Ecaroh wrote: 19 Dec 2025, 17:59
analogika wrote: 19 Dec 2025, 12:40
If the plugin requires the hardware to be hooked up, there really isn’t any incentive to develop it, since you can already control and record your hardware in the DAW.
To me there are are two reasons why this would make sense:
First, you could test drive the whole Nord Piano library with your own hands before you actully choose what to have in your hardware. Differences are subtle and it’s not easy to pick up the best for a special purpose.
In DAW environment this would be even more nice: think about MIDI recording a piano track with Nord and then have a chance to test and choose actual piano sound to play it. Not messing with audio interfaces and cables and everything (including using FXs to sound) is open to modify until finaly you bounce your project.
Again: there is no incentive to invest hundreds of man-hours into building, testing, and supporting this software, and then spend the rest of its product life trying to secure the hardware requirement against piracy (which might even require specialised hardware in the Nord itself, since anything else would probably be easily emulated eventually).
Literally the only thing it would eliminate is the discomfort of having to load new pianos onto the Nord. Like, once every few years? (I think I've replaced individual pianos twice since I bought the Nord in 2017.)
Everything else works exactly as you describe it: you plug in the Nord in your studio (if you're "messing with audio interfaces and cable and everything" when simply plugging in a single stereo line-level instrument, I suggest you reassess your setup), and "everything (including using FXs to sound) is open to modify until finally you bounce your project".
You'd rather mess with authorisation, serialisation, the software not working after your DAW or system was updated until Nord can set aside the manpower to adapt their software (or the updated DAW is fixed), higher hardware costs, and less frequent updates and firmware fixes to existing hardware — and possibly delayed product releases — just for a software Nord?
? I mean that you could hook up your Nord with usb to computer and play Nord piano sounds from your computer. This might be very helpful because it can be laborious to delete and download sounds to Nord to test. To develop this idea even further Nord might make a plugin so you could easily play and record Nord pianos to DAWs and check afterwards what sound you wanna actually use etc. Now, somebody would probably think this might compromise Nords brand crown jewel, piano library, to mass use. If this is problem then app/plugin might need to have hardware Nord connected it to work.
