Why does IK Multimedia generally have a bad reputation?

I didn’t realise they do have a bad reputation. I used to use T-Racks, many moons ago when I taught high school, and loved it.

I won’t use them now, because their installer is the scariest pile of crap I’ve ever double-clicked on. I keep getting offers of free products and, once in a while, I’ll give one a go on the laptop I use for testing things out. And every time the thing seems to start about 15 parallel processes, so that I have pop-ups all over my desktop asking whether I want to allow an unnamed process to make changes to my machine, and no idea what they all are, or if some are unnecessary. I always uninstall it immediately, but then eventually they’ll offer me something else, and I’ll wonder how bad it can really have been….

I’m aware that I’m massively more anxious than most about such things though. I still won’t have my studio machines online, which is an ancient mindset. So if you’re not plagued by my fears then there’s no reason IK should have a bad reputation.

nortiks said:

For me UAD is: good products, good company, abominably abysmal product manager software and license enforcement mechanisms. And actually the product manager itself is fine, its just the fact it auto-launches when you open a UAD plugin, even when the license is on a local dongle. But you can
delete the product manager after installing products and it works fine.

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Yeah, I got a pack with plugins from UA at the holiday sales, and the dam* plugin manager comes up every time I load them into a session. What a fcn dic* move!! I’ve stopped using them, and think about deleting them from my system. I just can’t deal with shi* like that, total creativity buster.. so I can choose between harassment or inconvenience(?!!), not for me.

I even considered picking up an OX and an Apollo, but this has really put UA on ice for me. What other ploys do they have up their sleeve?

Dietz said:

Most certainly not due to their sound. I know a least two top-tier mastering engineers who are using several of their plug-ins regularly.

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this. basically all the engineers I met have (or had) some of the T-Racks stuff in the chain somewhere. Their D-esser and most compressors are just great (add also that they have M-S features, which makes them extremely powerful), sunset reverb same. But in general all the T-Racks range is excellent.

I personally load lots of their mixing plugs when mixing.

1. Installed Syntronik 2 from the group buy a few years ago, the installer defaulted to installing every single synth sample (190GB) to my C:\documents drive on Windows which filled up my boot drive and gave me drive full errors until I could figure out how to move the installation folder.
2. The installer saves every single product update file, you have to manually delete them from the installation folders for each product every time you update if you don't want these old installers from filling your drive.
3. Installed Miroslav Philharmonik 2 CE and found that the latest version will install but gives an error and will not run, you have to go into the IK website to download the previous version and install it over the later version. This has been a known issue for several years but they still have not fixed the latest version.
4. T-Racks will install every single effect, even the ones you have not purchased. It's up to you to figure out which one you own. I had to go in and rename the ones I own so I know which ones I can use and if I update T-Racks, I have to rename then all over again.
5. Tonex - if you have the hardware pedal, you can't edit the pedal parameters directly like most hardware/software guitar pedal products, you have to edit the parameters within the software and then download it to the pedal.

That's off the top of my head. I like a lot of their products but their installer is a nightmare.

Installing plugin like Mixbus is fine. But installing things like Syntronic is hell. I think Syntronic install was OK. Then i upgraded to Syntronic Delux and could never get all the presets to work. E few months ago i tried to install SampleTank V2 Max(mostly for Syntronic v2 Max) thinking that should fix the problems but got similar results. All i would say is if you want to buy Syntronic don't think about upgrading unless you enjoy beings disspointed. Too bad cause i think it's really nice. If i had to do it again i would go with the competition like UVI. IK really needs to fix their installer/manager.