Sad state of Native Instruments

[pdxindy]

Filterscape VA is part of Filterscape, I'm not aware of any impetus to partition VA off from Filterscape? IMO though it also shows that even small agile developers struggle with technical debt, that U-He has not yet gotten Filterscape to Apple Silicon, and has not yet finished Zebra 3, which was supposedly happening 5 years ago or thereabouts.

Very soon the new Filterscape will be in public beta (Filterscape + VA and Q6). Apple Silicon, CLAP versions, AAX is back, totally redone GUI with the usual browser and resizing, a brand new u-he filter that sounds gorgeous, and so on.

And it's a free update...

Sure there's technical debt. But they are obvious handling it. And not just handling it, but moving forward on the leading edge of development. The new Filterscape VA supports Bitwig's Note Expressions which is freakin awesome!

[bundoo]

I spent 10 minutes last night trying to find my support ticket on their site. I eventually gave up and just opened a new one.

they send you an initial email when you open a support ticket with the address of the ticket. You would've had better look looking through your emails.

The thing is, it feels like NI are in a similar situation to Adobe - too many rusted on professional users who don't want anything to change because they are too set in their ways to adapt. So they leave the old stuff the way it is and make new stuff for other users.

They get no new sales on old software so they always make something "new". The Play series is just proprietary Kontakt libraries, but to their credit, some people are less likely to buy them without a GUI that hides that fact. That's the silly state of it. IMO they could refine and update Kontakt and Reaktor for the next 20 years and I would think they're a valid company, but in order to stay relevant they have to introduce essentially sample packs with GUIs.

Spot on

[zerocrossing]

I’m trying to consolidate all the complaints of NI plugins here. The idea is to then all get together and send the link to anyone we can at NI.

viewtopic.php?p=8711852#p8711852

[Hammy Havoc]

I’m trying to consolidate all the complaints of NI plugins here. The idea is to then all get together and send the link to anyone we can at NI.

viewtopic.php?p=8711852#p8711852

I, amidst many others, spent many years providing feedback via the forums and via Centercode to NI. Either management doesn't care or there aren't the resources or the potential return on investment to justify it.

After NI themselves remarked about what a small team Reaktor's dev is currently undergoing with minor features, I don't think your feedback is going to mean much that they don't already know after having been told umpteen times over the years.

P.S. I bitched so much that they banned me from the forum. In the nicest way possible, sink the time into audio rather than trying to help the biz that doesn't seem to want any help.

[Milkman]

When I started making music, Native Instruments was at the forefront of making innovative music software. In the past few years, it has become clear that is no longer the case. They sold out to some big business, fired a huge number of people, and stopped doing what once made them so great.

Massive X release was delayed, the released product was still unfinished, updates have been slow and unimpressive.

Guitar Rig 6 was released with the promise of incredible ICM components that would be released frequently based on people’s wishes. It’s been years and apart from the three they launched with they’ve released zero, latest news was there aren’t plans for any.

Komplete 14 was released with pretty much no new NI software, they just added a new browser to Kontakt and bundled a mishmash of third party products. They keep promoting synths by U-he and Arturia instead of making their own.

Absynth was killed off.

Super 8, a Reaktor based synth, was turned into a VST with no new features. They are now discontinuing the VST version and going back to Reaktor only, so all that did was make things convoluted for people who used the VST.

Reaktor, a dev said on the forum that NI “is not in a position to invest major resources in this product, which has not been news for some time.” Blocks started out strong, but NI stopped making them and so did the community after the messy front panel patching update making old blocks incompatible, and Reaktor in general being convoluted.

Now they just release sample packs as new products, and take painfully long to update their remaining products to current spec standards. I hope they can bounce back from this but am not holding my breath.

Feel free to add to my rant, disagree or just mourn NI’s demise.

*Exactly* my experience, and thank you for posting this. I've spent... some $$ on NI products over the years, I've been their customer 20+ years, and I am getting a bad feeling about the future.

In the last 6-12 months alone, since NI rebooted their forum to the hideous thing it is today, there has been a distinct change to the community, the brand management, customer service and moderation, etc, and this change has (for me, having been on that forum for decades) destroyed a lot of the earlier camaraderie found there.

Their product offerings have stagnated, their promised updates and improvements have fallen very short, and suddenly... NI are talking about "AI music tools" instead of new HW, software synths or other useful content/updates for actual musicians. Their focus seems to be moving toward pop culture methods of "making a quick buck" and moving away from the quality, innovative brand they used to be, and this disgusts me. I wrote a bit about it on their forum last week, under the thread about AI shit, and as expected a couple brand new accounts with no posting history came to attack me and claim that I didnt understand AI, lol.

The acquisition of NI and many other brands by larger, private-equity backed firms is a dead-end. These PE firms will hollow out our favorite brands, dump personnel, dump anything they can't extract high profit margins from, and then ultimately dump the brand in the gutter after they finish extracting anything they can from it like f**king parasites.

Just a year or so ago I found myself defending NI. I found myself trying to cool down people who were getting angry because NI wasnt meeting their timelines for updates, etc, lol. I defended them because, while they had some problems, many companies have similar problems and many other vendors are much worse to deal with, and I've LOVED NI for so long! So I felt like I should defend NI... because I did not see *this* coming. I did not realize they would move in this direction, and now I feel silly for ever having defended them.

I dont see good things in the future for NI, and I wonder if I should keep all my NI stuff on an offline, air-gapped machine that stays the same forever to keep updates from potentially f**king up what I have now. Maybe they will go to all subscription services. Who knows. I wont be coming along for that ride. : (

[zerocrossing]

I’m trying to consolidate all the complaints of NI plugins here. The idea is to then all get together and send the link to anyone we can at NI.

viewtopic.php?p=8711852#p8711852

I, amidst many others, spent many years providing feedback via the forums and via Centercode to NI. Either management doesn't care or there aren't the resources or the potential return on investment to justify it.

After NI themselves remarked about what a small team Reaktor's dev is currently undergoing with minor features, I don't think your feedback is going to mean much that they don't already know after having been told umpteen times over the years.

P.S. I bitched so much that they banned me from the forum. In the nicest way possible, sink the time into audio rather than trying to help the biz that doesn't seem to want any help.

Well, it’s only been a year since they’ve become part of Soundwide, and maybe there’s a chance that if enough people make enough noise they’ll see value in adding a couple of developers to spruce things up. Trust me, I’ve complained on their forum too, but clearly no one from corporate is reading those forums. A lot of constant bad publicly isn’t good for any company, and if we don’t clearly explain why we’re disappointed, they may not know how widespread the issue is. You could still be totally right, but it’s not like it will take much effort to do this.

[zerocrossing]

When I started making music, Native Instruments was at the forefront of making innovative music software. In the past few years, it has become clear that is no longer the case. They sold out to some big business, fired a huge number of people, and stopped doing what once made them so great.

Massive X release was delayed, the released product was still unfinished, updates have been slow and unimpressive.

Guitar Rig 6 was released with the promise of incredible ICM components that would be released frequently based on people’s wishes. It’s been years and apart from the three they launched with they’ve released zero, latest news was there aren’t plans for any.

Komplete 14 was released with pretty much no new NI software, they just added a new browser to Kontakt and bundled a mishmash of third party products. They keep promoting synths by U-he and Arturia instead of making their own.

Absynth was killed off.

Super 8, a Reaktor based synth, was turned into a VST with no new features. They are now discontinuing the VST version and going back to Reaktor only, so all that did was make things convoluted for people who used the VST.

Reaktor, a dev said on the forum that NI “is not in a position to invest major resources in this product, which has not been news for some time.” Blocks started out strong, but NI stopped making them and so did the community after the messy front panel patching update making old blocks incompatible, and Reaktor in general being convoluted.

Now they just release sample packs as new products, and take painfully long to update their remaining products to current spec standards. I hope they can bounce back from this but am not holding my breath.

Feel free to add to my rant, disagree or just mourn NI’s demise.

*Exactly* my experience, and thank you for posting this. I've spent... some $$ on NI products over the years, I've been their customer 20+ years, and I am getting a bad feeling about the future.

In the last 6-12 months alone, since NI rebooted their forum to the hideous thing it is today, there has been a distinct change to the community, the brand management, customer service and moderation, etc, and this change has (for me, having been on that forum for decades) destroyed a lot of the earlier camaraderie found there.

Their product offerings have stagnated, their promised updates and improvements have fallen very short, and suddenly... NI are talking about "AI music tools" instead of new HW, software synths or other useful content/updates for actual musicians. Their focus seems to be moving toward pop culture methods of "making a quick buck" and moving away from the quality, innovative brand they used to be, and this disgusts me. I wrote a bit about it on their forum last week, under the thread about AI shit, and as expected a couple brand new accounts with no posting history came to attack me and claim that I didnt understand AI, lol.

The acquisition of NI and many other brands by larger, private-equity backed firms is a dead-end. These PE firms will hollow out our favorite brands, dump personnel, dump anything they can't extract high profit margins from, and then ultimately dump the brand in the gutter after they finish extracting anything they can from it like f**king parasites.

Just a year or so ago I found myself defending NI. I found myself trying to cool down people who were getting angry because NI wasnt meeting their timelines for updates, etc, lol. I defended them because, while they had some problems, many companies have similar problems and many other vendors are much worse to deal with, and I've LOVED NI for so long! So I felt like I should defend NI... because I did not see *this* coming. I did not realize they would move in this direction, and now I feel silly for ever having defended them.

I dont see good things in the future for NI, and I wonder if I should keep all my NI stuff on an offline, air-gapped machine that stays the same forever to keep updates from potentially f**king up what I have now. Maybe they will go to all subscription services. Who knows. I wont be coming along for that ride. : (

You know, at one time I was similarly angry with Arturia. Crappy dull sounding plugins that just seemed to be trying to make some money off pictures of classic instruments. But something happened and now I literally own every plugin they make and a PolyBrute. So, I’m not saying that NI can do a similar turn-a-round, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Someone with a ledger just needs to see that there will be some money in it for them. Also, it’s not like they’re not doing anything cool. A lot of those scripted Kontakt instruments are pretty interesting, and Reaktor is still Reaktor, and by that I mean great. I also have rekindled my fondness for Guitar Rig, and they released a new fuzz for it that’s good. So, it’s not like they’re dead. Just very drowsy.

[Hammy Havoc]

I’m trying to consolidate all the complaints of NI plugins here. The idea is to then all get together and send the link to anyone we can at NI.

viewtopic.php?p=8711852#p8711852

I, amidst many others, spent many years providing feedback via the forums and via Centercode to NI. Either management doesn't care or there aren't the resources or the potential return on investment to justify it.

After NI themselves remarked about what a small team Reaktor's dev is currently undergoing with minor features, I don't think your feedback is going to mean much that they don't already know after having been told umpteen times over the years.

P.S. I bitched so much that they banned me from the forum. In the nicest way possible, sink the time into audio rather than trying to help the biz that doesn't seem to want any help.

Well, it’s only been a year since they’ve become part of Soundwide, and maybe there’s a chance that if enough people make enough noise they’ll see value in adding a couple of developers to spruce things up. Trust me, I’ve complained on their forum too, but clearly no one from corporate is reading those forums. A lot of constant bad publicly isn’t good for any company, and if we don’t clearly explain why we’re disappointed, they may not know how widespread the issue is. You could still be totally right, but it’s not like it will take much effort to do this.

The forums are really neither here nor there. Having feedback ignored on Centercode says it all.

Triaging feedback is one thing. Actioning it is an entirely other beast.

[sacer]

I have very long loading times when opening Kontakt7, battery 4, maschine2 and Komplete Kontrol. Since last update also guitar rig 6 takes longer to open the plugin.
I contacted the support, but nothing happened.
After writing in the forum twice with same problem, a NI guy priored my ticket and I was finally after 4 weeks in a net meeting to solve the problem.
While Kontakt6 takes 3 seconds to open the plugin, Kontakt 7 takes around 4 minutes to open the plugin, also like battery4, Maschine and kK.
After he deleted my xml files, which are used as NKS presets, Kontakt 7 now opens up in only one minute, but I have no NKS presets in Maschine and KK with that solution.
He told me he has to continue next week.
After asking next week for a meeting again, he told me he is sick and out of office. After that week they wanted to close the ticket so I replied that nothing has been solved. I haven’t heard anything from them again.
I read that this problem is not pc only, also Mac people have this problem. With these loading times NI doesn’t make fun if you have to wait 5 to 10 minutes if you have used these NI plug-ins in an Ableton project. Also old battery 4 projects don’t find the old sample path, it would be no problem to let battery search in current sample path first, before asking for manual search. Also when I point to current library path, after saving and reopening the project again, it asks again for library path. So I have to switch the plugin itself that it can save.
Only massive x, Kontakt 6 and reaktor6 do open quick. With this current situation I don’t want to use any NI product - I have doubts that they won’t fix this issue soon. I bet it’s a copy protection issue combined with slow loading times of Native Access 2 - it’s a really mess, if you have invested so much money and can’t roll back to older versions

[noiseboyuk]

Guitar Rig 6 was released with the promise of incredible ICM components that would be released frequently based on people’s wishes. It’s been years and apart from the three they launched with they’ve released zero, latest news was there aren’t plans for any.

Actually one snuck out in June - Fire Seeker, along with new rack presets. Hardly the tsunami of models we were promised, but it's not accurate to say there's nothing at all.

Also largely overlooked here was Kontakt's 7.5 update which does significantly improve the new browser. It's still not good enough yet imo, but it is now useable. (sacer - sorry to hear your load times are so bad. I have them noticeably worse than earlier versions, but nowhere hear your level).

Amid the general moaning - I share much of it - there is a widespread view here that they've released nothing but worthless junk for years. That's not the case. When I updated to K14 CE, two standout products where Lores and the Picked Nylon. Lores is better at what it does than any other product from any developer, and Nylon is at least on a par. (I don't care if they subbed out the work on these - it's NI for us the end users).

As for AI - they have to do it. I know KVR just wants devs to make endless marginally-better-quality models of old stuff that all sound more or less the same, but not only is that market over-saturated, it's uninspiring and dull. AI can be used to make either cookie-cutter ultra-easy stuff - at the simplest end you may as well just rent the whole job out MusicLM and be done - or it can provide new tools and products that can do stuff with audio we've never been able to do before. Any major music company not in that game is going to die. That said, iZotope having led the way for a few years has clearly fallen well behind, and NI themselves haven't done anything with the tech yet, so I'm not holding my breath.

I'm a pragmatist. NI continue to make some best-in-class products while they have seemingly all-but given up on areas like synths. Development can be glacially slow, and they have a track record of abandoning good stuff. But as long as they keep adding high quality useful products of some kind, I won't just abandon them on point of principle.

[Milkman]

You know, at one time I was similarly angry with Arturia. Crappy dull sounding plugins that just seemed to be trying to make some money off pictures of classic instruments. But something happened and now I literally own every plugin they make and a PolyBrute. So, I’m not saying that NI can do a similar turn-a-round, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Someone with a ledger just needs to see that there will be some money in it for them. Also, it’s not like they’re not doing anything cool. A lot of those scripted Kontakt instruments are pretty interesting, and Reaktor is still Reaktor, and by that I mean great. I also have rekindled my fondness for Guitar Rig, and they released a new fuzz for it that’s good. So, it’s not like they’re dead. Just very drowsy.

Arturia has some great stuff, and I love my microfreak and pigments4. My MF is on al day every day. Goes on when I wake, off when I sleep. Yeah I hope NI can turn around in some way, and I also use NI stuff every day, but I dont appreciate what I've seen for a yeari-sh now, and I think the forum really took a crap. The community was important to me, as well.

[Dalle]

Guitar Rig 6 was released with the promise of incredible ICM components that would be released frequently based on people’s wishes. It’s been years and apart from the three they launched with they’ve released zero, latest news was there aren’t plans for any.

Actually one snuck out in June - Fire Seeker, along with new rack presets. Hardly the tsunami of models we were promised, but it's not accurate to say there's nothing at all.

They’ve released two after this thread was started, Fire Seeker and Red Fuzz.

[zerocrossing]

I'm a pragmatist. NI continue to make some best-in-class products while they have seemingly all-but given up on areas like synths. Development can be glacially slow, and they have a track record of abandoning good stuff. But as long as they keep adding high quality useful products of some kind, I won't just abandon them on point of principle.

That’s my take on them too. The effort to replace everything that I have from them would be considerable, and in some cases I’d never be able to fully recover. I’ve been using MSoundFactory as a modern Absynth replacement, and while it’s very capable, and in many ways more capable, it’s not really the same experience. Sometimes I still boot up Absynth. It works, and I have one small monitor to use for such things, so I can’t really think of a reason to not use it. If it stops working one day, I’ll just switch to something else. It’s not like I don’t enjoy making new sounds.

[pdxindy]

I'm a pragmatist. NI continue to make some best-in-class products while they have seemingly all-but given up on areas like synths. Development can be glacially slow, and they have a track record of abandoning good stuff. But as long as they keep adding high quality useful products of some kind, I won't just abandon them on point of principle.

If that works for you... great.

In my case, the sample based stuff is not what interests me or what I use. It's the NI synths, which were at one time, cutting edge, that caused me to buy Komplete. I haven't had Kontakt or any sample based products installed for years . Maybe 60% of what is included with Komplete I have never even tried.

Since switching to Apple Silicon Macs, I have nothing from NI installed. That is not a point of principle, but a practical choice. When NI canceled Super 8 as a VST and dropped Absynth that caused me to conclude that they are no longer interested in or perhaps capable of developing synths. At that point, my interest in their products has declined and is on its way to zero.

If at some point, synths again become a focus, I'll be happy to reconsider using their stuff again.

[machinesworking]

Filterscape VA is part of Filterscape, I'm not aware of any impetus to partition VA off from Filterscape? IMO though it also shows that even small agile developers struggle with technical debt, that U-He has not yet gotten Filterscape to Apple Silicon, and has not yet finished Zebra 3, which was supposedly happening 5 years ago or thereabouts.

Very soon the new Filterscape will be in public beta (Filterscape + VA and Q6). Apple Silicon, CLAP versions, AAX is back, totally redone GUI with the usual browser and resizing, a brand new u-he filter that sounds gorgeous, and so on.

And it's a free update...

Sure there's technical debt. But they are obvious handling it. And not just handling it, but moving forward on the leading edge of development. The new Filterscape VA supports Bitwig's Note Expressions which is freakin awesome!

I'm as big fan of U-He. I even wrote some of the stock presets for it. The point remains though, other developers like U-He do experience technical debt that slows things to a crawl, and ones that are now lauded that used to be bashed like Arturia do deprecate core products like Spark.

It's the NI synths, which were at one time, cutting edge, that caused me to buy Komplete. I haven't had Kontakt or any sample based products installed for years . Maybe 60% of what is included with Komplete I have never even tried.

Since switching to Apple Silicon Macs, I have nothing from NI installed. That is not a point of principle, but a practical choice. When NI canceled Super 8 as a VST and dropped Absynth that caused me to conclude that they are no longer interested in or perhaps capable of developing synths. At that point, my interest in their products has declined and is on its way to zero.

IMO that's a strange take, NI Reaktor is one of the more interesting granular sample mangling tools out there since it's capable of being nearly anything, and Kontakt is an absolute standard library host.

I loved Absynth, but it was obvious what was happening there, Brian hadn't worked at NI in at least 5, maybe 10 years. At some point NI were going to stop hiring him to come back and fix it, and that eventually was the case.

Beyond that I always frankly preferred Zebra to Massive, and they messed with the code of Massive X so it wouldn't run on old Intel Xeons since they didn't do AAX. So for me their core sample devices and Reaktor in general are where they shine.