(GAS = Gear Acquisition Syndrome - used to be hardware, but now it’s also software. Serious sufferers find unless they can hide their credit cards, the overall spend is at least doubled by compensatory spending on one’s partners wardrobe 
)
So what was your most loved buy in 2022? Can be an App or a plugin, or sample library etc.
Optional : biggest lemon
Library:
Samples from Mars ‘Everything’ bundle.
Plugin:
RC-20
Hardware:
Elektron Model:Cycles
UVI Falcon and some Soundware and effects add-ons; very happy with the investment
LOL, I have 4 of this kind:
1 - EW Pop Brass, too difficult to tame for a bad-room producer, and also impossible to refund/resell/give away for free
2 - UJAM sparkle, just boring
3 - Metapiano, not exciting
about the best ones instead, I cannot say Scaler because I bought it years ago, but if the various releases are valid, Scaler is Number One
then all the Izotopes (even if some doesn’t work with Bitwig), S-Gear guitar amps, Garritan World Instruments, Bitwig Studio, all guitar MIDI packages for AAS Strum-GS 2, Minimonsta (moog), and Soundpaint 1980 Tenor Sax Spectralis
Lemon:
The singing part is difficult. I think it will take several more years for a breakthrough and a game changer to hit the market in singing.
Yes, it seems so, but KK is involved, 
OK, I decided to install KK 
But after having been forced to install 4 useless softwares 
, and having got that to have 1 interesting plugin I was forced to swallow 1 gazillion of GB of ugly samples (KOMPLETE START) I gave up
It is not a matter of ugly Konsonants
It is the fact that to just have the option to test ONE plugin, I have to swallow tons of useless samples: I just hate that
My friend, Kontakt is not a problem neither are its instruments. I tried and uninstalled practically everything that comes with and use only the instruments I bought. Everything else is in the “Not Installed” section 
If you want to uninstall them, go to
then , select the Native Instruments instrument you don’t like (OK, all 
) and uninstall as any other application.
After that, the instrument will return to Not Installed.
Keep just what you like, but wait for the specials. Guitars are quite often at 49.99 US/
My favourites are Omnisphere, DUNE 3, Luftrum’s Lunaris 2 and Pigments 4.
I’ve just been listening to and ‘curating’ patches from Pigments and many are tracks just waiting to be finished.
I’ve also got NI’s ‘Picked Acoustic’ - a great guitar.
Are you on full fibre ? Everything nowadays seems to think that gigabyte downloads are no issue.
Yes, really good one. I have Strumming Acoustic. Also great.
In fact, most of the NI instruments are very good.
Arturia, too.
And not that expensive when on special.
yes, full cotton fibre
1 - Native Access
2 - Kontakt 7
3 - Komplete Kontrol (HAL 9000 said it was mandatory)
4 - Kontakt Factory Selection
5 - Kinetik Treats to have one instrument to look at least
6 - the NI installer
they are 6 dead woods and not small
+
the 7 GB demo for the NI guitar
So hours with my ADSL almost dead (and my wife a little angry 
) just to (hope to) test the instrument I was interested to
No way for me 
Some of these are not instruments but as you knowthe mechanism for you to maintain your account with the vendor, check and get updates and so on. It’s a big step up from the old days of downloading ZIP files and trying to get things into the right directories.
The Arturia equivalent version maintains software, but also manages my keyboard and does things like firmware updates In these days of zero cost (almost) disc space, they just sit there are do a useful job.
The Kontakt Player 7 is now the default for all current NI based instruments. I’d think twice before trashing them …
Of all of this, you need Native Access through which you install Kontakt instruments (NI or others) and Kontakt 7 Player where your instruments are. All the rest, you did not need to install. I forgot if there was an option to uncheck what you don’t need after the download of Native Access. I don’t know what is NI Installer, it’s been a long time. I think it is just the first EXE that runs everything else so it should be quite small.
BTW Electric Mint is 14 GB, Electric Sunburst is 6 GB, Strummed Acoustic 2 is almost 9 GB, but the sounds and templates are incredible and certainly worth of downloading.
If your PC supports a USB C connection it might be worth you investing in a Samsung T7 for less than £100. Once the NI stuff is downloaded it’s there forever.
I can’t see the reason to do that, apart to get hardware manufacturers richer
My ADSL is slow, and nothing can make it faster
I have multiple internal and external SSDs, but wasting space is not a good practice anyway: for example antimalware scans require much more time
Well, after a while I have to add q lemon to the 2022: the Garritan World Instruments
Yes, I said before it was doable, and it is, but it’s not easy to play when it comes to ensembles, because:
1 - each instrument has often totally different note-ranges, and the ARIA engine is unable to manage all them together when you give it a series of chords, so you are forced to drive multiple instances plus MIDI mappers, adding too much complexity to your workflow
2 - the Scaler’s MMO cannot be used due to some ARIA internal problem (its own architecture, maybe)
3 - Last but not least, the sound of samples is poor, and hard to improve even using external effects, at the point the old Edirol Orchestral (without external effects) wins hands down 
4 - There is no demo, so you find its drawbacks only after a while, and you cannot resell the plugin (supposing that somebody wants to pay for a lemon 
)
So I uninstalled it and I am demoing the NI West Africa that seems promising
I’ll let you know what I think about
BTW: the more I haunt the field of bad-room producers, the more I am persuaded that less is better; fewer instruments, easy to play & with a better sound, not tons of instruments impossible to master
