Sad state of Native Instruments

[pixel85]

While I do share the disappointment about the lack of innovation at NI in recent years, circle-jerky threads like these just show what a niche audience resides at KVR.

If you browse around VI-control, Kontakt is still widely used, (third party) Kontakt libraries are still THE main source for film and tv music.

If you check out younger producer circles on social media and tutorial channels on YouTube, no other brand is as present as NI when it comes to controllers and often sampled instruments. NI still makes a shitload of money from their controllers and instruments like their Play series or the ever-growing number of expansions. Not because any of these suck, but because each (controllers, samples instruments, versatility of expansions) are still among the best in the industry.

Their run of innovative product after innovative product from 2005 to 2015 is unmatched. No other company today comes close in terms of the impact Kore, Massive, FM8, Reaktor, Guitar Rig and Kontakt had.

You're right 100%. Oh those losers who have their own preferences that don't follow mainstream, they don't know sh**.
It's obvious that smart intellectual people like you, will shift their preferences wherever the mainstream wind blows.

You're concerned about a company because they stopped supporting products that you're using for your genre X? Oh maaan. Just start doing music for TV and cinema instead of doing your niche crap.
You like modular soft synths like Reaktor but company is making sample libraries now? Son, put Reaktor to the bin and use orchestral libraries from now on! It's what everybody is using so should you to.

Ps. and of course on all those youtube (definitely not circle-jerky) circles, you'll see that NI is still the king in soft synths. Serum and Diva are kings there. The best synths NI ever did

[idoru97214]

Regarding the above post related to the relevance of Kontakt and it's future market share...

I agree with a poster above who mentioned that Tal-sampler and many of the samplers mentioned just don't have any real chance of being serious viable competitors to Kontakt, but I also do agree that Kontakt is waning slowly, but very surely, in market share and significance. The real competition is in the proprietary players various companies are coming up with (as mentioned - SA, 8dio etc). Some of the biggest sample companies do not need Kontakt anymore. That means those sample company's customers won't either - for those libraries. This wave will have a cumulative effect. It already is.

This is all shared dispassionately. I don't have anything against NI. It just is the way the wind is blowing. Sad in a way. The first major chapter in virtual instrument land is coming to a close (not talking about NI as a company, but about the growth and contraction of the first big players in general).

[noiseboyuk]

It is very expensive to maintain a spread out product range and diverse code base with lots of accumulated technical debt. So it is healthy for NI to cut down on these costs for products that no longer work in the market (Reaktor) and consolidate their resources where it matters economically: Platforms that drive content sales.

Really good post, xbow, I think that well explains what we're seeing and likely to keep seeing.

Reaktor though - I'm not at all sure this is troubled product. That bit of news that NI are soon to drop the standalone plugin version of Super 8 is quite telling. They want to now put all their resources into the big beasts, to keep the maintenance low ongoing. At the moment Reaktor IS such a beast.

In fact, I wonder if a Reaktor 7 is round the corner. Much like the changes to Kontakt 7 were pretty superficial and related to the browsing experience, I can see there's a clear opportunity here for Reaktor. It's fundamentally a user unfriendly platform at the moment. With Kontakt you have nice big images for each library so you can quickly find them. This has never been the case with Reaktor. So I'm expecting a Komplete Kontrol style skin like Kontakt 7 now has with clear icons.

I will never program or edit my own Reaktor ensemble, I just use it as a host. I'd imagine 98% of users are like me. So skinning it with a semi-decent browser, for which they have the code already*, seems like a no brainer, and will take the sting out of dropping the standalone Reaktor ensemble experiments.

*Yes I know these browsers are comparatively rubbish, but at least they are being actively developed and are better than nothing.

[xbow]

Really good post, xbow, I think that well explains what we're seeing and likely to keep seeing.

Reaktor though - I'm not at all sure this is troubled product. That bit of news that NI are soon to drop the standalone plugin version of Super 8 is quite telling. They want to now put all their resources into the big beasts, to keep the maintenance low ongoing. At the moment Reaktor IS such a beast.

In fact, I wonder if a Reaktor 7 is round the corner. Much like the changes to Kontakt 7 were pretty superficial and related to the browsing experience, I can see there's a clear opportunity here for Reaktor. It's fundamentally a user unfriendly platform at the moment. With Kontakt you have nice big images for each library so you can quickly find them. This has never been the case with Reaktor. So I'm expecting a Komplete Kontrol style skin like Kontakt 7 now has with clear icons.

..

Thanks!

Reaktor 6.5 is going into beta and in this post a dev says they only have a small team left to work on Reaktor and won't be making any big steps in terms of new features.

With the competition in advanced synth land (e.g., various virtual modulars, and innovative synthesis concepts by smaller devs) I think there is too much competition and Reaktor's main selling point caters to too small a niche (tinkerers) to be viable.

I may be wrong but I see a big advantage for stand-alone VSTs both for users and developers because you're not weighed down by an ancient legacy code base and design decisions of the past. As it is, it seems to be challenging enough to even keep that code base operational (M1 support, high resolution displays, VST3...)

Do you have a source regarding Super 8 stand-alone? I don't even have access to the Reaktor version, so it would be good to know more.

EDIT: Added link above for exact post about scope of Reaktor 6.5 changes.

[aMUSEd]

You may not want to abandon it,but the choice is not really up to you...

Many peeps were very satisfied with NI's previous wunderkind ecosystem called Kore,but the company decided it was too hard to maintain,so they stopped any further development and shafted the user base...

It may not be up to me, but that scenario is unlikely with KK and Maschine because it's a healthy ecosystem and their main source of income (no, I don't know their business numbers, but it is pretty self-evident if you look at their strategy).

NI is not failing just because some of their product lines are failing.

It is very expensive to maintain a spread out product range and diverse code base with lots of accumulated technical debt. So it is healthy for NI to cut down on these costs for products that no longer work in the market (Reaktor) and consolidate their resources where it matters economically: Platforms that drive content sales.

Producing content for an existing platform is easy and cheap in comparison because it's very standardized. NI probably can set a fixed budget for the development of each new library and a good estimate of how much it will earn them.

Thus, I am not so worried about Kontakt, KK and Maschine. But sadly it also means that many of their products (FM8, Battery, Massive, Reaktor Monark and Prism ...) are not relevant to them in terms of pushing the boundaries of synthesis, but just in terms of filler items in a large software bundle and content platform (Maschine expansions include presets for Monark, Massive, Prism).

But I can live with that. In a weird way, this may be just what I need, because I want to invest less time in chasing the bleeding edge and more time in making actual music with what I have (which is already too much).

Ni have created a self fulfilling prophecy though. These products may not be doing so well economically (although we are only inferring this - we don't know - they sell Komplete as a bundle so how would you know which ones were more popular when they are all sold together?) but that situation is created by people's perception that NI are not developing them. Why would people invest in a Reaktor that hasn't been updated in terms of innovation for years, why would people buy an Absynth that the company left to rot? However genuine investment and innovation in those products could have created a different perception - I think a lot of people would be interested in a revived Absynth and a Reaktor that is actively being developed. Besides all this just shows the limitations of this stupid profit driven system and in particular the disease of venture capitalism with its rapacious focus on the short term and parasitic approach to markets. Absynth was a seminal synthesiser and deserved to be developed further, dropping Reaktor would be an outrage.

[noiseboyuk]

Reaktor 6.5 is going into beta and in this post a dev says they only have a small team left to work on Reaktor and won't be making any big steps in terms of new features.

Oh well that's my theory out the window! That's crazy and sad. You can tell the developer is upset about it. Why on Earth they don't update it with a browser they already own must mean the penny-pinching is quite extreme.

Do you have a source regarding Super 8 stand-alone? I don't even have access to the Reaktor version, so it would be good to know more.

Yes, Dalle posted it earlier in the thread -
https://community.native-instruments.co ... fm8-super8

[xbow]

Yes, Dalle posted it earlier in the thread -
https://community.native-instruments.co ... fm8-super8

Super 8 is no longer developed as a standalone synth, it will now only be developed as a Reaktor synth, like it was before. So, you'll have to wait for the next Reaktor update, coming in Q1 2023.

Thanks, good to know... and at least that means they'll keep Reaktor afloat as a platform for other products.

(EDIT) Some more take aways from that thread on Super 8 in case anybody is interested:
- it will remain available for Windows users, but only supported for M1 through Reaktor as porting the stand-alone is too expensive
- it wasn't successful enough as a stand-alone product, hence NI abandoned the idea of releasing stand-alone synths based on Reaktor

[Septic Underground]

Not sure if it's been mentioned elsewhere (probably has) but one thing to add to the list of the OP:

• Maschine

A product with so much potential, so much they got *absolutely* right about it, and yet somehow is still riddled with bugs, riddled with performance issues, lacking in features that have been asked for by hardcore users for years upon years, bloated with un-asked for tack-ons..... and with a future dev plan that is always being changed, delayed, scrapped, re-written, then repeat all those all over again. Just a sad story, altogether.

Bingo. I've been heavily invested in Maschine since Day 1, and now it just sits there collecting dust, an unused, convoluted mess that's not worth selling, and not worth keeping.

Yeah was a big fan since v1.3, had the og one, modded with wooden sidepanels and overlay etc, had the studio version also. Sold all this when even after years of asking(begging) by users to implement a straightforward MIDI control from your daw for seperate channels etc, they made it so convoluted I got insta migraines each and every time I tried it. So it ended as a groovebox on its own in the daw. All those BS they added like the fader/jam, the soundpacks (endless stream), song mode etc, but never a good way just to multi trigger multiparts from your daw in a reliable way (there are 3 trigger modes, on sound/part/kit level zzz)

I use TAL drum, Atlas and Sitala these days, with the first a f**king great one both in tweaks and sound. No sequencer on TALDRUM, but the sequencer on maschine was nothing special also. so.

[soulata]

I think Native Instruments and Plugin Alliance, too, will be history in about 5 years. Most competitors simply are superior.

Not gonna happen.

I rely on Kontakt for numerous 3rd party libs. It's not going away anytime soon.

Reaktor I could do without (Machine, too) but I like both.

k

[machinesworking]

OK I've owned Komplete since version 2. Without any doubt IMO this thread is filled with Chicken Little "The sky is falling!" nonsense. This is coming from someone who will trash on NI with the best/worst of them.

NI since day one has released great products, then ditched them; let technical debt pile up and blamed everyone else for it when they lagged behind every other manufacturer when change happens and they had to rewrite their code at a core level; they've released ROMpler level sample players and spurious preset packages; When Abysnth was first ported to Windows it was a huge CPU pig, and when Reaktor was ported to Mac it crashed every 15 minutes; they constantly oscillate between mediocre releases of Komplete and good ones. On top of all that, they literally recently have been forced into a corner on fixing their codebase with VST3 and Apple Silicon, not to mention the needed but not delivered GUI changes for modern screen resolutions.

As a Mac user, nothing has changed, mostly I think because VST3 and resizable or at least larger GUI's drastically affect Windows users, we're seeing people thinking it has. I was with them when they transitioned from OS 9 to OS X, and from PPC to Intel chips on Mac etc. The same lags happened then, the same total stagnation for a year or three.

They still release some great products, they still will, they will always get new customers because out of the box Komplete is an insanely great deal. After each of these achingly slow transitions in the past they came through with decent product. I'm laughing a bit because I ran into this thread after finally breaking down and getting a Komplete Control S88 Mkii, and I really like it. It's partially broken NKS wise on Apple Silicon, but even then it's just a great near hardware experience.

Oh, and of course on individual levels there are "better" plug ins, I much prefer to make my own sample libraries in Falcon, Amplitube is a better guitar plug in, F'em is better than FM8 etc. but that's irrelevant. NI do some things extremely well, smaller sample library companies aren't jumping to UVI over Kontakt, because UVI compete with them, Reaktor is still the best modern modular VST plug in The Grid and Max 4 Live are not VST/AU's etc.

TL;DR You get what you pay for with NI, upfront it's amazing, then when a bump in the road happens NI lose their shit and react like they "never saw it coming" a couple years later they get back on track, and something else comes along. Been like that since the beginning.

[nanostream]

- [Super 8] wasn't successful enough as a stand-alone product, hence NI abandoned the idea of releasing stand-alone synths based on Reaktor

It’s remarkable how wrong it went for NI. They’ve released a number of genuinely weird (in the best way possible) synths like Kontour or Form, which weren’t successful by all accounts. Presumably because a) they are weird and b) everybody is hating Reaktor. So they released Super 8, a simple, yet high quality synth, also as a stop gap measure while we were waiting for Massive X, but it didn’t get traction, because Reaktor. Then they made it standalone, only for it to tank, and possibly also tanking their exit strategy for other Reaktor based synths underperforming on the market.

Seemingly the only way out is to invest into Reaktor — to fix bugs, deliver new features and revamp the user experience, from the GUI to the preset/snapshot system and everything inbetween. But they won’t do it because it doesn’t make enough money.

Now we’re at a place where the only company keeping the Blocks ecosystem afloat, Toybox, can’t even push out maintenance updates of their bundles because modified Blocks will crash Reaktor if you try to load older Racks.

I guess we’ll see how this plays out. I, for one, think it would be crazy to port Reaktor to AS only to let it linger. But the long term picture doesn’t look pretty atm.

[Cyforce]

Well, you don`t know if Reaktor is really "that hated"... only NI probably knows their user`s main preferences and liked products.

It`s also understandable, why Reaktor won`t see big feature upgrades on the horizon - even with other modular platforms (VCV etc) this is still a niche. The bigger part of the users mostly preferred tools/instruments with very few controls for fast "daily production" workflow - also a reason why Arcade is so popular. The guys who love to dive into a synth or under the hod like in Reaktor etc - are not the majority of the customers.

And Super-8/VST - maybe it was a test pilot - to see if Reaktor Instruments, ported as standalone VSTi work well - but maybe they don`t in terms of maintenance / necessary code updates etc

[nanostream]

Well, you don`t know if Reaktor is really "that hated"... only NI probably knows their user`s main preferences and liked products.

True, I don’t have hard data to support this. But all those public statements by NI employees and the last few years have made it quite clear we can’t expect much more than basic maintenance updates. For now, anyway.

It`s also understandable, why Reaktor won`t see big feature upgrades on the horizon - even with other modular platforms (VCV etc) this is still a niche. The bigger part of the users mostly preferred tools/instruments with very few controls for fast "daily production" workflow - also a reason why Arcade is so popular. The guys who love to dive into a synth or under the hod like in Reaktor etc - are not the majority of the customers.

I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Reaktor is many things at once: a playground for builders, a platform for user friendly (more or less) instruments, and a Blocks fueled modular system. You don’t need to be a builder to have fun with Form or Super 8, or to patch up a few LFOs in a Rack. Reaktor, while still mostly excellent as far as I’m concerned, seems to be failing at all of these jobs. At least that seems to be the predominant narrative right now, and has been for years. I guess it’s not that easy to shake something like that off, not without significant updates and improvements.

[Septic Underground]

TL;DR You get what you pay for with NI, upfront it's amazing, then when a bump in the road happens NI lose their shit and react like they "never saw it coming" a couple years later they get back on track, and something else comes along. Been like that since the beginning.

May be so, but they are not the only one in the game these days. And when other players do update fairly quickly and within reasonable timespan, the choice is easy.

And when you have found another developer acting quick and delivering good stuff, why should I ever get back to a company that finds it ok to let their customers feel the "bump in the road"?

The tiny GUI BS that is years old now, the MIDI issues in Maschine etc. I prefer taking the smooth road instead of a bumpy one.

And that reaktor is too much fuss man, why would i load that first and then (browsing to) monark, if I have the legend/diva/model72 at one click alive

No it went downhill some 5 years ago and now it is too late, imagine the people that have jumped and are not going back.

Ow BTW those maschine expansions are shit also

[digitalboytn]

All this just shows the limitations of this stupid profit driven system and in particular the disease of venture capitalism with its rapacious focus on the short term and parasitic approach to markets.

This is the Kore issue....

The true heart of the matter