Sad state of Native Instruments

[Danilo Villanova]

Dirk Ulrich is leaving Native Instruments
https://synthanatomy.com/2024/03/dirk-u ... ments.html

[andypryce]

Ten years ago Arturia were the whipping boy around here and NI the golden calf.

That's because 10 years ago Arturia were not very good and NI were good!-- Over the last 10 years Arturia improved until they were one of the best, improving and modernising even their oldest products.

NI on the other hand have declined the last 10 years (and in particular the last 2 or 3) in terms of both interesting new products and support for older products (and some of the best like Absynth have now gone all together)

I fear Battery is next

[ThomasHelzle]

Dirk Ulrich is leaving Native Instruments
https://synthanatomy.com/2024/03/dirk-u ... ments.html

Amazing to see these big tanks tumble into irrelevance.
And Thanks god for small agile devs who love what they do...

Edit: I guess my post could be seen as applauding Dirk for heroic deeds. Not so, it's more that one questionable tank now finding another questionable tank not up to his standards is somehow funny, I "applaud" the general absurdity of all these games...

[SLiC]

''It has been apparent for several years now that Native Instruments is a slowly sinking ship.''

Such a shame.

[gunark]

''It has been apparent for several years now that Native Instruments is a slowly sinking ship.''

Such a shame.

That’s not Dirk though, that’s the author of the piece.

[zerocrossing]

Dirk Ulrich is leaving Native Instruments
https://synthanatomy.com/2024/03/dirk-u ... ments.html

TL;DR: "I wanted to keep full control of the company I sold and they wouldn't let me so I quit."

[chk071]

Didn't know Dirk Ulrich is such a hero figure for KVR Audio.

Oh, wait, he's just a complete asshole for KVR when he sells plugins at $29 discounted from $295 regular price, not when he leaves the "sinking ship" NI. I get it.

How could I disregard the high moral standards on this site.

[digitalboytn]

Ten years ago Arturia were the whipping boy around here and NI the golden calf.

That's because 10 years ago Arturia were not very good and NI were good!-- Over the last 10 years Arturia improved until they were one of the best, improving and modernising even their oldest products.

NI on the other hand have declined the last 10 years (and in particular the last 2 or 3) in terms of both interesting new products and support for older products (and some of the best like Absynth have now gone all together)

I fear Battery is next

I would be really pissed off if NI dropped Battery 4..

It is such a great product with so many great features...

It's built on the Kontakt engine,so it streams multi layered samples very efficiently and the built in effects and editing capabilities are a fine example of cross pollination from the NI product line up...

I'm going to create a separate post to shine a positive light on just.how brilliant Battery is and get some traction working there,so that hopefully NI can further develop it as needed and not just let it die on the vine,like they have with so many of their other products....

NI need to re-evaluate their reason for existence and put some passion back into their products instead of just looking at them all with a bean.counter's mentality...

People would feel the change in passion and NI would start rising again,both in terms of their technological morality and a subsequent increase in sales that would flow from a renewed focus and a commitment to greatness

[machinesworking]

Ten years ago Arturia were the whipping boy around here and NI the golden calf.

That's because 10 years ago Arturia were not very good and NI were good!-- Over the last 10 years Arturia improved until they were one of the best, improving and modernising even their oldest products.

NI on the other hand have declined the last 10 years (and in particular the last 2 or 3) in terms of both interesting new products and support for older products (and some of the best like Absynth have now gone all together)

IMO all of you are forgetting the complete slash and burn that has been NI since day one. They deprecated far more plugins on my system than they currently have, they slowed down for a while after Kore, but all of you (figurative, not you personally), somehow forgave them immediately for Kore.

NI are IMO no different than they've always been, but somehow it's affecting a wider audience I guess, maybe the slower effects of abandoning development on plugins that windows users experience is part of it? I don't know? The fact that Massive X didn't appeal to many people might also be part of it, but Abysnth is 100% par for the course. The list is long, Pro53, Spektral Delay, Kore, Kompakt, Intakt, Akoustic and Elektric Piano, B4, etc. etc.

They floundered on the Mac side for every major change, OS9 to X, 64 bit, PPC to Intel, Intel to Apple Silicon. So I was never surprised when they flounder about MPE, resizable GUI's, VST3 support and probably in the future MIDI 2.0.

The fact is they put out some great products, but everyone expects them to put out "new things", and they allow their line up to accrue technical debt to the point of no return chasing a new plugin to wow everyone with. Sometimes abandoning them along the way. Personally I would be happy if NI just concentrated on Kontakt and Reaktor, released Play instruments based on those two monsters, kept FM8, Battery and Massive X up to date, and stopped pretending they reinvented the wheel.

[Jac459]

Sorry I am not generally writing on this thread and I don't plan to read the 128 first pages, but I just wanted to share here my strong disappointment with Lores and Fables, 2 Native Instrument expansions that I bought as a bundle and second hand (fortunately)...

Knowing that I almost bought Lores at 199USD 1 year ago gives me chill.

My feedback for those stupid enough like me to consider buying it:
1 - It is buggy as hell so you will need to restart your DAW or your Audio Engine regularly.
2 - It is buggy as hell so the pitch bend doesn't work.
3 - It is buggy as hell so the macros don't work. In particular, even if you try to isolate a sound to use it (because lets face it, the sounds are so rich, they are their own compositions, can be nice but very difficult to place in a composition), the sound will have a freaking lot of reverb. And then if you try to turn the macro know to control the reverb. In fact it controls... the volume. Because why not.

The sound are of generally ok quality but I still don't understand how the hell the bundle takes 120GB in my drive. I feel the UVI extensions sound as good and are lighter. And in particular, with UVI the macro knobs actually work and the sounds are usable...

[billinder33]

Personally I would be happy if NI just concentrated on Kontakt and Reaktor, released Play instruments based on those two monsters, kept FM8, Battery and Massive X up to date, and stopped pretending they reinvented the wheel.

Not sure about all the rest of your post, but I definitely agree with this last point.

Kontakt, Massive, Battery are such great concepts, but they are falling way behind by today's usability standards. Not sure about Reaktor and FM8 because I never use them, but those are very popular instruments and I assume the same applies there as well.

[dune_rave]

Who needs NI, when we have U-he and others?

[noiseboyuk]

Sorry I am not generally writing on this thread and I don't plan to read the 128 first pages, but I just wanted to share here my strong disappointment with Lores and Fables, 2 Native Instrument expansions that I bought as a bundle and second hand (fortunately)...

Knowing that I almost bought Lores at 199USD 1 year ago gives me chill.

My feedback for those stupid enough like me to consider buying it:
1 - It is buggy as hell so you will need to restart your DAW or your Audio Engine regularly.
2 - It is buggy as hell so the pitch bend doesn't work.
3 - It is buggy as hell so the macros don't work. In particular, even if you try to isolate a sound to use it (because lets face it, the sounds are so rich, they are their own compositions, can be nice but very difficult to place in a composition), the sound will have a freaking lot of reverb. And then if you try to turn the macro know to control the reverb. In fact it controls... the volume. Because why not.

The sound are of generally ok quality but I still don't understand how the hell the bundle takes 120GB in my drive. I feel the UVI extensions sound as good and are lighter. And in particular, with UVI the macro knobs actually work and the sounds are usable...

Had no issues with Lores or Fable (though the pitch bend isn't operable - might have to look into that). The macros are stage controls - left right, foreground / background - all work fine for me. Love them both, excellent quality products.

By contrast, I've never got on with the UVI extensions, they feel cheap to me. Horses / courses.

[Jac459]

Sorry I am not generally writing on this thread and I don't plan to read the 128 first pages, but I just wanted to share here my strong disappointment with Lores and Fables, 2 Native Instrument expansions that I bought as a bundle and second hand (fortunately)...

Knowing that I almost bought Lores at 199USD 1 year ago gives me chill.

My feedback for those stupid enough like me to consider buying it:
1 - It is buggy as hell so you will need to restart your DAW or your Audio Engine regularly.
2 - It is buggy as hell so the pitch bend doesn't work.
3 - It is buggy as hell so the macros don't work. In particular, even if you try to isolate a sound to use it (because lets face it, the sounds are so rich, they are their own compositions, can be nice but very difficult to place in a composition), the sound will have a freaking lot of reverb. And then if you try to turn the macro know to control the reverb. In fact it controls... the volume. Because why not.

The sound are of generally ok quality but I still don't understand how the hell the bundle takes 120GB in my drive. I feel the UVI extensions sound as good and are lighter. And in particular, with UVI the macro knobs actually work and the sounds are usable...

Had no issues with Lores or Fable (though the pitch bend isn't operable - might have to look into that). The macros are stage controls - left right, foreground / background - all work fine for me. Love them both, excellent quality products.

By contrast, I've never got on with the UVI extensions, they feel cheap to me. Horses / courses.

Well, out of the 450 plugins I have (not counting the Reason Rack Extensions) (sorry, I am playing with the new KVR plugin manager lol), the 2 that are really crashing are from Native Instrument (Stutter Edit and Kontakt/Lores/Fables)... That's really scares me for the next version of Ozone that I like and use a lot...

Actually I agree with you, the sounds are nice, or even some really really nice (that why I purchased the bundle) but the macros are really not working ==> I am not talking of the stage controls, these works (hell, it is volume and panning, shouldn't be too complex), but I am talking about the knob below, with noise, compression and.... reverb.
Do they work for you ?

[sacer]

They also dropped Reaktor - 6.5 is the last release.
Reaktor was how it has started and their last outstanding product.
I really was pissed of when they dropped Kore, it’s not only a synth like Absinth, it was a whole ecosystem with hardware, and many of xpensive expansions etc. whit Komplete you’ve lost more than 1000€

Also plugin alliance was only releasing new products instead of fixing or renew their old stuff.
Izotope also has every year new major releases - there is no much enhancement in their products - compared to other companies.