Sad state of Native Instruments

[Dirtgrain]

and yes any personal attack IMO points to you not having a point, or feeling threatened by what someone is saying.

But Bones. Ad hominem comments flow from him here and there, but he still sometimes has a point. Still, if people tune him out, that's on him.

[mixyguy2]

OK then, how happy are you with Air, MOTU instruments, Ohm Force, Nomad Factory?

Totally irrelevant to the actual topic (NI, remember?).

You keep trying to make conclusions for others. Just speak for yourself. You're not actually good at accurately summarizing the comments of others.

Quiet, he's on a roll.

[machinesworking]

and yes any personal attack IMO points to you not having a point, or feeling threatened by what someone is saying.

But Bones. Ad hominem comments flow from him here and there, but he still sometimes has a point. Still, if people tune him out, that's on him.

Yeah good point. Personally I don’t hold grudges, like I mentioned, to me conversations on the internet get convoluted pretty quickly and people get butthurt pretty quickly, making idiotic posts like the one right before me.

[CrystalWizard]

What I've found though, is that I missed a certain kind of improvisational composition style that comes from having knobs at arms length and it's exactly the opposite to what is described here in terms of time consuming. With software I often spend too much time setting up controllers to get the kind of improvisational workflow going. With hardware, I patch and play. I spend time with that "instrument" and then move on.

It does take a certain commitment to not worrying about not being able to recreate something, or continue to work on it at the source level in the future. I just turn on the multitrack and play my gear. Sometimes, I turn what comes out into a track, mostly, I don't bother, it's an experience in and of itself.

Yeah, it's a different approach.

When I am using hardware, I don't even try to make it something I can recall in the future. I record to audio and keep going... never to be reproduced. It's fun and refreshing.

I'm in this boat, too. Hardware pieces only rarely get repeated and at that they are new versions, not the same. i actually approach software in a similar manner, it's just way more difficult. I have just spent about 70hrs interfacing a midi controller to Ableton. Some manual reading, looking up some details in forums, tedious occasionally, but quite fun and satisfying too. After all that programming and work i did i can say that my setup is much more responsive and easier to navigate but it would pale in comparison to my hardware synthesizers. Maybe if i stay at it long enough...get the muscle memory.

[noiseboyuk]

The new browser/resizable interface is literally the only thing new in KONTAKT 7 from version 6.

What the hell did I actually pay for when I upgraded?

Well there was the new factory library plus a coupla new effects and an update to the time stretching algorithm. Not saying those things are amazing, but it's not true to say it's only browser and resizing that changed.

[lokust9ine]

I agreed with the statement of the OP and just got a little bit sad as I read the reply trail. I love Reaktor, but it is a little bit convoluted when it comes right down to it. I was going to purchase a Komplete Kontrol keyboard awhile ago (like less than a year), but it feels like I would end up getting annoyed because I don't really Kontrol anyway. I find that these days, it is easier to just use NI synths as VST 3 instruments (on MIDI channels in Abelton) individually. It probably is much more work for my processor, but it allows for some creativity when just using my regular Launchkey controller. It is really too bad that they got rid of Absynth. I hope the same doesn't happen to Reaktor...

[aMUSEd]

The new browser/resizable interface is literally the only thing new in KONTAKT 7 from version 6.

What the hell did I actually pay for when I upgraded?

Well there was the new factory library plus a coupla new effects and an update to the time stretching algorithm. Not saying those things are amazing, but it's not true to say it's only browser and resizing that changed.

And more effects have been added in subsequent point updates. However the biggest changes were builder focused. All of which enables Kontakt to have more sophisticated interfaces like the one in Playbox and also adding a new graphics engine/builder tools that support resizable interfaces such as we can see in Kontakt Library 2 and Omnia, and which NI are getting out to developers so they can update their libraries. So I guess most users don't see those things but do benefit from them by getting better interfaces and of course potentially anyone can develop the skills to be a Kontakt builder themselves.

[jamcat]

Certainly as an end user, the one important feature introduced in KONTAKT 7, indeed, pretty much the only thing anyone talked about or cared about in KONTAKT 7, is the resizable GUI. But it is a half measure at best. They couldn't vectorize the text displays? It's bizarre that display text is bitmap instead of vector to begin with. How do they make a resizable GUI without fixing that?

There is a small number of fixed zoom levels to choose from. Why is there only a single small-sized bitmap-based set of lettering and icons for all of them?

[aMUSEd]

Certainly as an end user, the one important feature introduced in KONTAKT 7, indeed, pretty much the only thing anyone talked about or cared about in KONTAKT 7, is the resizable GUI. But it is a half measure at best. They couldn't vectorize the text displays? It's bizarre that display text is bitmap instead of vector to begin with. How do they make a resizable GUI without fixing that?

There is a small number of fixed zoom levels to choose from. Why is there only a single small-sized bitmap-based set of lettering and icons for all of them?

It's not finished yet - the fonts still need vectorising, as do things like the editor - plus a gazillion libraries need updating.

[BONES]

That's when it started to seem like NI had changed direction from a cutting edge soft synth developer into a money grubbing corpse. Doing Only what will bring in the most $.

Like it or not, that's what companies are all about. They have bills to pay, employees who expect to get paid and you can't do that if you aren't making money. And the bigger you get, the more that pressure builds, the more you have to focus on it to stop the whole thing from crumbling around you. That's why it makes no sense to put any faith into a company or a brand - all any of them want is to get you to give them as much money as they can winkle out of you. Early on, they do that by providing better products and/or superior service but once established, their priorities undoubtedly change, out of necessity. They can't rely on the one big update a year to keep them afloat, they need to be releasing stuff on a regular basis to keep the money flowing relatively smoothly. That's just how it is.

You want them to be all warm and cuddly, and that's probably how they want to be, but warm and cuddly only gets you so far. The bills mount up and you have to start being a bit ruthless.

I don’t think anyone would fault them for going for a new market, but why abandon your old market?

Maybe that market abandoned them and became a drag on resources, in much the same way as Synapse stopped development on Orion, because the effort meant that 80% of the effort was going to the benefit of 10% of the user base. It's hard to know but, equally, it's hard to imagine they would abandon a market segment that was profitable.

I’ve not had an issue that needed support in a long time, but previous times I’ve had similarly good customer service from NI, so sure. The good should also be appreciated.

My experience has been the opposite. I currently have three Support Requests open with them, going back more than a month now, and they are yet to respond to any of them. Really, that's my only complaint with NI. It seems they are able to tailor disappointment to different customers, depending on our needs.

[jamcat]

Certainly as an end user, the one important feature introduced in KONTAKT 7, indeed, pretty much the only thing anyone talked about or cared about in KONTAKT 7, is the resizable GUI. But it is a half measure at best. They couldn't vectorize the text displays? It's bizarre that display text is bitmap instead of vector to begin with. How do they make a resizable GUI without fixing that?

There is a small number of fixed zoom levels to choose from. Why is there only a single small-sized bitmap-based set of lettering and icons for all of them?

It's not finished yet - the fonts still need vectorising, as do things like the editor - plus a gazillion libraries need updating.

I totally get that individual libraries will need to be updated by the developers, or may not get updated at all. They are separate from KONTAKT.

But as for KONTAKT 7 itself, why would they not at least get the fonts and menu icons looking acceptable when zoomed from the start? These are basic elements of the KONTAKT interface that you have to interact with to use it.

And do you know that it's a work in progress and these bitmap elements will be addressed in future .updates of KONTAKT 7.x, or is that just an assumption? I hope we don't have to pay to upgrade to KONTAKT 8 to get scalable fonts.

[jamcat]

Really, that's my only complaint with NI. It seems they are able to tailor disappointment to different customers, depending on our needs.

[CrystalWizard]

That's when ... at will bring in the most $.

... And the bigger you get, the more that pressure builds, the more you have to focus on it to stop the whole thing from crumbling around you. That's why it makes no sense to put any faith into a company or a brand - all any of them want is to get you to give them as much money as they can winkle out of you. Early on, they do that by providing better products and/or superior service but once established, their priorities undoubtedly change, out of necessity.

They can't rely on the one big update a year to keep them afloat, they need to be releasing stuff on a regular basis to keep the money flowing relatively smoothly. That's just how it is.

You want them to be all warm and cuddly, and that's probably how they want to be, but warm and cuddly only gets you so far. The bills mount up and you have to start being a bit ruthless.
...

quotes skipped...

Warm and cuddly? Wth? Warm and cuddly from a company?... No not what i'm looking for.
Your point about the size of a company/corpse is valid imo, it seems rare, if not unheard of, that as they go from small company to large corporation they bring any ethics along. As a person who has created some companies, as well as knowing quite a few who have done the same, as well as buying stuff from them for some decades, i have seem a broad range of intentions and actions from the totally mercenary as you describe to genuinely interested in quality and selling something of value. There's plenty of examples right here in synthlandia. Sure, every company has to survive, how they go about can be drastically different. I'm glad that my experience with small companies is apparently quite different than yours. NI was not a ruthless bunch of bean counters in the 2000s, they had some vision, some interest in pushing the envelope of software synthesis ... in my #$$%^ opinion of course before somebody jumps in with bbbb but the facts. As is the case at least half the time our opinions differ.

[pdxindy]

Really, that's my only complaint with NI. It seems they are able to tailor disappointment to different customers, depending on our needs.

best BONES comment ever!

[BONES]

i have seem a broad range of intentions and actions from the totally mercenary as you describe to genuinely interested in quality and selling something of value.

I bet none of the latter have more than 100 employees. Overheads go through the roof once you need to have someone to do the accounting/book-keeping, someone else to do payroll, HR, etc., etc. The back office stuff that you can mostly do yourself when you're only employing a handful of people starts to take over.

NI was not a ruthless bunch of bean counters in the 2000s, they had some vision, some interest in pushing the envelope of software synthesis ...

And yet they did nothing to make me even slightly interested in their products at that time. I still don't use any of those older products, even though I got a lot of them through Komplete. The ones we use are all things they have released since I became a customer - TRK-01, Straylight, SCHEMA: Dark. We used Massive on a few tracks on our last album but, in the process of moving everything across to Studio One, I replaced it in every song we'd used it in. I just don't like the harsh, "digital" tone of the thing. Ditto for Battery - it's on every track on our last album but, again, I replaced it when we moved to S1. I actually quite like Battery but it was creating too many headaches for us so we pretty much had to get rid of it.