There are over 100 comments at the time of this posting. I think I saw ONE that was positive.
Haven’t they heard of a company called Waves?
What a shitshow. And a shame. That looks like a cool synth. I have 3 or 4 MA products and prob won’t ever own a new one then. Subscription-based models are 
Not about the synth…
But also a bunch of political shitposts would achieve the same thing as the thread title.
Is this basically just Codex reloaded? Maybe Codex II: Electric Boogaloo?
I’ve never really understood the allure of their plugins to begin with. They had a few decent strips, a few shitty strips, and pretty much nothing else of use to me. Maybe it’s just too god-tier for my shitty ears, but I don’t get it. I also know they’ve been committing a slow suicide for a long time now anyway, but I don’t really see it as a big loss when we have so many other companies who operate pretty fairly (diminishing, but they still exist).
If people took to the high seas on this one I wouldn’t be too surprised, but for me I haven’t even ventured that far with Waves because there’s really not much to gain there. They seem a bit behind the times, kind of like McDSP or [insert any other company from 10 years ago who hasn’t done anything cool since then but somehow still stays in business]. Pretty soon they might just fade into obscurity where they sort of belong, while they keep pushing these mindless, soulless plugins that everyone has already made a thousand times over by now.
Also, was that edIT in the video? Crazy cameo there 
Apparently, they didn’t disclose the fact that it was going to be subscription only when they sent the synth to reviewers… Oof.
I didn’t like Rift at first because it was a CPU pig but after updates, it became much better. Morph EQ is fun too.
Waves: I did get Flow Motion on sale some years ago and did like it quite a bit. It will always stay on version 11 because I’ll never pay yearly for an update. So basically I don’t use it anymore.
I forgot about the update thing, that was kind of hilarious as well when they rolled it out. I think I have one of their old strips and I’ll be damned if I ever pay just to keep that thing updated when there are alternatives galore.
Honestly I don’t know why anyone even entertains shit like this (not here, but legit repeat customers). You’re kind of paying to get burned, or in cases like this, you’re overpaying for hundreds of plugins you don’t even need. This is right out of Adobe’s playbook and when companies get this big, it’s usually bad news for the consumer.
This was my take on it as well. I played with Rift when it came out and it was…fine. Most of their stuff looks boring and not giving me anything I don’t already have(unless, like you, it’s just too god-tier for my ears to process). Current just looks like every other modern synth package, and I have a couple already thank you very much. Tack a sub onto it and it’s a big nope from me.
I feel like we’re well into the ‘Soundcloud Rapper/Bedroom Producer’ age of software. On the one hand, it’s awesome that anyone with a second-hand Acer laptop can shit out some DSP and an interface, but on the other, there’s zero quality control. That barrier of entry cuts both ways and manages to dilute the water with hundreds of “I too made an EQ! It’s awesome despite being a textbook implementation of a 40 year old algorithm used in pretty much every other EQ! It’s pretty b/c my girlfriend is an art major! Now with Dark Mode and Man-Bun Support! BUY TODAY!”…get the fuck outta here.
Absolutely this.
I think the worst part about all of this is that new producers are more confused than ever about what’s actual shovelware and real power tools because some of the really bullshit ones have video game-like interfaces and look super shiny from the outside while doing almost nothing to the signal. I forget which ‘suite’ I demoed just for laughs a few weeks ago, but one of the plugins (out of like 15-25 of them) literally had no noticeable effect when it was supposed to be engaged. It was like they just forgot to insert something into the DSP chain and released it without testing, plus most of the others had obvious faults with their dry / wet mixes. Essentially their entire suite couldn’t even stand up to something like SpecOps, even when doing the basic filtering that SpecOps and other high-quality plugins can sometimes do just as a byproduct.
Waves might fall into the camp of having some serious power tools for sure, but their consistency and quality has really changed over time… or maybe it’s that times have changed and they’ve stood still? One or the other.
Honestly if I were just starting out now, I’d also be confused. The sheer amount of shovelware that exists today is overwhelming, or plugins that just do the same thing that many others have done already with no cool twists and turns (usually when there’s also a free alternative that exists somewhere). It’s crazy how a lot of those devs seem to keep making money in the midst of all of this, but even that eventually has to burn out like music basically did.
Well props to MA - they apologized and are changing the pricing model!
Initial backlash must really have been brutal
Yeah, I totally agree there’s a lot of trash out there - including some of the ‘big name’ suites. Though I don’t have any time with it, I’m lumping Current in with that because it looks like a Phase Plant knock off, likely with a lot less plugins, and I’ll eat my hat if it manages to sound noticeably better. It looks like one more thing I don’t need.
My real issue is that nobody is moving the needle anymore. It’s all reskins and small, iterative changes instead of paradigm shifts. Which is fine since maybe something helps your workflow/process a bit and we can always do with less friction, but I don’t feel like that’s inspiring. What was the last huge thing to change ITB production? Serum, 10 years ago? Maybe UVI Falcon? VCV Rack? How many reverb plugins have come out since Valhalla Vintage and haven’t managed to match the quality? It’s hard to be excited about new offerings when it feels like all you get are overpriced knockoffs that do the same as the last handful, and aren’t meaningfully different than shit I can download from KVR for free.
I think the most sage and salient piece of advice I ever got about music production (specifically relating to gear, but it might actual be the best thing overall) is that 99% of the time, the person listening to your music is never going to know what you used to make it. That’s doubly true of synths, and double-plus true of software synths. Like, all this shit doesn’t matter. It’s all bad, it’s all fine. Use what you have and don’t be the poor craftsman blaming your tools, and don’t be poor because you think you need more tools.
tl;dr - Current looks sadly current, just like everything else coming out. Even if it was free, I’d probably only play around with it but I doubt it’d stick around long.
It depends what you want in VSTs… To me, the only thing that matters is how the synth sounds/what I can use it for without having to learn about programming because frankly I’m not interested in making less-than-average quality sounds when some presets are out of this world and just need a little tweaking to be what I’d like them to be. Therefore, it’s great to own a pool of synths I can choose from for whatever I want to do with them.
I try to stay on top of what’s new because being on top of the tools is one way for me to separate myself from every other bedroom engineer out there. But I agree most of the big moves in DSP in recent years have been more about workflow and less about the actual DSP getting better. For instance @Artificer brought up Valhalla Vintageverb. I agree, the number of reverbs that I think sound straight up better than Vintageverb I can count on one hand, and they’re all expensive - eventide SP2016, a good Lexicon emulation (there are few, including some by Lexicon), and Valhalla Room when you need something more neutral. So two emulations of vintage units and another Valhalla product… And the other reverb I’m interested in is VSS4 HD native, which is an emulation of another 20+ year old hardware unit.
But one that sounds almost as good and gets me where I want to be faster is Izotope Neoverb. I picked that up for like 10 bucks during black friday last year and it quickly took over most of my FX tracks. I can use 3 instances of Vintageverb on multiple busses running into each other to get the sound I’m after, or I can slap Neoverb on one bus and tweak a few sliders after I hit the “reverb for me” button.
There are a few tools pushing at the edges of what can be done with classic processing ideas. If you look at Tone Projects Kelvin, it’s a nice saturator/distortion. More or less gives you the flexibility of Saturn with more broad strokes controls. But the magic slider inside of there is a “width” control which takes the harmonics you’re adding and puts them in progressively more and more of the sides signal, which means that during mastering I can make a track wider without touching the original audio by just blending in a little saturation on the side channels. That’s pretty cool, but is that really what 10 years have gotten us from Decapitator?
I think the actual biggest jump in DSP in recent years was zero-delay feedback filters being implemented in DSP for the first time… which happened 10 years ago in Diva for the first time. And it’s still not something I can run on more than one instrument at a time. Finding a way to accelerate that workload algorithmically in a way that’s easy for a CPU to run natively (without going through an abstraction layer to do calculus) is probably the next big jump (outside of AI powered stuff).
Also just a shoutout for the Output FX, I got Portal last year and that made granular FX fun and easy to automate in my tracks. A bit expensive for mostly a preset machine, but I have multiple songs built around ideas that came out of playing with it so yeah… Thermal looks fun too. I’d like to see something with a similar interface for reverb, kind of like a souped up Neoverb…
Oh, and if you don’t have one, get an EQ that can oversample. I didn’t think that would make a difference until I tried to EQ the top end with versus without oversampling. Every EQ plugin that has a rep for a “smooth” or “natural” or “effortless” top end is just the sound of oversampling keeping the reconstruction filters away from whatever EQ moves you’re trying to make.