It’s not entitlement. Complex software should be maintained, be it free or paid, be it proprietary or open-source.
I personally cannot even use Vital because of a constant monitor flickering bug on my setup, there have been no updates with bug fixes since 3(?) years ago. Fortunately there are other good synths as well. Vital is a great synth as is, but you shouldn’t assume everyone’s experience is the same.
I hope the dev is still alive and well, it’s understandable they lost interest both in the project and in communication about it; I’m a fickle person and have had a similar experience with my own stuff. Maybe Vital already reached its end, maybe not yet.
Rather than bring out new features, I’d like VItal 1.5.5 to just work on iMac as it doesnt. See previous posts I’v made for details on this problem. Cheers everybody.
i admit that it would seem more normal if there was an occasional edge case mended or opportunity for some optimization to be found. these days the codebase could be dropped into claude and it would probably find a bunch of things that might be worth it to tweak such as updating to the newest version of juce at least. it would be a lot of work still, but what the project needs is someone with time on their hands to do it.
Does anyone know something about this fork GitHub - 12Matt3r/vital: Spectral warping wavetable synth ? Seems like AI nonsense but sounds kinda cool. I have no idea about building code myself tho, would be great if someone could share the dll if some of you can…
The problem with computer software is endless feature creep. When you are a big company or even medium company with employees you need to do this to get new users and the product becomes bloated. Your DAW is really the only thing that needs tons of features because you are using it for everything. Some plugins reach a stage of being pretty complete. I think Vital is pretty much great as is. Vital sounds really good which is my first consideration because there are thousands of synths that don’t. I have real hardware synths here and only a handful of software synths sound as good as those. Vital also seems to be quite easy to use. UI is fine.
These are the first things I consider when looking at these plugins and not how many features it has but then you have to look at the company. Are they ripping you off for something that isn’t that great? Obviously Vital doesn’t fall into that category. Is their licensing a nightmare? Vital is obviously fine there as well but then you have to consider will the software keep working. This is the question with Vital. In my opinion it should not have been free. Helm synth should have been the free one. Most people would have happily paid a small amount and then if problems arrive, it’s not a major loss but the developer could have had more income to at least update occasionally. Free open source software only works if you have an enormous user base and hence lots of developers as well or if it’s just something simple that a single developer doesn’t have to spend a lot of time on. Synths are too specialised and complicated. There is no standard synth that every musician uses.
There are numerous disaster models in selling software way worse than the simple lack of Vital updates. Wolfgang Palm? This is the guy who basically invented digital synths. He released some plugins which sounded brilliant. UIs could have been improved but these synths were absolutely great. He charged quite a lot of money and then sold them off to another company who discontinued them screwing all the users over. We can’t install on new system. We can all still use Vital but there should be a known model moving forward even just fixes to keep it running. I have paid nothing because I’m only just experimenting with it now. I’m not really interested in presets. Maybe I’ll buy some to fund the developer but then we don’t seem to hear anything from him. I’m moving my system over to Linux and Vital is native Linux which is great.
It beggars belief to me that we have this amazing free synth and yet no clear knowledge of what’s going on moving forward. There is so much nonsense and hype about software. Endless fads moving to the next hyped product. I use my ears. That’s why I have a bunch of classic hardware synths picked up for peanuts. Vital sounds really great.
Switch to Serum 2. Infinitely better. Customer support for Vital is non-existent. Tons of unresolved complaints about Vital crashing various DAWs, leading people who paid for pro content to revert to plus at 1.5, ridiculous. I used Vital for about 2 years exclusively and once I upgraded to “Pro,” tons of problems, content not usable, “newer” versions crash…rendering the synth totally unusable.
I paid for the Vital Gold Pro at full price for Vital to never ever receive a new version after I paid (was excited to pay being a Linux user and it having Linux support). I think we who paid should be compensated to be honest. If it was free software, sure, go ahead and abandon the project because you lack concentration on finishing one thing. But don’t go ripping people off by taking there money and running and then locking yourself in your basement. You can still pay for the two pro version of Vital, and that as far as my knowledge goes is what looks like an ongoing scam. Sure people can argue with me about that. But what am I supposed to think? If it quacks like a duck and all that
