N.I. Kontakt goes VST3

[machinesworking]

OK....let's pay attention here...

Most of the updates that NI have released over the last few years have been to benefit their development of Maschine and Kontrol...

Ever since the two Ronnies took over the reigns at NI the company was on a downward spiral because their focus was on profits and not on the products that the end user wanted...

It was their vision of the future of sound and you had to fall into step with their plans because you were locked into their system...

Komplete Kontrol...

Now that the two Ronnie's have been given the flick, there is hope that there will be some signs of new life in the company...

NI used to make creative and inspiring products and it would be nice to think that they can get back to that vision and find the heart and soul that was once a part of the company's DNA

Honestly owning Komplete 2 and Absynth 1.5 to upgrade to it years ago, NI have always been glacial with big changes. There's no new thing going on here in terms of the time it took to get to VST3, the fact it isn't using any VST3 features, that the GUI isn't scaleable yet, or that it will take most of those features to happen before it goes Apple Silicon native. Probably around the time Microsoft releases an Arm OS chip they made, that needs recoding for.

I suppose you could argue that they aren't blowing the waters wide open like they did with Reaktor or Kontakt etc. but Blocks are cool, they're still plugging away. They just have always been last in line with big changes, as a Mac OS user I can testify to the glacial pace, but eventually it happens. My solution is to keep an older machine around and a copy of VEP so I'm not waiting on their asses.

[EvilDragon]

The source code of Kontakt is super old, and will require a complete re-write for it to be scalable, that's why it has not been done so far, and we are in 2021, not 2001.

It doesn't need a complete rewrite, but it is a fairly significant amount of work at any rate.

[aMUSEd]

The source code of Kontakt is super old, and will require a complete re-write for it to be scalable, that's why it has not been done so far, and we are in 2021, not 2001.

It doesn't need a complete rewrite, but it is a fairly significant amount of work at any rate.

If people think about it this isn't just about the code for Kontakt per se anyway, but you also have to factor in the huge amount of work to enable larger scale interfaces for all those Kontakt libraries produced by NI. Kontakt is already scalable in terms of window size anyway, although not the fonts etc, however most libraries still have tiny interfaces and with bitmapped GUIs that's going to mean making several size options which is a lot of work (although some developers have enabled at least a small/large option eg Luftrum)

[Ah_Dziz]

I guess I'll hold off until they activate the other midi ports at least. Kontakt is already pretty snappy and uses a very reasonable amount of cpu even on my old system. The weird bug where kontakt hangs for a long time before beginning to load a library (especially a large one) would be good to see gone. It doesn't happen with all large libraries. Just with some. I have one that usually takes 5-7 minutes before the loading box pops up. During that time it is frozen.

[machinesworking]

The source code of Kontakt is super old, and will require a complete re-write for it to be scalable, that's why it has not been done so far, and we are in 2021, not 2001.

It doesn't need a complete rewrite, but it is a fairly significant amount of work at any rate.

Out of curiosity what's the benefit of VST3 as it stands? Future compatibility? Is there a list of changes, release notes we can see?

[Sinisterbr]

The source code of Kontakt is super old, and will require a complete re-write for it to be scalable, that's why it has not been done so far, and we are in 2021, not 2001.

It doesn't need a complete rewrite, but it is a fairly significant amount of work at any rate.

Out of curiosity what's the benefit of VST3 as it stands? Future compatibility? Is there a list of changes, release notes we can see?

I'd like to understand that as well.

[EvilDragon]

The source code of Kontakt is super old, and will require a complete re-write for it to be scalable, that's why it has not been done so far, and we are in 2021, not 2001.

It doesn't need a complete rewrite, but it is a fairly significant amount of work at any rate.

Out of curiosity what's the benefit of VST3 as it stands? Future compatibility? Is there a list of changes, release notes we can see?

Yeah just future compatibility for now. Changelog is available in Native Access.

[attention ♥]

As nice as this is to see, NI not being able to maintain Massive X has made me worried.

At this point the problem seems bigger than just old codebases, as Massive X is brand new.

[machinesworking]

As nice as this is to see, NI not being able to maintain Massive X has made me worried.

At this point the problem seems bigger than just old codebases, as Massive X is brand new.

Just a guess, but they're probably trying to move everything to where Massive X is first, then leap on everything at once. Most issues are due to the GUI, and Massive X already has a jump on the others that way I would reckon.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for NI, but the work schedule they have can be estimated. Personally I wish they would drop everything and get Kontakt on Apple Silicon, VS3 and and resizable GUI, but that's not kosher for the whole company to abandon everything for that one plug in.

[Sinisterbr]

As nice as this is to see, NI not being able to maintain Massive X has made me worried.

At this point the problem seems bigger than just old codebases, as Massive X is brand new.

Just a guess, but they're probably trying to move everything to where Massive X is first, then leap on everything at once. Most issues are due to the GUI, and Massive X already has a jump on the others that way I would reckon.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for NI, but the work schedule they have can be estimated. Personally I wish they would drop everything and get Kontakt on Apple Silicon, VS3 and and resizable GUI, but that's not kosher for the whole company to abandon everything for that one plug in.

That's a good guess. OTOH, I'd also like to know if this (probable) new synergy with Izotope did change their latest roadmap in any way.

[chk071]

As nice as this is to see, NI not being able to maintain Massive X has made me worried.

At this point the problem seems bigger than just old codebases, as Massive X is brand new.

I'm pretty sure their biggest project in terms of porting is Reaktor, but, Massive X is probably a big one as well. It has to be ported to Mac M1, it has to be ported to VST3, and they also had a lot of feature suggestions concerning MIDI learn (which I'm pretty sure they'll implement with one of the next update), and some other stuff. It doesn't really surprise me that it's taking so long.

[EvilDragon]

Porting MX to M1 and VST3 together is about 100x simpler and easier than porting Reaktor to HiDPI, I reckon. Just spitballing.

[machinesworking]

Porting MX to M1 and VST3 together is about 100x simpler and easier than porting Reaktor to HiDPI, I reckon. Just spitballing.

I would bet you're right, just because MX is modern GUI code VS their old system, that held out forever, plus the super interoperability of Reaktor VS any of their other GUIs really.

Have to bag on them a bit here though, U-He and others did it, it reeks of too many projects too many directions at once, too many mouths to feed, making them put off changing things slowly to get ready for a port. VST3 has been out forever, same with high definition monitors. Apple always let developers know months to years in advance when something is depreciated, and that always means that something drastic is changing, and NI seem to always wait until the last minute IMO because of the previous given reasons. I wouldn't bag on them if I didn't care, Kontakt is the backbone to most of my libraries. They make great stuff, but a lot of this last version of Ultimate I got was filled with fluff, too many Rompler libraries that could have easily been Kontakt based instead of given their own proprietary GUI's. <-- If they're easy to code, and it frees up the developers to work on porting MX, Kontakt, Reaktor etc. etc. then I'm all for it though.

[EvilDragon]

Yeah see, the teams which do the instruments are different from teams which work on Kontakt, Reaktor, Massive X etc. It's not exactly a dev switcheroo - roles are way different.

But indeed - tech debt at NI unfortunately accumulated to insane levels. This is quite apparent to anyone really. You cannot shake off that much tech debt very quickly.

[attention ♥]

How does Massive X have tech debt? They cannot maintain their software new or old.