Developer Love

[huggermugger]

Often in these groups people ask 'what's your favourite synth? your favourite compressor? your favourite reverb?'. Less often people ask 'who's your favourite developer?'. Most developers have a distinctive design/use philosophy and some developers really shine. For me, a favourite is SugarBytes. I really dig their interesting UIs, deep programmability, and overall sophistication. Plus they sound great. I own these four SugarBytes devices, and I'm eager to grab another one called Egoist.

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What developer really turns you on and why?

[BRIGGS]

Sugarbytes ftw! I use looperator on a daily basis.

Even thought their gui's are blah, I like Valhalla. Having a good reverb is mission critical, for doing ambient stuff.

[freshkidblaze]

Kilohearts for me, after using phaseplant 2 it helped made me use the rack extentions in ways I didn't think to use them. All I need from them is multipass, I can't wait for it to go on sale. So much freedom within their ecosystem.

[EdGrip]

Valhalla

Tokyo Dawn Records

D16 (I love their UI design, even though it's often pure UX chaos)

Unfiltered Audio (the only thing of theirs I have is Dent 2, but I love it and use it all the time. They just make fun stuff.)

U-He, of course, for being some of the granddaddies.

[dvdrtldg]

Klanghelm, for a small suite of basic meat-and-potatoes plugins that are top quality and ridiculously cheap

Soundtoys, for their delays (Echoboy, Primal Tap) and saturation devices and the sexiest UIs around

Audio Thing, for their commitment to weird & creative plugins. Wires, Gong Amp and Fog Convolver are three of my all time favourite effects. Outer Space is the Roland RE-201 emulation to rule them all. Valves is a beast. And again, they all look fantastic

u-He, for classic synths that are deep, powerful, incredible sounding and very user friendly. And Satin is one of the very best tape emulations out there

Waves. This is a tough one, because as a company I think Waves absolutely blow - they're nickel & dime chisellers who seemingly put as much time & creativity into sucking money out of their customers as they do into developing software. But I do love a bunch of their plugins, especially the Abbey Road Collection. I have no idea how faithfully they model this or that historic console or hardware EQ or compressor or whatever, and I don't care, so all the "capture the classic sound of the Beatles!" marketing fluff is a bit of a non-issue. Just taken on their own terms, they're wonderful plugins (Abbey Road Plates & Chambers especially are two of the best sounding reverbs I've heard). And then there's a bunch of other Waves gear that I've been using for years - Vitamin, PuigChild 670 comp, MV2, API 2500 comp, Brauer Motion, F6 EQ, H-Delay, Smack Attack, NLS, L3 Limiter. Couldn't live without them, they're essential tools

[MattLeschuck]

Toneboosters, Kilohearts and Audiothing. Love simple, clean GUIs that are easy to look at. They are also all very active with the community.

[DaveyG]

I don't like the title of this thread. It conjures up icky images.

[Popey]

I have a lot of respect for a whole host of vst and re devs so too many to mention however I will give a special shout out to Steve Duda of xfer for his customer service and generous thoughts towards customers.

Had a few email conversations with him and his responses always go over and above answering my questions and the rationale behind why he does things. I am also pleasantly surprised by him wanting to reward those that supported him by buying serum with serum 2 being free to them if/when it is released.

Considering the success of serum he is likely to give up a lot of money doing this. He is aware of this but wanted to give thanks to serum customers for the support. Nice gesture imo and worth the praise.

[RobC]

Reason Studios, because they made Reason U w U

[arnigretar]

Reason, Lectric Panda, Selig, Ekssperimental Sounds, Turn2on (RE)

Arturia, Soundtoys, D16, Fabfilter, Waves (VST)

[dezma]

If I had to pick one I'd choose synapse - great synths and very good support / communication

Further in top 5: arturia, valhalla DSP, fabfilter, vengeance

[wowhow]

I actually love all developers (selig, jiggery pokery, letricpanda, tonic mint, orkerstein, chis griffin, iphonik, skrok, turn2on and a lot of others) but I can't get over retouch controls's mapping of pusher to reason!