RANT: IK Multimedia... stop installing 5GB of BS on my drive!

[James Steele]

Okay... I know it's been said many times, and in many places, but IK Multimedia needs to knock it off with these installers that install gigabytes of crap on your hard drive when you just want one plug-in. I recently availed myself of a deal where you got a IK Multimedia plug as a free gift when you bought something else. Little did I know I had to go back to my installer and install gigabytes worth of crap on my drive—all these plugs I don't use—in order to install the one plug that I will use. This is because I previously, painstakingly, deleted all the extra plug-ins that are part of the T-RackS suite that IK Multimedia feels necessary to park on my drive *just in case* I buy them someday. (I know UA kinda does the same thing.)

Quit doing this. Installers should download as needed. Don't park gigabytes of crap on my drive!!! tStop it!!

[bayswater]

I have to agree. The amount of admin time involved in keeping a vendors plugins up to date is becoming an important consideration for me. For that reason, I’ve pulled back to one VI and one reverb plugin from IKM, and I’m not like to buy any more. Waves is also a PITA for complicated installers you have noted here.

One of the companies that is easy to manage if PSP. They send you an email with an update notice, you click on it, get your own page, and click on link for the installer package for that plugin. And you only have to install the formats you want. No large folders of VSTs I never use.

I notice that Melda gives you an installer with everything in it, but at least it seems to know which plugins you have, so the default is to only install updates to those you already have.

One thing I used to watch for with IKM was that some plugins seemed to depend on the presence of others. So if plugin A is wasn’t installed, plugins B, C, and D didn’t work.

[mhschmieder]

Arturia's the "worst" in that regard, as updates are frequent and usually across the product line, so it can take well over an hour to do "one" update, all of which requires constant intervention and thus multi-tasking is nigh impossible.

I like how Plug-in Alliance and some others do it, where you only have to authorize once to run the full suite installer, then you can go off and cook dinner.

[mikehalloran]

Nevermind...

[James Steele]

What am I missing? Although the All Products tab shows many products, nothing that isn't in My Library is installed.

Updates can take forever to download and install, I'll grant you that. The squirrels running the treadmills that power French internet seem to be pretty slow.

Well, talking just about IK Multimedia for a moment (they're in Italy, aren't they?) with a product like T-RackS, their installer installs EVERY plug-in that's part of that suite, and then they try to sell you on purchasing it if you try to open one that you don't own. So if you're a DP user, you can indeed go into DP's settings and determine which plugs you don't own and disable them from loading so you aren't presented with plug-ins you don't own and then get a little notice informing you that you can demo or buy them. This is also what UA does, but in that case there are a couple of utilities out there that will automate the removal of the plugs that you haven't purchased. I just don't want plugins installed on my computer just sitting around waiting for the day I demo or purchase them. Both IK and UA do this. Maybe with larger hard drives today, it's not a big deal, but I don't want Time Machine backing all that up, too.

Also, IK's installer stores a backup of the installers themselves on your boot drive. If you go to:
~/Library/Application Support/IK Multimedia/
you'll see folders named after your various VI's and plugs that contain archives that end with the file extension ".pak." I think these actually used to be the raw installers (.pkg) but either they changed the format recently or I already moved them. I could be wrong. But I believe these are backups that IK decided to just park on your boot drive. On my system that's "only* 3.8GB of stuff... here's what it looks like:

12-Jun-2023.jpg (223.93 KiB) Viewed 1696 times

You can see that they're not terribly large, but the T-Racks archive is pretty large because it contains the installer for ALL the plugs so that folder is 1.91GB combined. Then the other folders aren't really all that bad with Sample Tank 4 and Syntronk 2 eating up about 1.4GB together. But again these are just the backups IK installs. I'm not sure how much space all the actualy VST3, VST2, AAX and AU T-RackS plugs that were installed took up, but it added up too.

Like I said, just wish these installers would install piecemeal and when I need them.

[mikehalloran]

Ooops, I was confusing them with UVI. Waiting on an appointment to get my eyeglasses prescription changed next week...

Through various upgrade offers over the last decade, I have everything from IK. My T-Racks 5 folder is nearly 9GB.