Sad state of Native Instruments

[D-Fusion]

"old-school synth experimenters", Reaktor? In today's world, it's just another modular (with no MPE?). I don't find it "creative" in the intuitive way. Just a bunch of standard modules.

I think the problem lies with you , reaktor is far more than just another modular (blocks) .
You’re just using a tiny subset of it’s capabilities ,learn reaktor core

I saw Reaktor v1, then I switched to Max MSP (because it was scriptable and more user friendly), then M4L, but they are all too confusing with their partial DAW integration and the need for boring low level tweaking (ie. midi clock management in Max MSP).

Finally, today, and for the years to come, I use Bitwig. What this little company is doing is mind blowing in terms of creative workflow. Compared to the others solutions decribed here, the balance between power and intuitive high level, DAW integrated, tools is near perfect. Why? Because they have innovated with creativity in their mind. While what NI is doing, with all their power as a big company, is minimum maintenance of their catalog to sell their play accessories.

What to expect from a DAW like Maschine that is in version 2 since 10 years! It must be a (sad) record in the music software industry. The computer+hardware+DAW integration at reasonable price is a powerful idea broken by a minimalist, profit only, oriented view. That's why I blame them so much. They have never finished it and now they are trying to sell Maschine+ at twice the price with all the hardware durability and limitations drawbacks.

That is what you get when you are a big company that fires or loosing the People that makes the programs for you to save a buck or to give the Ceo more pocket Money and selling out to profit Companies with no musical experience or interest in improving what they have already sold.

Seems like more and more software companies are shooting themselves in the foot these days with Subscription based Copy Protections or other idiotic Copy Protection methods that punish their honest buyer base.

+ More and More Draconian Eula's that takes the users rights away if you don't agree with their views.

Even Some HW Synths these days that has built in Wifi is going in a direction i don't like that demands reactivation on every 30 power on/off Cycle to let you use their soundpacks or you can buy a Usb Dongle to connect to it for "Offline" use. *Cough**Roland**Cough*

[stefani ss]

The sale is on going guys

[jlgrimes11]

I actually think it started earlier, when they didn’t update their very liked vst products, like pro 53, fm8 and absynth. All their control systems are a step into the wrong direction, imho, requiring a host on host software. Only the hardware seems to be very solidly built.

Pro 53 was a great synth for its time.

NI created alot of good synths but yes they never stand in one place for too long and other companies come out with something better and they usually don't respond back.

Repro is on a whole different level and basically a whole new synth, but Pro 53 was long gone by then.

Massive created a whole genre of music, but Serum took over where Massive left off and while Massive X is nice, they kind of missed what people were wanting in a Massive update.

Maschine is good but Akai is heavily fighting with so many MPCs, and Maschine+ kind of killed the vibe as it seems underpowered for a standalone device.

They have let alot of stuff fall to the wayside.

FM8, they kind of waited too long, and now there are a gazillion FM synths with freeware competitors for users who just want DX7 patches, or more unique offerings. And FM is pretty popular now and NI has a 10+ year old synth.



That said they are still a good company but the cost of getting big is making it harder for them to make quick decisions especially with alot of old code and developers who are probably long gone. It took them long to adapt to VST3, and Retina displays.

Kontakt is still their bread and butter and still a good program and they still have many great synths but yes they have huge competition now even with freeware developers in the synth market.


Surprisingly Arturia really stepped their game up, really by just focusing mainly on what they have been doing. They expand but it seems like they do it a bit more carefully and mainly focus on synths which was always their bread and butter.

Ni Komplete though is still an amazing product that gets you almost every type of synth at your fingertips and the ability to create any sound. Still a good recommendation for someone who wants a bunch of tools/sounds. Arturia comes the closest but not really the same as they focus almost exclusively on synths and very little on Samplers (except Retro emulations).

[Hanz Meyzer]

Well, I actually think Pro-53 had its own, nice sound. Surely with obvious aliasing on higher pitched notes, and not accurate emulation at all, but I actually kind of like that in a mix, it gives the sound more prominence when you use a bit of cutoff, maybe a bit like adding highpassed noise pre-filter. I think fm8 still is ahead its competitors regarding the sound and some controls. But the gui is horrible. Though it still has features, which no others have, like macro controlling brightness etc. or morphing of presets and so on. The fm7 gui was much better, IMHO What I mean, NI always sucked in GUIs, and they never did proper updates, or way too late.

So I never understood this poor product maintainance. I also don't like it, if a company regularly abandons their older products and publishes new, incompatible versions of it. There are better examples, like u-He Zebra: Provide an engine-version switch. I think starting new stuff all the time, not update your existing stuff also is not wise in a commercial perspective.

[rod_zero]

Arturia and NI, so different paths. NI started innovating and then went too big. Arturia made big turn as they developed hardware, I remeber that reallyt big VA , the Origin, which was big failure.

Then arturia made the microbrute, matrixbrute and polybrute, some failed products here and there (spark, analog lab controllers), they renovated their software during the last 5 years. Arturia didn't become big fgast and struggled more to find a niche and succesful products but that kind of forced them to take more risks.

Apart form Maschine Ni has struggled to deliver great HW, mostly low quality stuff that breaks and is obsolete fast. They had so many resources back in the mid 2000's made so many stuff that was abandoned: kore, guitar rig HW, and all the software instruments that never got updates. Always chasing bringing something new but always struggling to consolidate and make it better.

[neverbefore]

I like how easy it is in FM8 to modulate things like oscillator waveform and get useful results - easier than say F'em which is way more complex but even so seems less accessible for programming
But the FM8 interface is too small and I have not found a way to rescale it

[stargate38]

What would be better for the customers would be to make the (no longer maintained) old VSTs available for free, instead of discontinuing them. That would attract a lot more attention to NI, and they might get more business (i.e. people downloading the free VSTs may eventually buy the paid ones if they can afford them). Same goes with any VST or DAW company.

[Hammy Havoc]

What would be better for the customers would be to make the (no longer maintained) old VSTs available for free, instead of discontinuing them. That would attract a lot more attention to NI, and they might get more business (i.e. people downloading the free VSTs may eventually buy the paid ones if they can afford them). Same goes with any VST or DAW company.

I don't think it would do much. Steinberg is killing VST2 support, the rest of the industry will inevitably follow without the SDK for new architectures and operating systems, just like killing ReWire.

Move on to superior software from developers that support it and care about customer experience. I spent years trying to convince NI of XYZ, participating in their forum and Centercode. The grass is greener pretty much anywhere else.

[commerce]

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

All keys are white in your picture...
(Was it generated by Dall-E?)

I purchased the Ultimate package and was suprised that Scarbee Funk Guitarist was not there.

[seangm]

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

All keys are white in your picture...
(Was it generated by Dall-E?)

I purchased the Ultimate package and was suprised that Scarbee Funk Guitarist was not there.

You're not missing anything with Scarbee Funk Guitarist. Most convoluted guitar instrument I've ever tried to use. The Session Guitarist instruments are much better.

[DrWashington]

Action Strings 2 is a steaming POS which exposes exactly how bad Kontakt 7's scripting engine optimization truly is: it's constantly causing CPU spikes and audio dropouts. Not the instrument itself, nothing in it is putting that much load on the processor. They just don't know how to optimize and do not test their releases.

Many years later and still no standard MIDI learn on Massive X. Pigments is a nice alternative, at least, along with Icarus 2 and a few others. Shame, I wanted to at least get to know Massive X, but this is a dealbreaker for me. I despise KK. I don't want to fight with "workarounds", I just want speed and convenience. I don't know why industry standards & conventions are so hard for this hubristic company to get behind. It's always gotta be their own shit so they can sell more of THEIR controllers. Naturally. They're like the anti-MIDI: the whole industry has to bend over backwards to accommodate THEM, not the other way around.

I really hope most of their product management gets the axe and people who are smart enough to look at what has brought their competitors such wild success recently are brought on board. I am really, really tired of Native's general attitude for gosh, at least a decade now.

[Gribs]

They killed Kore to supposedly focus on the Maschine product line, then developed NKS and a line of controllers that uses it, and incorporated it into Maschine as well. However, they have never made a stand-alone NKS controller independent of a keyboard or pad controller, which to me seems dumb and leaves a segment of their potential customer base unserved. I have made the joke that it could be the "Kore" of your system...

I noticed that the Komplete and Komplete Ultimate upgrades this time were mostly expansion libraries and nothing else. Okay, so they also threw in Ozone Standard and some unexciting products from PA.

Still, I love Reaktor and Kontakt and I enjoy playing with third party libraries. I suppose is possilbe Kontakt will become obsolete at some point and be replaced by neural network models of instruments instead. Who knows.

[Gribs]

Speaking of NI and Reaktor, what is up with Twisted Tools? They made some killer Reaktor ensembles, got at least one into Komplete, and then seem to have disappeared. Did they close up shop and stop developing? Their website is active but says it is under development, which I don't remember being a thing in the past.

[CrystalWizard]

I haven't given NI or Izotope a penny in years and will not. Those were two of my favorites in the 2000s. I now have old machines and am collecting a few more to run all my old software. Right now i have one Win 7 and two Win 10 that i use regularly. Only one of them goes to the internet, the other two stay home. I also have another Win 10 desktop, a Win 7 laptop, a tiny little notebook, and an iMac.
Yes, eventually all my stuff will someday break permanently (even my big pile of hardware but i can fix that). I doubt i'll be around.
I wish that many more music software buyers would wake up and take a look at NI, Izo, PA, (behringer) and the rest. NI would have either got it back together or sunk. They're disgusting imo.
added: dunno bout TT they did some fun stuff.

[anxiousmofo]

Since NI has lost all inspiration for developing VI's they should meet us and their merger-buddies halfway and develop a solid and supported Iris 3 with Izotope.