Sad state of Native Instruments

[SLiC]

Once again, the sad, sad state of NI

[elxsound]

Live « configure » for plugins isn’t limited to 8 controls

I knew someone would misinterpret, Live only has 8 slots for controller keyboards and control surfaces. I use a Slate Raven which takes 4 of them, so I can't use all my controller keyboards and control surfaces with Live in that advanced mode, only as dumb MIDI boxes. That along with the lack of metronome only during count in, and not just while recording are my personal feature requests for Live.

Sorry for OT:

Shouldn’t it only be 3 slots?

*I’m asking because I don’t know and have always been curious about adding a Slate Raven.

Anything weird when using Raven with Live?

[kidslow]

The whole KK system appears to be fraught and fragile. Perhaps it's a local issue for me, but the presets for NI's own instruments like Reaktor-based Razor & Form throw up a VST3 VST2 error in native mode. I get a different error in Rosetta mode. NI presets for their Kontakt libraries and third party K presets give same errors. A small universe of what I have available to me can actually take advantage of the full feature set of Komplete Kontrol --> Developers who supply VST3 and have made the migration with their NKS, and community NKS that have been upped to support VST3 are what I have found to be fully functional.

Damn, thank you for the explanation and sorry you had to navigate that.

That should help me set my expectations since I’m new to KK.

I do plan on only adding VST3, even if it’s limiting. My desktop is Intel, and laptop is M2. I’m hoping to clean things up before the S88 arrives so I can freely swap Live sets between them.

No worries. I brought it on myself.

I realize now that the error I was getting in Rosetta mode was because you have to have the VST2 and VST3 version of a plugin installed side-by-side if you want to work in Rosetta. If you want to only work in Native Silicon, VST3 is it. Switching between Rosetta & Native is a pain and requires a rescan of plugins, which for me hangs more often than not.

[elxsound]

The whole KK system appears to be fraught and fragile. Perhaps it's a local issue for me, but the presets for NI's own instruments like Reaktor-based Razor & Form throw up a VST3 VST2 error in native mode. I get a different error in Rosetta mode. NI presets for their Kontakt libraries and third party K presets give same errors. A small universe of what I have available to me can actually take advantage of the full feature set of Komplete Kontrol --> Developers who supply VST3 and have made the migration with their NKS, and community NKS that have been upped to support VST3 are what I have found to be fully functional.

Damn, thank you for the explanation and sorry you had to navigate that.

That should help me set my expectations since I’m new to KK.

I do plan on only adding VST3, even if it’s limiting. My desktop is Intel, and laptop is M2. I’m hoping to clean things up before the S88 arrives so I can freely swap Live sets between them.

No worries. I brought it on myself.

I realize now that the error I was getting in Rosetta mode was because you have to have the VST2 and VST3 version of a plugin installed side-by-side if you want to work in Rosetta. If you want to only work in Native Silicon, VST3 is it. Switching between Rosetta & Native is a pain and requires a rescan of plugins, which for me hangs more often than not.

I’m hoping to avoid needing Rosetta.
The laptop is very streamlined and I’m hoping to keep it that way with a reduced toolset, but you know… time & Gas have a way of mucking that up eventually.

[martinjuenke]

All these developments make me sad, very sad, perhaps more sad than sad.
Don't know where this will end...

[machinesworking]

Sorry for OT:

Shouldn’t it only be 3 slots?

*I’m asking because I don’t know and have always been curious about adding a Slate Raven.

Anything weird when using Raven with Live?

OT is how KVR Rolls!

I like Live with the Raven, but the fact is Lives interface isn’t designed for touch, you’re not going to be setting up Racks with the touch controls, and it’s not half as much fun to use Lives built in Instruments with touch as it is to use third party plugins with resizable windows. Mixing is fantastic and you still have access to the Raven macro commands etc. Compared to older super heavy keyboard shortcut dependent DAWs like DP or Logic though it’s not as useful, the main thing being third party plug-in support. If you have an iPad the Avid control surface makes certain is free and amazing, so agin the biggest advantage is the third party plug in parameter adjusting etc. I have a push 2, and use Metagrid on the ipad so I have a license for Live and the Raven but I mainly use it with DP11, as Ableton only give you six control surface slots and the Raven takes three like you pointed out. I have about 6 control surfaces that could be used.
I think until Slate actually update the Raven to version 3 and the dependencies (V-Control, and UPDD) get native Apple Silicon support I would go with an iPad the free Eucon mixer from Avid, and Metagrid. If you already have an iPad that’s $25 for Metagrid VS $800 for a Raven that adds trackpad touchscreen gestures and single touch support for third party instruments.

[elxsound]

Sorry for OT:

Shouldn’t it only be 3 slots?

*I’m asking because I don’t know and have always been curious about adding a Slate Raven.

Anything weird when using Raven with Live?

OT is how KVR Rolls!

I like Live with the Raven, but the fact is Lives interface isn’t designed for touch, you’re not going to be setting up Racks with the touch controls, and it’s not half as much fun to use Lives built in Instruments with touch as it is to use third party plugins with resizable windows. Mixing is fantastic and you still have access to the Raven macro commands etc. Compared to older super heavy keyboard shortcut dependent DAWs like DP or Logic though it’s not as useful, the main thing being third party plug-in support. If you have an iPad the Avid control surface makes certain is free and amazing, so agin the biggest advantage is the third party plug in parameter adjusting etc. I have a push 2, and use Metagrid on the ipad so I have a license for Live and the Raven but I mainly use it with DP11, as Ableton only give you six control surface slots and the Raven takes three like you pointed out. I have about 6 control surfaces that could be used.
I think until Slate actually update the Raven to version 3 and the dependencies (V-Control, and UPDD) get native Apple Silicon support I would go with an iPad the free Eucon mixer from Avid, and Metagrid. If you already have an iPad that’s $25 for Metagrid VS $800 for a Raven that adds trackpad touchscreen gestures and single touch support for third party instruments.

Thank you for that. I am interested in adding third party instrument support for mixing. I keep looking at the softube console 1, but keep thinking something like Raven would be better.

Without silicone support, I can wait. I’m sure they’ll add it since it’s there for VSX.

I’ve tried some of the iPad mixer apps in the past… like maybe 7 or 8 years ago? Things jumped around too much so I gave that a rest. I’ll check them out though.

[machinesworking]

The Avid Eucon mixer is really pretty great, and free! Yeah they’re essentially waiting around for V-Control or UPDD, I haven’t checked recently but at least one of them is Rosetta still, and they supposedly were talking about a v3 two years ago…

[EvilDragon]

So NI are now turning into the Apple of the plugin world and breaking backwards compatibility

Nope.

[machinesworking]

So NI are now turning into the Apple of the plugin world and breaking backwards compatibility

Nope.

OK then. I never got a straight answer to this..
So, is it up to NKS developers to code NKS1 compatibility into their presets? are they having to specifically code for NKS1? which of course means that NKS1 hardware is deprecated and on it's way out. I'm not talking about new features for NKS2, just what NKS1 can do now, are we at a point where developers will have to do extra work for NKS1 specifically to get the functionality it has now and NKS2 being easier will be coded for only in the future?

You're insinuating here that NI is not going to deprecate their old hardware but it seems if NKS1 is harder to develop for that that simply isn't true.

Coupled with using Apple Silicon Macs this puts end users in the place where VST3 versions have to be coded for by developers, because they can't or decided against coding VST2 versions for Apple Silicon due to pressure from Steinberg, and the likelihood of that happening is IMO very low for NKS1 if it's more work to code for than NKS2.

[rod_zero]

AFAIR, because I haven't used tools for creating Ableton Live remote scrips in a long time, but with old tools by native kontrol you could create a remote script which had 8 banks of 8 parameters each for any controller.

Any controller basically can have the same access to plugins parameters as Push has, there were even some experiments in emulating push screen.

Around Live 10 I used nativekontrol DDC to make remote scripts for my custom lemur templates, going as far as making lemur interfaces for specific plugins and having each one a a remote script.

[aMUSEd]

So NI are now turning into the Apple of the plugin world and breaking backwards compatibility

Nope.

OK then. I never got a straight answer to this..
So, is it up to NKS developers to code NKS1 compatibility into their presets? are they having to specifically code for NKS1? which of course means that NKS1 hardware is deprecated and on it's way out. I'm not talking about new features for NKS2, just what NKS1 can do now, are we at a point where developers will have to do extra work for NKS1 specifically to get the functionality it has now and NKS2 being easier will be coded for only in the future?

No it's not the same as Apple Silicon. NKS1 still remains as the 'basic' tech for controlling plugins using their hardware. NKS1 is basically what you get if you map a few knobs to the hardware controller using the learn function (not midi learn) and then save that as a template for that plugin. That functionality can't be removed without making it impossible for musicians to do that basic thing. A fully developed NKS conversion adds other things like all presets saved as NKS, previews, thumbnails and a few .json files to integrate it into the database but I have made a lot of NKS conversions on that level and I can't see NI just removing that without losing the ability to map a plugin on the fly and save that configuration. NKS2 seems to be a much deeper level of integration using scripting and at the moment seems mainly a Kontakt thing, although clearly as Diva demonstrates there may also be some API level stuff going on with plugins. None of that is going to be accessible to the average musician so I think it's best to see NKS1/NKS2 more as having 2 levels of control possible in the new keyboard, instead of just the 1 in the current generation. 2 is not replacing 1, it just adds more possibilities.

[martiu]

i use kontakt alot

how dare you, how dare you not using Reaktor more

[El°HYM]

i use kontakt alot

how dare you, how dare you not using Reaktor more

https://twistedtools.com

[Teksonik]

So NI are now turning into the Apple of the plugin world and breaking backwards compatibility

Nope.

Tell that to people who can't authorize older versions of plugins they purchased from NI.

I recently updated to Kontakt 7 so this latest issue does not affect me but it seems like for a company that is one of the largest and longest running in the industry they do have a penchant for upsetting their user base.