2
KV331Audio - SynthMaster One & 2
Lennar Digital - Sylenth1 (oldie but goldie)
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Arturia V Collection 8 (and also Pigments 3) = For me, these have been my biggest waste of money. And currently I have uninstalled both from my device and de-registered them from my Arturia account. I'll get around to selling them at some point for a discount to any interested parties. I personally wouldn't recommend Arturia software to anyone, although I know some people claim to like them. They do make some decent hardware (MIDI controllers) though.
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Yeah, perhaps its just me, but I would ditch the Arturia bloatfest from your list unless you're certain you like it.
Damn really? I love some of the stuff that's out of the box in Arturia Analog Labs V, is V Collection different? I thought they were considered good. Could you elaborate why you feel that way towards Arturia's stuff? Any examples would be appreciated, I'm still newbie to sound design and not sure what details to look for in sound selection/design so I don't really know the full possibilities of what's out there yet. Do they sound hollow, tinny, depth, or something like that compared to the ones you mentioned? Or is it a sound creation/design issues? I thought they were good because they are supposedly almost 1:1 synth emulators.
I find Arturia's V Collection to be rather a bloatfest and very slow to both scan (within plugin manager) and more importantly to load and initialise (into projects) compared to other third party synths which is frustrating and slows me down. I noticed that the slower loading of Arturia's plugins compared to others, seems to be down to the fact that every time you load an Arturia plugin it launches a separate background process (its obtrusive DRM the Arturia Software Center (ASC)), which each Arturia plugin has to communicate back and forth with to verify itself, before said plugin(s) will fully initialise, which reminds me of the iLok Licence Manager, which is another DRM system that I cannot stand. That extra communication/verification can add up to 10 seconds extra to each project load time and quite a bit more if there are multiple Arturia plugins used in a project.
Other users who use plugins such as Kontakt instruments requiring very large sample libraries, are likely used to waiting ungodly amount of time for their projects to load. But I am a MIDI + synth-only / physical modelling user, rather than sample-library dependent, and so I am used to extremely fast load times of projects. Arturia's stuff is like working in slow motion compared to how my other plugins perform (which you can see from my previous list). You don't know how depressing it is to see all your project plugins loading in faster than the eye can catch their names, only for everything to screech to a halt whenever an Arturia plugin is next up, and needs to launch its ASC and have coffee, tea and biscuits with it back and forth, before it will allow it to authorise and load. It made me stop using the plugins altogether and eventually, like I said, completely uninstall everything Arturia.
And you don't even want to know how depressing doing a fresh verified scan with Plugin Manager is with Arturia V Collection installed, versus uninstalled. No lie, that Arturia adds about 15 minutes plus just for those plugins, when every single one of my non-Arturia plugins 'all put together' successfully scan in definitely less than 5 minutes for sure. And I own a lot more non-Arturia plugins than Arturia ones. So there's no justification for it having to take so much longer just to verify, other than that damned 'ASC' which has to open separately and authorise those plugins each and every time. I hate ASC and iLok almost equally now.
Now some users may think I'm being overboard, here. But I got no benefits using Arturia stuff and plenty of negative workflow drawbacks.
As for pure 'sound quality', well Arturia loses there also for me. Since I would choose my U-He synth collection (Diva, Hive 2, Zebra 2/ZebraHZ, Repro-1/Repro-5), Modartt's PianoTeq (I own the entire bundle) and my Applied Acoustics Systems 'Integral' bundle, over anything Arturia V Collection has to offer. And I also prefer Phase Plant, Dune 3 and Vital over Arturia Pigments, any day, and all at a fraction of the load times of Arturia's stuff, and also sound better to boot.
Generally speaking, with other companies I have mentioned, their 'upgrade pricing' of most of their products to a brand new 'major version update' are also far more fair and reasonable than Arturia also, who in my opinion offer awful pricing for major version upgrades, border-lining on being out and out 'rip off merchants' if you ask me. But that's not something that overly concerns me anymore since I know I will never buy anything from Arturia ever again.