Sad state of Native Instruments

[machinesworking]

Just upgraded to Komplete 14 standard, it's still a great deal. IMO I upgraded to 12 Ultimate right when 13 came out for maximum savings, but honestly I mostly just use Kontakt and Reaktor, and load raw samples from Maschine expansions into the MPC here.

I still don't get the extreme hate? It's always been a great deal of a package, they just aren't "churning out the hits" like they used to, and personally I don't care. As long as a copy of Reaktor and Kontakt run on my computers that's all I really need from them.

[Gribs]

Just upgraded to Komplete 14 standard, it's still a great deal. IMO I upgraded to 12 Ultimate right when 13 came out for maximum savings, but honestly I mostly just use Kontakt and Reaktor, and load raw samples from Maschine expansions into the MPC here.

I still don't get the extreme hate? It's always been a great deal of a package, they just aren't "churning out the hits" like they used to, and personally I don't care. As long as a copy of Reaktor and Kontakt run on my computers that's all I really need from them.

I also upgraded to Ultimate a couple of versions back and updated during the summer sale. The expansions are well-produced and have a lot of great content. Innovations appear to continue in scripted Kontakt instruments. I would say I feel more disappointment, but it is not extreme disappointment, and concern over the company’s future. I am a customer willing to pay for a specific product (a desktop controller having browsing and mapped parameter features like the Komplete Kontrol portion of their KB controllers) that to me seemed obvious but to them is apparently uninteresting. I am pretty much in the same boat as you as far as the software goes: keep Reaktor and Kontakt up-to-date and supported, add features, etc. I want NI to stay solvent, innovative, and relevant. There is also the people angle. Corporate buyouts, investment deals, and restructurings always leave a trail of layoffs and losses. I have experienced that from an employee pov and it was extremely traumatic and life-changing. I got lucky with my career recovery, but not everyone does.

[glokraw]

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.

Providing a U-he like product registration option would be nice for both companies.
An Iris 3 or Massive X2 that didn't require more than pasting a serial number would be very welcome.
Cheers

[martiu]

are you still sad ?

[machinesworking]

I also upgraded to Ultimate a couple of versions back and updated during the summer sale. The expansions are well-produced and have a lot of great content. Innovations appear to continue in scripted Kontakt instruments. I would say I feel more disappointment, but it is not extreme disappointment, and concern over the company’s future. I am a customer willing to pay for a specific product (a desktop controller having browsing and mapped parameter features like the Komplete Kontrol portion of their KB controllers) that to me seemed obvious but to them is apparently uninteresting. I am pretty much in the same boat as you as far as the software goes: keep Reaktor and Kontakt up-to-date and supported, add features, etc. I want NI to stay solvent, innovative, and relevant. There is also the people angle. Corporate buyouts, investment deals, and restructurings always leave a trail of layoffs and losses. I have experienced that from an employee pov and it was extremely traumatic and life-changing. I got lucky with my career recovery, but not everyone does.

Mostly I just want Reaktor and Kontakt to remain around. I don't see them going away, in fact I would bet they're doing fine. KVR is filled with veterans and veterans have plenty of legit reasons to not think highly of NI. The been counters there have always made it hard to be a fan, even if the products aren't bad. IMO personally I don't think I'm going back to Ultimate, I'm not that into Romplers, they do nothing for me but fill my hard drive, and that's probably why these types of threads pop up.

[DrGonzo]

I still don't get the extreme hate? It's always been a great deal of a package, they just aren't "churning out the hits" like they used to, and personally I don't care. As long as a copy of Reaktor and Kontakt run on my computers that's all I really need from them.

I actually don't think it's hate, but rather a venting of an extreme disappointment. Native Instruments have an incredible potential with Maschine, Kontakt and Reaktor. Maschine+ was such a cool move. What have happened with that platform since its release? Basically nothing. NI is clearly doing as little as possible at this point.

I think we had a similar discussion about about the Push 3 standalone some weeks back. I don't think most people are really hating on NI - they just feel the potential for greatness is enormous and NI don't really care.

/C

[Daru925]

Recently i purchased a new laptop for music while travelling, good opportunity to filter out things i dont need anymore.
Well as sad as people claim NI is, i find their synths and effects still relevant today.
Idc about presets or expansions so i only installed Massive X and kept its init preset, a bunch of kontakt libs for guitar and orchestra, and my go to FX (raum replika supercharger driver and molekular). The rest is stock plugins (ableton) and phoscyon2.
Massive x replaced 90% of my synths basically, and saves me bunch of space on the tiny ssd.

So maybe ignorance is bliss but i'm thorougly enjoying my old sad and outdated NI products for the time being, and i guess they could rest on their proverbial "laurels" with a still strong catalog for quite some time.

[DrGonzo]

so i only installed Massive X and kept its init preset

That's a great way to learn and master a synthesizer.

Even if you prefer to make your own sounds from scratch, dissecting others presets is a damn fine way to learn the less obvious features and exploits, and understand why they sound like they do. Almost every preset for me is like a story in miniature.

Buy you are right. Massive X is a good solid synthesizer no matter what.

[machinesworking]

I still don't get the extreme hate? It's always been a great deal of a package, they just aren't "churning out the hits" like they used to, and personally I don't care. As long as a copy of Reaktor and Kontakt run on my computers that's all I really need from them.

I actually don't think it's hate, but rather a venting of an extreme disappointment. Native Instruments have an incredible potential with Maschine, Kontakt and Reaktor. Maschine+ was such a cool move. What have happened with that platform since its release? Basically nothing. NI is clearly doing as little as possible at this point.

I think we had a similar discussion about about the Push 3 standalone some weeks back. I don't think most people are really hating on NI - they just feel the potential for greatness is enormous and NI don't really care.

/C

I've owned Komplete since version 2, the ride with NI has always been a bit bumpy. The list of plug ins they've abandoned is longer than their current line up. They also put out some of the most interesting pieces of software out there. Reaktor alone could be your only third party plug in, Kontakt has the largest third party libraries.

This is the issue IMO, for the most part the bigger the company the more mistakes get made, people get hired who write great plug ins like Absynth, then they quit. So Absynth at some point gets deprecated. I would bet that's half the battle with seemingly great products that stagnate or are deprecated: Loom II, Spark, BPM, Cypher 2 come to mind right away as products from companies that seem to have lost the original developer.

Also completely not related to NI but IMO part of the problem, I think plug ins have made most of us into preset tweakers, rather than own 2-5 synths a drum machine and a sampler, that we know very well, we now can have literally hundreds of synths we know only the basics of. So we require "innovation" from developers, i.e. new synths with new sounds to tweak a little and call our own.

Maschine and + in General has the same issues that Push 3 standalone has. There is only one global time signature. Push standalone is disappointing for me for sure, but it's not like the computer version is bad. The MPCs IMO literally kill those two because of this. My issue with Push standalone is I figured it would be better than the MPCs.

[DrGonzo]

Also completely not related to NI but IMO part of the problem, I think plug ins have made most of us into preset tweakers, rather than own 2-5 synths a drum machine and a sampler, that we know very well, we now can have literally hundreds of synths we know only the basics of. So we require "innovation" from developers, i.e. new synths with new sounds to tweak a little and call our own.

Yeah me too - I've been with NI since when Reaktor was called Generator, still have the box and the installer in a box somewhere. I even think NI sent me that first hardware expansion card to bring down the latency.

Preset tweakers is not a new thing though. Just take the 80s and the Fairlight. I don't know how many records that were created using the Fairlight library straight out of the box. And let's not talk about the DX! The bigwig producers hired programmers to develop sounds for them. I don't see preset tweaking as anything bad though. It's like working with food. You can make your own broth by boiling bones overnight with your preferred veggies and spices. It's easy to learn and to do. It just takes time. The easier way is to pop in a broth cube that gives you similar flavours, but it doesn't give you the control of where you want to go.

I'm a rabid hardcore proponent of learning at least one synthesizer inside out. To make a sound I have in my head in let's say Diva takes me less time than it takes to find a suitable preset. Damn it, I can even do it when out walking hearing the results in my head!
But during preset flipping I usually stumble across something that I never could have thought of, which puts me into a different direction. That's what I think is the power behind having a lot of presets at your hand.

Both ways are good.

[noiseboyuk]

Preset tweakers is not a new thing though. Just take the 80s and the Fairlight. I don't know how many records that were created using the Fairlight library straight out of the box. And let's not talk about the DX! The bigwig producers hired programmers to develop sounds for them. I don't see preset tweaking as anything bad though. It's like working with food. You can make your own broth by boiling bones overnight with your preferred veggies and spices. It's easy to learn and to do. It just takes time. The easier way is to pop in a broth cube that gives you similar flavours, but it doesn't give you the control of where you want to go.

I'm a rabid hardcore proponent of learning at least one synthesizer inside out. To make a sound I have in my head in let's say Diva takes me less time than it takes to find a suitable preset. Damn it, I can even do it when out walking hearing the results in my head!
But during preset flipping I usually stumble across something that I never could have thought of, which puts me into a different direction. That's what I think is the power behind having a lot of presets at your hand.

Both ways are good.

Amen.

There's a few bits of KVR orthodoxy that are kinda silly, and "presets are bad" is one of them. So many classic records are made with presets, in interviews people often say they just used what was lying around in the studio. And this was in the days when presets got "famous" from over-use. I have many tens of thousands of presets across different synths, and the only widely recognisable ones are the old famous presets.

It's whatever works for you.

In terms of NI, I'm still waiting for them to make Komplete Kontrol useable as a unified preset browser. Arturia do it well in Analog Lab. Hell, even NI did it with Kore, but that was 20 years ago. It's staggering to me that their browsers across the range are as bad as they are, and KK is the epicenter of the badness.

[nightjar]

KK software is a horribly designed user experience.

One of NI's biggest mistakes. It hugely devalues the concept of NKS.

[CinningBao]

so i only installed Massive X and kept its init preset

That's a great way to learn and master a synthesizer.

Even if you prefer to make your own sounds from scratch, dissecting others presets is a damn fine way to learn the less obvious features and exploits, and understand why they sound like they do. Almost every preset for me is like a story in miniature.

Buy you are right. Massive X is a good solid synthesizer no matter what.

I totally agree, that middle paragraph sounds very similar to something I utter in this post

Great timing!

[pdxindy]

I actually don't think it's hate, but rather a venting of an extreme disappointment.

Exactly... I don't hate NI. NI's sound generation DSP is world class. But then so much other stuff is a mess or incomplete and they are generally behind on their development.

There are 3-4 NI synths I would happily use if they were VST plugins with good browsers. At least for the moment, I have written off NI. I have Komplete, but don't have a single thing installed anymore and don't expect to in the future unless they have a fresh start.

[zerocrossing]

I actually don't think it's hate, but rather a venting of an extreme disappointment.

Exactly... I don't hate NI. NI's sound generation DSP is world class. But then so much other stuff is a mess or incomplete and they are generally behind on their development.

There are 3-4 NI synths I would happily use if they were VST plugins with good browsers. At least for the moment, I have written off NI. I have Komplete, but don't have a single thing installed anymore and don't expect to in the future unless they have a fresh start.

This seems like nose cutting off behavior. Is there really anything so atrocious about NI’s software that you can’t bring yourself to enjoy it for what it is? I could maybe see not buying it at this point, though I would, but to deny yourself a resource that you already own? I don’t get that at all.

For example, I’m pissed that Massive X doesn’t have polyphonic aftertouch support. Niche, I know, but I like what I like. But it is still installed and gets used for bass and lead sounds. It actually replaced a Pro 2 and freed up space for a PolyBrute.

I can tell similar stories about almost all of Komplete. Every time I think, “maybe it’s time to ditch NI, I look at alternatives and I never really find something that can replace it. Not all of it.