Sad state of Native Instruments

[whyterabbyt]

Bandlab By Cakewalk presumably are still sitting on the code for Dimension Pro, barring some fine-print ownership legality with Rene'. Dimension Pro supports SFZ, and if it were open-sourced and picked up by a team as good as the Surge XT coders, and made 64bit, could have a nice impact in the sampler market.

It already was 64 bit.

[MoodyB]

Does anyone know if you can sell your NI software purchases. I am not happy with the two items I purchased from them and hope to sell the playbox and the monark.

https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... econd-Hand

[noiseboyuk]

VST3 is still not hosted in the VEP server etc.

As of this week… it finally does!

[Lind0n]

... Where is the incentive to the builder of this open source sampler? ...

I already responded to the same question by another member here: viewtopic.php?p=8599375#p8599375

I wrote:

Maybe ask the Hise dev?

I'm not really involved in opensource software, but it seems possible for opensource developers to later offer paid premium services for business users.

But it's probably mostly based on enthusiasm and the will to have a free decentralized solution available. Also independence of c/r copy protection servers which are always at risk to go down and never come back.

Yeah I think that's conflating two things, as I pointed out HISE != Kontakt, so we were talking about some open source version of Kontakt - which HISE for sure isnt, and the developer (Christoph) has a business model aimed at 3rd-party developers, not at end users - you need a license to release closed source end-user products.

[Lind0n]

but what would be the business model for the open source product you are proposing

why would it need a 'business model?'

Where is the incentive to the builder of this open source sampler?

Open source software isnt built on the basis of 'incentives', its built on the basis of making open source software.
Might as well ask, what's the incentive for all those people making music they dont get paid for.

You are right there are a lot of people out there building open-source software for the love of it, just as there are a set of developers out there building open-source software with a business model(they need to eat) e.g. Red-Hat or, huh, HISE...

It would seem there are no "for the love of it" people prepared to build an open source sampler to replace Kontakt...as an end user tool. No surprise as this is surely a many person-year effort to do.

[dune_rave]

komplete = kontakt (i mean the bigger part of the package is kontakt). I hope they can show some development on that when we welcome Komplete15. Or i will stay at Komplete12 forever...

[machinesworking]

I Can't speak on the Apple Silicon support as I don't have one but I just checked and I can load VST3's in VEP 7 on my Mac Pro 5,1 connected to VE in a Live session on my Mac Pro 6,1.

Yeah that happened last week.

[v1o]

Feels like that to me, too. I noticed that Kontakt 7 also has a new factory library which seems to be nice (I don't have it though), but when you look into it was actually taken out from another companies products:

> Completely overhauled in KONTAKT 7 by Orchestral Tools, the comprehensive, integrated collection of sampled string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments in the Orchestral collection are all taken from OT’s flagship product range, The Berlin Series.

They have always used other companies for the factory sample library. The orchestral samples in the factory library for example came from the Vienna Symphonic library, the String instruments are from e-Instruments and the pianos were sampled by Galaxy instruments..

[v1o]

Their latest product (another sampleset with a pretty picture) doesn’t even have the correct amount of black keys on its keyboard

Could be an AI generated keyboard. AI art has this thing of not generating the correct number of keys.

[osiris]

It's a shame the Emu Proteus/EmulatorX died. I really liked it. Buggy as hell, and would never properly sync.

[v1o]

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.

According to Linkedin - Vadim Zavalishin is still at NI and still in charge of Reaktor development. As long as he's around then Reaktor is still in safe hands. He's pretty much single-handedly been the brains behind NI Reaktor for the past 20 years.

It actually makes sense that they put more resources into more commercial products like Maschine and Kontakt. With Reaktor you just need a small team of highly dedicated people, as it's more of a toolset for audio programming.

[glokraw]

Bandlab By Cakewalk presumably are still sitting on the code for Dimension Pro, barring some fine-print ownership legality with Rene'. Dimension Pro supports SFZ, and if it were open-sourced and picked up by a team as good as the Surge XT coders, and made 64bit, could have a nice impact in the sampler market.

It already was 64 bit.

Jokes on me...I have Dimension Pro, but being a Reaper user, don't often pay enough attention to whats 32 or 64 bit. Thanks for the correcting an assumption. Makes me wonder what's wrong at Bandlab, that they've kept it on lockdown.
Cheers

[digitalboytn]

Rapture Pro would be the better choice for development....

That synth has so much potential....

[machinesworking]

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.

According to Linkedin - Vadim Zavalishin is still at NI and still in charge of Reaktor development. As long as he's around then Reaktor is still in safe hands. He's pretty much single-handedly been the brains behind NI Reaktor for the past 20 years.

It actually makes sense that they put more resources into more commercial products like Maschine and Kontakt. With Reaktor you just need a small team of highly dedicated people, as it's more of a toolset for audio programming.

People read a hell of a lot into a post on the NI forums saying that Reaktor was getting a straight Apple Silicon port right now and wouldn’t be adding any new features etc. yet. Nothing about the post says that Reaktor won’t ramp up development after the beta come out, but that’s how people read it.

[seangm]

nvm