Same is true for Spitfire, Spectrasonics, etc. I can still download Native Instruments libraries I bought 15 years ago. As far as I can tell, nobody but IK has a limit like this. You say 'storage is pretty cheap these days,' but so is enterprise-grade cloud hosting.

The 180-day limit tarnishes the IK name and I'd estimate that that tarnish has a much greater impact on IK's bottom line than the cost of lifetime downloads. It seems to come up a lot on every forum as a reason not to buy IK software, even if they're talking about IK products that don't have the limit.

But there's also a lot of hate for the 'business practices' and I think 90% of them are because of this download limit.

IK gets a lot of love for the quality of many of its plugins. Hey Peter: As a TS3.5MAX owner and someone who has used IK plugins for over a decade, I'd like to just throw it out there: You can download the main applications/plugins any time though. You can download those and back them up within that time (storage is pretty cheap these days) if you'd like. Otherwise, though, you don't have to download and install every SampleTank library, or if you don't want a particular tool like AmpliTube 5 or something, you can download the application/plugin later.Īs I'll address below, there is the 180 day limit to download the sound library installers. However, what people may have been talking about is installing all T-RackS plugins which is true but we have stated that in v6 we'll make it so you can install single T-RackS plugins as you wish. The bundle includes a number of sample-based instruments as well as effects, so it's pretty big in terms of storage requirements.You don't have to download everything in Total Studio 3.5 MAX at one time. I'd be interested to hear from users here about whether that's true. But it appears that one has to download and install the whole bundle even if you only want to use a few plug-ins. There seems to be consensus that there are good plug-ins in the bundle. E.g., the reviews at Sweetwater are interesting. Might be worth checking out some reviews before buying.

Sampletank 4 review