I’ve looked at most of these and eliminated them for various reasons.
For example, Shreddage. (Warning – I’m not giving all the details of the ordeal that discouraged me from pursuing Shreddage, but this account is still crazy long.)
Shreddage had the best-sounding demo I’d heard. I figured, free version, I just go on the site, click “download”, and try it out – fait accompli!
But when I tried downloading the “free” trial version, the site refused to download anything until unless I gave it a PayPal user name, authorized it as a PayPal merchant, and made a “voluntary donation” of at least $5 to “cover bandwidth costs.”
OK, I did all that and the company said I would receive a download link within a few minutes. Nothing came in. After waiting a few hours, I went through the whole process again, got another download promise, and still nothing. The next day, multiple emails from the company finally appeared without warning.
Those emails contained links to download instructions. I quickly discovered that what the seller didn’t tell me is that I’d have to also install Native Instruments Kontakt Player in order to use Shreddage. And that meant setting up yet another account, this time with NI. Arg! Does this mean that Shreddage isn’t a standard VST that I can load into Dorico – that I need a Kontakt player to use it? Or do I also need to somehow install Kontact into Dorico? At this point, who knows? Should I have even continued?
But then it got even worse. After setting up NI, I then would also have to install something called Pulse Downloader, then use a NI serial number to “redeem and download” a “Pulse Downloader instrument.”
Finally, I’d – if all went well – have to register, then activate the downloaded instrument (I assume that this instrument is Shreddage, although it’s never named in the instructions) “in Native Access”, which I assume must be some other Native Instrument product or service. Before I started down that rabbit hole, I wondered whether I’d need to pay for any of these things? No information about that. Only a series of scary paragraphs about possible errors that could occur.
After all that, there were even more instructions about how to load, access, and use the instrument in Kontakt Player. But nothing to indicate whether Kontakt is somehow needed to use Shreddage in a score. Is it even a standard VST3? Or VST2? Or 64-bit? Who knows if it even works with Dorico 6 Pro?
What I mean is that I need to be able to add Shreddage to Dorico for use in just one player, and to create expression maps, articul.ations & playing techniques, whatever for that player. I’m not familiar with the process of using multiple VSTs in one score because I use NotePerformer for all my other players, toth to keep things simple for myself and to make it easier to share scores with collaborators. So I was steeled for this final stage to be a learning experience (one that I know I could figure out); but all this other BS was more than I wanted to deal with. All I want is a quick-and-dirty download of a reasonable-sounding guitar patch for one-time use in a few hundred measures of a single composition.
So although Shreddage initially seemed like it might do the trick, I finally gave up. I’m sure that, given the amateurish, hard-to-naviate UIs that plague the music-software industry – and the problems I’d already experienced with the simplest parta of the process, like ordering and receiving a confirmation email – this, sadly, wasn’t the droid I’m looking for.
Too bad. I had high hopes for this one. Maybe I’ll have a drink at some point and try to tackle it again.
