Please give us the option to disable the similar preset search as well as the preset online shop.
Similar preset search
It is really prominent, being displayed three times on the same screen (red circles). This is somewhat distracting because of the otherwise relatively clean GUI without much clutter.
Also, I clicked on it once because I thought it was something like a preset demo sound
button and it took very long until it was finished searching. I don’t want to have to wait again until I can continue using the synth if I should click it again by accident.
The free search engine DuckDuckGo lets users disable the AI "features" (expand to view the screenshot)
The green marked settings allow users to clean up the GUI from “features” they have no need for. This makes the search engine more pleasant to use.
Plugin Shop integrated into Pigments (orange circle)
This also applies to Minifreak V and Analog Lab.
If there are four active instances of Pigments, one of Minifreak V and one of Analog Lab in the same project, for example, you basically have six online shops (three different ones) opened as well.
I think it’s tolerable to have the online shop integrated in the standalone applications but I don’t like that it’s in every instance you open in your DAW. Even if it wouldn’t impact efficiency or CPU performance it makes the plugin feel more heavy.
Especially because Arturia plugins are pretty CPU intensive already.
We paid good money for this software so we should be able to decide if we want to see an online store with even more products every time we use the plugin.
The free Opera Browser lets users switch off the softwares own adverts (expand to view a screenshot of the settings)
The green marked settings allow you to disable/hide their advertising and make the software just a little more efficient and less cluttered.
Maybe Arturia can draw some inspiration from the free software which can be customized for a better, cleaner and more streamlined experience.
Some more examples from other audio software developers: Native Instruments advertises more instruments in Kontakt but you can disable that if you own the full version, as far as I know.
There is an online store in FL Studio as well but you can hide it completely and it won’t load until you actively decide to open it.
Thanks for calling my attention to this feature. I never noticed it before, but just tried it out and find that it can be extremely helpful in finding presets I might otherwise not have stumbled onto.
At first I thought that having three places where the icon button show up might be a distraction for some people and that giving them an option to limit where it shows up might be good, but then I started looking where the icon shows up in different modes (screens).
True it shows up in three places in one screen, there are some modes where it only shows up in one place. In each of the other two places, I felt that based on the content, having the additional icons saves time. If the icon was only in the current preset in the bar at the top, doing sequential searches would require far more mouse motion than having it in the additional places based on the mode.
In addition to your point, there are some people who only use presets they create and who might have no need for so many places to search for presets.
Also, I never search by categories from the current preset bar, but sometimes it just shows up and I wish I had an option to turn that feature off.
Finally, I just did a similarity search for a tweak I did of a purchased preset. It has taken several minutes so far and I would love to see time devoted to making the analysis take less time.
So, thanks for calling my attention to this handy feature. I hope we get more functional options all around, not just to the ability to disable the similarity search button.
I don’t need it at all since I mostly make my own sounds and tweak presets myself, if I use one at all.
Imagine you’d have three times the up/down arrows for the presets in the preset browser, three shortcuts to get to the store.
But you seems to understand my point and agree that customization is nice for everyone
Btw you might also like the “Soung Design Tips” that you can turn on when you click the little light bulb right next to the master volume knob (not visible when you’re in the preset browser and works mostly just on Arturias own presets). It can help you understand how you get to a certain sound or it just makes tweaking a preset easier
Addition to my original post:
I noticed that Pigments now shows ads for Arturias preset packs when searching for presets.
It blocks some of the actual preset information.
When you click on one of the adverts it takes you to their online shop and you have to re-enter your search when you go back to the “explore” preset page.
Please give us an option to disable these things in the software we paid for.
Does anybody know if there’s a way to go back to Pigments 5 or if it’s possible to use Pigments 5 and 6 simultaneously?
I don’t know if there’s a way to use 5 and 6 simultaneously, but several years ago I uninstalled a current build due to an issue I had and successfully re-installed an earlier version from the download resources. Eventually they fixed the issue I had with several of the newer releases and I went back to allowing the ASC to update me to the newest version and it has worked ever since…
As for having both 5 and 6 running at the same time, try contacting support.
You can download and install any version of Pigments that’s available on Arturias download page.
You can only have one version installed at a time. So you can for example not have both Pigments 5 and 6 installed at the same time.
Keep in mind, that only the latest version can use all presets. If you wan’t acces to the new stuff in Pigments 6 you need to have it installed.
Also keep in mind that only the latest version is maintained including to run on new OS’s and with new CPU’s if they demand speciel changes in the software.
