Good Bye Reaktor, good bye NI synths

[machinesworking]

and for me it's great for that. so there.

Thumbs up for ending your post with "so there."

[glokraw]

I use NI products for their sounds. If selling videos or printouts of plugin and daw screens made good money, there would be different choices to consider.
Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

[SLiC]

Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

Eye of the beholder- I love the way Live looks, especially on my PUSH 2 screen

[bmanic]

1)

Open Reaktor, then open Form or Scanner XT. Now drag and drop a sample from the factory library of the corresponding synth you just opened within Reaktor. Tweak the synth to your hearts content.. save your song. Close the DAW and reopen the project. Boom.. nada. Sample missing and you have to manually point it back to the factory (!!) sample folder.

Of course this also means it wont have a chance in hell locating your custom samples on any given hard drive or other location, ever.


2) Have a friend of yours edit a factory Battery 4 kit.. then save it and then send you the song. Open it up and you'll find a nice empty battery kit with all the samples missing even when all content is FACTORY.

This happens no matter how many times you've had Battery rescan your HD for the factory content. It's just not smart enough to understand that people collaborating might have the factory content on a different drive or within a different folder structure.

There are workarounds for this to get it working but these are just that, workarounds. Some solid B grade software engineering right there (and useless beta team considering this has been going on for a decade now).

That's Native-Instruments for you.

To be fair other software is also this dumb. I love Live, but it loses samples and audio all the time,most DAWs do unless you import all audio etc. and oddly enough the best piece of software for finding lost samples is Kontakt. Kontakt can search in a half dozen ways for missing files, including using the OS search engine, which works fantastically on OSX with Spotlight anyway. So yeah NI literally have the blue print for solid searching of lost files in their own catalog!

^^^this is the kind of thing NI IMO should be roasted for, not some new feature that everyone thinks they need, but just smooth UX across the line. < doesn't generate new revenue though.

Indeed. I just don't get it why a piece of software even needs to start a manual search for samples when they are part of the factory content. The software should know and have the relative path to the sample right there saved with the preset. Shouldn't matter if a client or colleague has the factory library installed on a different hard drive. The relative path will still most likely be exactly the same (in the root directory of whatever instrument is in question).

I can understand it when software looses the samples or audio when the paths completely change or you use your own custom samples. But what I was talking about above was factory content! It's absolutely absurd that they can't get this done correctly.

[SamDi]

Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

Eye of the beholder- I love the way Live looks, especially on my PUSH 2 screen

+1

me too

[grrrz]

I used pro-53 for years but it sounds like shit compared to the prophet V or the repro.

Pro-53 had a few filter settings that were just vicious in a great way, not anything like a Prophet 5, but I've rarely cared about the marketing of emulations, just what I can get out of the plug in.

You're right; pro-53 was a fun plugin; and my very first contact with synthesis; so it holds a special place for me; also the first I bought. But when it was no longer supported I looked for a replacement; found prophet V and found that it sounded a lot better. I don't care either about the "fidelity" of the emulation since I've never used the real thing; for me prophet V was like "pro-53 v2"; new and improved. never used the VS part by the way. Anyway we don't know how an actual pro-53 v2 would have sounded like. All in all I'm having a lot of fun with the V collection; and most of the synths I've never used and won't really care if it sounds like the original. Just got into the synclavier and it's really unique; if you had presented this to me as an original synth with a totally new synthesis system I'd have believed you.
They could even cut the crap and ditch the "virtual keyboard interface" that's redundant and just give me the "screen" interface which is very well laid out and has everything. same goes for most of their synths; I don't need a virtual keyboard taking all the space on my monitor; I have an actual keyboard in front of me; and if it's only to offer me the basic controls just give me a full interface directly.

[grrrz]

I use NI products for their sounds. If selling videos or printouts of plugin and daw screens made good money, there would be different choices to consider.
Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

a lot of ableton stock plugin are totally underrated because they don't have a shiny interface. Their whole collab collection with AAS is pretty good (analog; electric, corpus; collision...); new reverb and echo are very much usable. At one point I ditched pretty much every plugin to only use ableton stock plugins (mostly analog for synths) and you can make a lot with those.
They have also great sampled instruments in their packs (in the last release the ones made with spitfire are great), and the sampled rhodes is also really good IMO.

[grrrz]

Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

Eye of the beholder- I love the way Live looks, especially on my PUSH 2 screen

the interface as the whole is far from ugly; it's just the effects and instruments sit in a tiny corner and don't have a fancy vintage interface with fake knobs and a fake table with a coffee stain; so they don't stand out from the competiton; which is unfair. It's good some of the stock plugins can be expanded though (like the EQ or wavetable).

[grrrz]

At some point years from now soft synths will roll out to emulate the aliased filters of early soft synths, and people will buy them.

I'm already seeing the arturia emulation "classic windows XP PC with ableton live 5" V; it'll have an interface with an old dekstop tower and a CRT, and a little potted plant in the corner. You'll be able to open classic free vsts from the era (like the mini V); and sometimes you'll get a BSOD to make it more vintage.
And then arturia will release pigments V; an emulation of the first pigments version; and the cycle will be completed.

[ShawnG]

Synthedit emulations will be a thing

[machinesworking]

the interface as the whole is far from ugly; it's just the effects and instruments sit in a tiny corner and don't have a fancy vintage interface with fake knobs and a fake table with a coffee stain; so they don't stand out from the competiton; which is unfair. It's good some of the stock plugins can be expanded though (like the EQ or wavetable).

Mostly what Live does is an Apple style move though, all the instruments are aesthetically the same, I'm not as interested in having a unified look as I am interested in finding things on the screen quickly. I love Live, don't get me wrong, and I would be upset if it ditched it's GUI, since every other DAW gives itself a makeover every year and generally messes up or doesn't allow for the old one to be used, but it's a PITA that all their plug ins look the same, it has you staring at the screen longer trying to find shit. I don't need skeuomorphic design, just some big enough differences to notice. Wavetable was a step in the right direction that way IMO.

[glokraw]

I use NI products for their sounds. If selling videos or printouts of plugin and daw screens made good money, there would be different choices to consider.
Ableton usually drawing the short straw in a beauty contest.

a lot of ableton stock plugin are totally underrated because they don't have a shiny interface. Their whole collab collection with AAS is pretty good (analog; electric, corpus; collision...); new reverb and echo are very much usable. At one point I ditched pretty much every plugin to only use ableton stock plugins (mostly analog for synths) and you can make a lot with those.
They have also great sampled instruments in their packs (in the last release the ones made with spitfire are great), and the sampled rhodes is also really good IMO.

I'm glad that Ableton sounds good, keeps the competition on their toes!
If Ableton are happy to provide underrated content, they might benefit from an upgrade in the beancounter department. There's a reason why U-he haven't switched to providing plain and uninspiring interfaces, Assuming competitive quality of the sounds and underlying code, I'll opt for a tool with the most useful and attractive interface,
over a competitor with an equally useful, but drab interface. In some ways, our software
selection is like our home town. We love it, or tolerate it, until it's obviously time to move on. And people on the move respond well to real estate 'curb appeal'.

Are there shiny gui's out there? Most of them seem the opposite, with dull tiny text,
backgrounds with poor contrast and pointless fake shadows, or poorly rendered 3d. I really like the Replika gui, easy to read, uncluttered, and the gradient serves to establish visual contrast for readability.

An Ableton product in comparison seems invented by the color-blind guy
in the office behind the server room. I do hope their color schemes are at least skinABLE
Cheers

Replika gui.png

Able Hybrid Reverb.png

[chk071]

Audio software and its GUI's... it's a hit and miss really.

[machinesworking]

Audio software and its GUI's... it's a hit and miss really.

It's also much, much harder than people think. Just look at all the dogs in the Reaper theme user library, grand ideas that are terrible UX wise.

[chk071]

I can imagine that it's a bit of an art. But, in some software, most basic principles are neglected.

Even in bigger software. Like Android 12.