Plugin Subscriptions

In the modern era of audio we now have several companies offering access to all their plugins for a monthly or yearly fee. This can be great for someone just starting out, but it's also a potential pitfall. The barriers to entry have been removed to some degree, thus a prepaid yearly subscription becomes your biggest commitment. But is there one company that can deliver everything one would want or need? I say no. And it's not likely one is going to be subscribing to multiple companies as someone new to audio. It's not even likely if you're a big studio because chances are you've already purchased what you needed. New products aren't released often enough to really justify the subscription prices so far. It's not like there's something new every month or even every other month. The biggest need for a subscription might be for the studio or engineer who requires one or two plugins for a client and doesn't want to make any sort of commitment.

You've got options from Waves, Slate Digital, Eventide, McDSP, Softube, Kush, Exponential, Nugen, Eastwest, Relab, Avid's Pro Tools, and probably some more. The most complete lines are Waves and Slate. But there's still a lot of game-changers from other companies that you won't be spending on if you sign up for one of those bundles and leave it at that. It really depends on your need. If you're a very casual hobbyist who just wants to get some ideas down and doesn't care to try out every last plugin to see what your favorites end up being, I'd say get a Slate subscription and forget about the rest. You could always add some low cost plugins that are of equal or better quality from companies like Valhalla, Hornet, Sknote, Klanghelm, Plugin Alliance, Blue Cat, Lexicon, Voxengo, Stillwell, Nomad Factory, Tokyo Dawn Labs, and Waves during one of their many $29 sales.

The subscription offering companies also sell individual plugins very cheap sometimes. So maybe you have a Slate subscription and throughout the course of your annual subscription you buy an Eventide H910 for $50, Softube Fix Flanger/Doubler for $60, and a Waves Kramer Tape for $29. Then you add some stuff that's always inexpensive like a Lexicon MPX, Klanghelm MJUC, Sknote Strip, Hornet Tape, Stillwell Bad Buss Mojo, and Voxengo Elephant. Later on you see that Plugin Alliance is running a great sale like the one they did where you could get the VSC-2 and Millennia TCL-2 for $99 and you buy those. Then you see Soundtoys selling something for less than $50 and snag that. There's free stuff like Vlad Limiter 6 and Molot that are great. Keep your eyes and options open and you can do well in assembling your sonic arsenal.

Bottom line, you can go with a subscription and just use that along with your DAW stock plugins, or add things from other companies. You could also buy a high quality lineup of plugins from different companies for less than the cost of one of these annual subscriptions. It really boils down to what you consider to be necessary for your needs and how much you're willing to pay to get it. Depending on computer prices in your country, I'd say to make it a priority to build a computer that can handle a 20+ track session at 88/96 khz before investing hundreds in plugins. Even a Ryzen 3 1300x or Ryzen 5 1400 is a significant upgrade from something like an I5 2320. Building a system from a place like portatech.com is not too expensive. You should be able to move your hardrive and disc drives from your old computer. There's a lot of options for whatever you want to do, you're living in a good time if you want to make high quality audio work on a computer.