Sad state of Native Instruments

[rob_lee]

at my age, im flattered by any attention
bit whiny for my tastes, but take it where i can get it.

Are you saying you're an old c**t like?

[dayjob]

I don't see people making new blocks at anywhere near the rate that VCV and Cherry Audio devs are creating new modules. I could be wrong, but that's my perception.

yeah.. there's only a couple people who make/have made lot's of blocks. Michael Hetrik and Toyboxaudio.

toyboxaudio has made _a lot_ of really great blocks.

https://www.toyboxaudio.com

and so has michael hetrik

https://www.unfilteredaudio.com/collections/reaktor

but yeah.. i think they thought it would take off like max for live devices or something but w/o continued development and updates it's a hard sell i guess.

[Lind0n]

I'm not going to give them a few thousand dollars to sell something for $19 that might take years to sell through 100 licenses just for the opportunity to make a few hundred dollars. Ok, fine, maybe that's what they want, but the world isn't standing still along the way. I don't see people making new blocks at anywhere near the rate that VCV and Cherry Audio devs are creating new modules. I could be wrong, but that's my perception.

This seems a common general outline of developer opinion these days, certainly in the "Kontakt-content-owner" world. Given the prices outlined on their web-page (and to be frank this is the *lowest* these prices have been in 10+ years) most content owners seem to be thinking: "for that price I could get a 3rd-party to build me a native VST/AU and my potential audience will increase by xx fold". But I may well be biased as I see a lot of these customers, as I *am* one of those 3rd-party developers.

Also whilst the number of Kontakt instruments remains high - nearly all of these are for Kontakt only, not Kontakt Player - which carries none of these costs, but of course even further reduces the potential customer base. I suspect if we compared new native VST/AU sample based products against Kontakt-Player enabled products we may see a different picture, which would lead to NI *not* continuing to make a "truck of money" from these licensing deals going forwards, and thus another revenue stream fails on NI. But this is just gut feel - I have no evidence, beyond my customer base.

[Echoes in the Attic]

The only thing keeping Reaktor alive is that they have ensembles to sell for it that are popular and easy to use (like Razor for example), if Reaktor was just modular synth (like having just Blocks and thats it) they will send it to the drain just like they did with Absynth

Indeed. But that being the case, I'm still puzzled why NI doesn't just slap it's poor but better-than-nothing browser into it. For 99% of users, Reaktor is just a host for ensembles. I'm sure more people use Kontakt for actual sampling than use Reaktor for building their own ensembles. Yet it lacks a browser. If NI is going to keep the thing alive - because it hosts a ton of its products - it may as well graft on a semi-functioning browser and let us use them more sensibly.

Obviously its too much to hope that they might actually make their browser properly functional like the one in Massive they had 20 years ago, but there we are.

Komplete kontrol is really the browser to use for Reaktor. But yeah on a block or component level a nicer browser would be great.

[noiseboyuk]

Komplete kontrol is really the browser to use for Reaktor. But yeah on a block or component level a nicer browser would be great.

KK is horrible. But it does prove the point they have everything they need to put into Reaktor itself. I guess it's just lack of funds, but if they accept that as a host it is strategically important it still seems bizarre to me.

[Dalle]

don't see people making new blocks at anywhere near the rate that VCV and Cherry Audio devs are creating new modules. I could be wrong, but that's my perception.

When blocks first came around there was a lot of activity in the user library and from NI. To me it seemed like things slowed down after the front panel patching update - it was a good addition but should have been there from the start. Lots of great blocks weren’t updates to support it, Euro Reakt became a paid version etc... It was another layer of jankiness to Reaktor, which is already loaded with confusing concepts built upon layers of old code. Other products like VCV came around and were much more simple and elegant.

[dayjob]

what's weird is how they don't really promote reaktor a lot or at all.. or much of anything really do they? i don't follow them on social media but even on youtube there stuff just doesn't come into my feed. w/reaktor Blocks you'd think they'd interview the peeps behind toybox audio and spotlight them on NI news or something to promote the format. the most recent video from NI on blocks is like 3 years ago.

they promote maschine and kontakt and komplete and that seems like it??

i don't get it. how can they expect people to jump on board if they just poke it w/a stick now and then to make sure it's alive?

meh. whatever. it's sad indeed.

[glokraw]

Perhaps the investors have analyzed the age group 15-25, the near future, and have determined what they will buy, or what they will rent, and are prioritizing development based on their findings.

They also probably know an age range of customer's 'peak spending', perhaps 26-40? and whatever that range actually is, are targeting it with their products released in the last few years.

Boss: Franz, go find out how many tik tokkers bought Komplete. We need new markets"
Franz, stifling his laughter: "Yes boss, I'll have the data by lunch time."

Boss: "Have you worked here long enough to have a lunch break? I thought all those guys were phazed out in the last round of layoffs!"

[machinesworking]

I'm going to just keep repeating myself in this thread because damn?

NI have always slowed to a snails pace when faced with structural change that they always accrue through technical debt. This is far from the first time this has happened. This time, they hit VST3, GUI refreshes, and Apple Silicon, and they're crawling along. They seem to have decided to hold off on GUI changes until they do new versions like they did with Kontakt 7, which will come likely as a paid upgrade in Komplete 15.

Again, to those of us that have owned Komplete since the beginning none of this is new, shocking or out of the ordinary. Especially those of us on Macs. Windows users have had it easy with them, besides the slow downs that OS 9 to X and PPC to Intel caused. VST3 and GUI issues are cross platform messes so welcome to the club.

[dayjob]

I'm going to just keep repeating myself in this thread because damn?

NI have always slowed to a snails pace when faced with structural change that they always accrue through technical debt. This is far from the first time this has happened. This time, they hit VST3, GUI refreshes, and Apple Silicon, and they're crawling along. They seem to have decided to hold off on GUI changes until they do new versions like they did with Kontakt 7, which will come likely as a paid upgrade in Komplete 15.

Again, to those of us that have owned Komplete since the beginning none of this is new, shocking or out of the ordinary. Especially those of us on Macs. Windows users have had it easy with them, besides the slow downs that OS 9 to X and PPC to Intel caused. VST3 and GUI issues are cross platform messes so welcome to the club.

perhaps that's true. as a mac user it seems like the "slow down due to structural change" has been a thing for 10+ years.

[machinesworking]

perhaps that's true. as a mac user it seems like the "slow down due to structural change" has been a thing for 10+ years.

I've got my copy of Komplete Care 2005 right here. This was NI's first big disaster with technical debt and changes in Mac OS from 9 to X. A year later Apple announces Intel chips, and NI is still struggling to port all their line up to OS X. I can't recall but I believe there was some work that had to be done for Vista as well. NI gave away copies of Massive and gave another year of Komplete Care, because they could not meet their announced schedule.

NI have a long history of technical debt, and taking forever to clean it up, it's part of the issue with attempting to be the biggest plug in and musical developer in the world, and honestly that comes at a cost. When you hire multiple developers to create multiple lines of products, at some point those developers leave, then you have the task of rewriting all the GUI code pretty much from scratch if something major changes like Apple Silicon, VST3, and everyone wanting modern resizable GUI's.

NI are far from the only company this happens to, (IMO very likely this is why Arturia abandoned Spark, iZotope are deprecating Iris etc.), but with dozens of products produced by dozens of developers, some of which no longer work at NI, this happens a lot to them. IMO hence why they have deprecated Absynth, Kore, Spektral Delay, Kompact, Intakt, B4, Pro 53, etc. over the years.

[Synthdance]

And Vokator, I've never forgiven them that.

[machinesworking]

And Vokator, I've never forgiven them that.

the big one for me was Kore, it in Ableton Live was my live setup for years. Komplete Control and Maschine are not even comparable.

[martiu]

are you still sad?

[vurt]

yooooou willlll beeeeee...


something, something, something daaaaark siiiiiide.