Sad state of Native Instruments

[TruthTraderAudio]

My 2c,
The new rompler crap? No not interested thanks.
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Native instruments have let down their user base by releasing over priced romplers that appeal to a more casual market. As a large company why choose between the two. Why not develop both sides.

Also dropping absynth actually hurt me

Hi, and Happy/Musical 2024. A few points maybe worth considering...

Labeling things you don't use or like as 'crap' is neither accurate or helpful to those
who wish to make music.

I don't see many things in the plugin-daw market that are overpriced. Sure, there are comparative price differences, and sales strategies like IK's MAX deals, and Komplete etc,
but the capabilities that $500 wisely spent make possible, are enormous, and even a $70 Reaper license, using all freeware products is great with capable hands/minds.

Almost all old Komplete items still work, despite the march of tech and time, so I see NI as expanding their market, in a quickly changing world, rather than abandoning it.

And even the venerable Absynth can load samples freshly created this morning, for making new
Absynth sounds as yet unheard, as long as one should desire to do so.

Serum was not alone in kompeting with NI, there are U-he, Tone2, KV331, discoDSP, SugarBytes
the whole AIR/Pro-Tools collective, among a myriad, and dawmakers like Bitwig and Ableton adding significant content, as well as some devs who joined Apple under the hood. Not to mention KVR's own 'One Synth Challenge', lighting a path that's easy to follow when low on cash.
Mi dos centavos, now maybe only worth 'uno y tres décimos'.
Cheers

Maybe using the word crap was wrong, I still believe that they are releasing products that I don’t have value for, obviously it’s valuable to some. I’m for a very very cheap price you can purchase sample packs from loop cloud that include multi sampled instruments. So while it looks, while the gui looks nice on this rompler instruments it is still just a simple multi sampled instrument.

Sure other synth vsts have been competing with NI I don’t disagree with that. My observation was that Steve wrote and sold serum as a one man development. It’s impressive and it’s become one of the most used synth vsts in the music game.

Dropping absynth and investing resources into the play series maybe a good business move but it’s saddening as I think if absynth had a dev team it be an incredible vst.

But it does look like NI is upsetting long term users then make long them happy

[TruthTraderAudio]

"serum drops and becomes the best selling vst for the last x years. To top it off it was written by one person over 5 or so years.

That’s bad for business. Especially with the overheads that NI has. A relative unknown release a plugin on his own with no infrastructure and blows away most of NI library."

nothing personal, you seem alright, but you just hyped the thing into total bullshit territory. It's just one synth.
Not sure how much infrastructure or expense is required to code one thing so it looks apples v. oranges, and in no way does a synth touch something like Thrill or Mysteria or any of my SonicCouture, let alone blow it away, and it's also in all likelihood not something to even replace Absynth for me. Looks like a capable synth anyway. Oh I just bought Massive (not-X) - not for the first time - for 41 bucks, speaking of modulation capability. I ignored so much of it before, I guess owing to a certain kind of stupidity. I really got off on the sound the one time I really used it but I don't like its appearance.

I wasn’t comparing serum to kontakt and it’s libraries because they are completely different products and completely different platforms.

Kontakt has been great but the last two updates have really let people down. Especially 3rd party developers. Creator tools was pretty much half baked. They haven’t really made any updates to the ksp language. When they released creator tools it came with lua programming that made no sense since you write the whole instrument in ksp. Under the hood kontakt Is great it’s just held back by very silly things that are over looked.

If I were to compare serum to massive x which at the time was the competition to serum, it ended up a complete flop. It has the potential to be a great vat but it’s unfinished in my opinion. A massive step back for me was that the envelopes aren’t animated. All the envelopes on NI synths are animated. Even on massive which was the predecessor. What a stupid move.

I’m pretty sure massive x had a team of developers and a big budget. And it never stood up to a one man developed vst.

Another thing that NI should watch out for is UVI falcon which is becoming an absolute monster of a platform.

[jancivil]

I can't read minds. The text of your post has you saying that Serum "blows away most of NI library". We do call that a comparison. You can think as you think, I'm not policing it or care much, but I found that rather over-hyped. Apparently this is your way:

"sample packs from loop cloud" as supposed as superior to... anything I'll ever use in Kontakt is a missive from Bizarro World to me.

[jancivil]

"stopped supporting new installs of deprecated products"
Hmmm. Only one of these I have is Absynth 5. It's installed here and installable still. I can't use it in the SOC silicon situation except as under Rosetta 2 translation to the machine, but it worked really snappily like that, as did BFD3 (the other thing I can't use in all-silicon projects), which survived fxpansion's floundering shockingly enough. Is this not true per se?
I'm on Mac OS 14.3 on an M1 Macbook, this is connected to Cubase 12 or now 13.

Hmm? I don't own Cubase, but Absynth 5 is like you say only good under Rosetta, and as AU in Rosetta, the thing is buggy as hell. Worse is Air instruments, but the kicker is they all work well in Bitwig, since they did their own x86 VST to Apple Silicon sandboxed VST hosting implementation.

I see you can still download Kore 2, I don't know if it's possible to authorize it? the Kore Sounds were pretty great, they haven't matched Kore, it's a shame.

It's VST2, Cubase doesn't do AU. At this point I don't use AU in VE Pro either, it's had issues with GUI in plugins that have been around a while. When I started with this machine back in May, Absynth in VE Pro was utterly useless. I didn't try a real simple patch, but the point was to use my patches and I could not play one single note, with nothing else loaded at all.

As to Kore 2 it is absolutely impossible to install it on a SOC Mac; or if someone has some trick workaround, for certain you aren't going to get it authorized. and IME wasn't authorizable back in 2020. High Sierra OS. Last time I had it working was late 2018.

[machinesworking]

It's VST2, Cubase doesn't do AU. At this point I don't use AU in VE Pro either, it's had issues with GUI in plugins that have been around a while. When I started with this machine back in May, Absynth in VE Pro was utterly useless. I didn't try a real simple patch, but the point was to use my patches and I could not play one single note, with nothing else loaded at all.

I'm trying to figure this out, are you running Cubase in Rosetta? Absynth is a Rosetta only plugin, so I'm not getting how you're running it in Cubase? Missing something here.

Isn't there a Rosetta version of VEP?

[jancivil]

I was, right up to the current proj. Finally I do think things are more efficient as native silicon.
If I want Absynth I'm going to have to run Cubase under Rosetta, or if it's viable in VE Pro both are in Rosetta mode (VEP has a Rosetta version separate to the main one now).
Cubase 12 & 13 may be believed 'round these parts to not run VST2 on this hardware but that's a kind of canard. VST 2 is dead but not dead I guess. To go back and forth, Cubase rescans plugins on both, annoying. I'm at the most recent version of Cubase, of VEP and a beta of MacOS 14.3.

I was going to have to go back and forth, or just finish out what I'm doing in native silicon and then have a project with BFD3. There's some serious foot-dragging at inMusic on this.
I have a new drum plugin that sounds fantastic, it isn't fully competitive with BFD yet but it might work, it's fully silicon ready. MINDst by a small Israeli team.

[prevolition]

I recently upgraded to Kontakt 7 because they finally fixed some xfade loop bug in certain libraries when exporting, but it's sluggish and bloated compared to Kontakt 6 so I'm still going to stick with the VST2 version of that unless I'm using 7 exclusive libraries. Bloated does seem to be a good word to describe NI's recent direction - I can't even tell most of the new Play Series instruments apart.

[jancivil]

well, I have bought a couple or three things made for Kontakt 6 that since have been saved in K7 so I foresaw that coming a mile away and fortunately had 50 bucks or whatever the update cost. I haven't found it being slower, but I'm running it in an all-silicon project on M1 SOC hardware so my mileage is going to differ than most users lacking the advantage. I prefer the K6 UX tbh.

Play series I have appx zero interest in. My view on that is they're pandering exactly to this segment of the market, KVR Producahs.

[_leras]

If I were to compare serum to massive x which at the time was the competition to serum, it ended up a complete flop. It has the potential to be a great vat but it’s unfinished in my opinion. A massive step back for me was that the envelopes aren’t animated. All the envelopes on NI synths are animated. Even on massive which was the predecessor. What a stupid move.

Whilst I have some gripes about Massive X, there's no doubt that it's a phenomenal synth. It's so powerful, but it does have a steepish learning curve, which probably puts some people off, or stops them being able to explore it.

I think anyone who does more than scratch the surface appreciates it. The sound is just fantastic.

Perhaps NI could have done better launch for Massive X with more bread and butter initial presets and demos. A lot of the sounds in the library seem to be on the esoteric end.

I think it really needs a basic sounds library, basses, leads, supersaws, plucks, pads etc whilst it has these they are not normally vanilla enough to let people hear what it sounds like.

[glokraw]

Cakewalk's z3ta+ 1.5 came out before 2007, and still has the best preset handling I've found. It's not just NI that have embraced mediocrity at various levels. Great sounds with clutzy access to them?
Not going to inspire sales. But I always appreciate sounds that easily found, selected, and re-saved after mods, even if it's just tuning and removing some OTT effects. I thought the bare MassiveX waveforms were good starting points for sound designers. But the installer process was absurd

EDIT: to be fair, that was a long time ago, and people are commenting that Native Access has been doing fine recently. Which is good news.(The sounds were installed from a separate iso file back when I first got massiveX ) end EDIT ...The future is out there, and may last for years, in case NI want to improve things.

[_leras]

The negative waves and entitlement of this crowd is always present here, I should learn patience.
"NI doesn't develop any more" is bullshit anyway though.

This whole thread is a bit of a hatchet job imo.

Yes, would be great if e.g. NI did more synths, less libraries. They do have a steady stream of development though, even if not fast enough for some people. Komplete is still also the best package deal by a mile...

Edit: If the thread title was just "State of Native Instruments" it would be better. As it is it's as though someone wants a negative view of NI to remain on the front page of KVR instruments. (And yes I realise I exacerbate this by replying... )

[_leras]

I thought the bare MassiveX waveforms were good starting points for sound designers. But the installer process was absurd

If you mean the Native Access app to do the installation, I can only disagree.

How can it be any simpler than installing Native Access, adding your login, then being able to install and update all your NI products from one place. Even if you only have Massive X it's still easy.

By contrast, some of the smaller devs that I have multiple tools from, I need to check manually if there are updates, then download and install for each one separately. It's much less convenient.

[geiger167]

Have to agree, after a bit of a black friday/xmas spending spree have found Native Access to be the easiest installer to use, and I've been testing on both windows and mac machines and both were trouble free. I've also rediscovered Reaktor and am loving it again. I know it's now in 'maintenance' mode but there are literally hundreds of synths that will keep me busy for probably years to come

[noiseboyuk]

I've been migrating to a new rig. Native Access 2 has worked very well I have to say, no issues here.

[ROTMetro]

Those that did the Komplete 14 upgrade recently, were you able to get your Plugin Alliance vouchers to work? I'm past week three of trying to get support to get me a working voucher. Seems really strange that it's this hard, and wondering if it's just me with an issue?