Now that Cubase 9 has landed and finally blacklisted all my IK Multimedia instruments (including SampleMook, SampleTron, Sonik Synth, Philharmonik), I think it is about time for IK Multimedia of seriously considering porting their instruments to 64 bits. The current option of using ST3 for these is not an acceptablee solution.
Reasons: The import into ST3 is a very unfriendly and convoluted process. There is a reason why the GUIs of programs like SampleTron looked different and lived as separate VSTis in a given song. It seems IK Multimedia is currently only interested in selling (apple based) hardware and doesn't put any effort whatsoever in development / improving their plugins? If there is no active development on Virtual Instruments then I would really like to know and rather move on and cut my losses to future prove my projects.
I would only begrudgingly use the old instruments by firing up Cubase 8.5 and then bouncing down to audio, but it is kind of a downer after investing so many days in downloading (slow internet here) all the sounds and maybe getting excited at finding playable instruments quickly. I find that I am reaching more and more for Halion because although the Samples there are limited at least the integration is great and far less crashy than using 32bit in bridged mode.
Any thoughts? Does IK Multimedia have a VSTi development team, or are they all working on hardware integration? Any plans on releasing 64bit updates to the aforementioned instruments in order to maybe retain your old customer base?