Sad state of Native Instruments

[RobGee]

Unfortunately NI don’t seem to have any clear sense of direction, vision or leadership. I guess we’ll just have to see where the wind takes them!

[audiouser720]

Maybe a fusion between Reaktor and Kontakt ?

I've been thinking more on this. Here's my new pet theory:

Kontakt X

Announced with Komplete 15 in September, released Q1 2025. A rewrite from the ground up to include sample and synthesis engines.

They'll have been working on it for years, explaining the decision to wind down Reaktor. Reckon we'll see a new synth or two with the launch, to partially make up for the dozens that are now deprecated.

Here's the big but - it won't be compatible with all past NKIs. Who knows how far back (maybe if we're lucky the .nicnt era). But some old libraries will continue to need K5/6/7 to run, and ultimately they will reach EOL.

This would make sense of a lot of NI's decision making of the past few years.

This would be f**king awesome. You, my friend, take over the chair of NI CEO today.

[gaf_thit]

A winding down of Reaktor would not be awesome, it would be a travesty.

[dayjob]

A winding down of Reaktor would not be awesome, it would be a travesty.

And it wouldn’t make any sense. It’s the thing that launched the company. There’s a user library with thousands of synths samplers sequencers and effects. “Winding it down” would be idiotic and would make them less interesting. It’d be like Porsche discontinuing the 911.

[noiseboyuk]

And it wouldn’t make any sense. It’s the thing that launched the company. There’s a user library with thousands of synths samplers sequencers and effects. “Winding it down” would be idiotic and would make them less interesting. It’d be like Porsche discontinuing the 911.

...and that's exactly what is happening. They told us back in Jan 23 - https://community.native-instruments.co ... ment_48110 .

Sorry, but besides the addition of native Apple Silicon support and the new VST3 plugin there will be no new features implemented.

At this point, perhaps it is time to comment on the situation. For a variety of reasons, NI is not in a position to invest major resources in this product, which has not been news for some time.

As 143 pages here attest, this is not the same company that launched.

You put in the fact no Reaktor products are included in the new subs packages, that Reaktor is absent from the roadmap they published, it tells you all you need to know.

I think Reaktor 6.5 will carry on working for a long time, a VERY long time for Windows, probably. But its days of development are over.

[noiseboyuk]

Doing some detective-work to get a sense of what is going on behind the scenes.

SUPER 8 LAUNCHED - May 2019. Things are good for Reaktor.
MASSIVE X LAUNCHED - November 2019 (delayed)
SUPER 8 R2 RELEASED - September 2020. A toe in the water for Reaktor synths, to make them standalone.
KONTAKT 7 LAUNCHED - September 2022
SUPER 8 R2 DISCONTINUED - December 2022. "Unfortunately Super 8 didn't meet a huge success, so the idea to develop standalone Reaktor synths was dropped".
REAKTOR DEVELOPMENT CEASED - January 2023, but decision taken some time before this.

So by Jan 2023 NI not investing resources has apparently not been news for "some time". So I think the 2020 R2 toe in the water was an experiment to see if this were a viable future direction for NI synths, knowing Reaktor was approaching EOL.

I reckon by late 21 / early 22 the big decisions were made. Super 8's toe is taken out of the water as it was not commercially viable. Make K7 the last legacy Kontakt release, pour most development resources into Kontakt X (redeploy staff who developed Massive X). A small team carries on trying to patch up Kontakt 7 to make it a solid legacy platform, and Play instruments keep being developed as low-hanging fruit.

One more crazy prediction - I reckon development on Massive X will quietly cease after Kontakt X's release. I think we'll see all of its core elements in Kontakt X, essentially making Massive X redundant.

NOTE - all this is pure fantasy on my part, I could very well be wrong on all of it. But it's kinda fun.

[audiouser720]

I do really like idea of Kontakt X if it has:
- The Massive X synth engine built in (OSC, filters, envelopes, LFO)
- Reaktor Blocks built in
- Molekular fx blocks built in

All of this internally oversampled and at least semi modular, so that everything is interconnected and you can modify your sampler instruments as well, so you can swap filters etc. But how long would this take for NI to develop, 20 years?

[egbert101]

Dead horse. Club.

[audiouser720]

I do really like idea of Kontakt X if it has:
- The Massive X synth engine built in (OSC, filters, envelopes, LFO)
- Reaktor Blocks built in
- Molekular fx blocks built in

All of this internally oversampled and at least semi modular, so that everything is interconnected and you can modify your sampler instruments as well, so you can swap filters etc. But how long would this take for NI to develop, 20 years?

Just imagine the possibilities of this and what you could build with all the samplers and synths, analogue modelled OSC, filters, wavetables and fx.

It won’t be Reaktor, not even close. But those guys as I see are already on Max, Pure Data etc.

I guess backwards compatibility would be an issue with existing libraries as this would require a completely rewritten engine?

Anyway, dreaming is a beautiful thing. If NI want to have a big d*ck in the game again, they should do it

[nanostream]

Doing some detective-work to get a sense of what is going on behind the scenes.

I think you forgot one important piece of information: NI made the strategic decision to port Reaktor to Apple Silicon. Porting a behemoth like that, including a compiler, to a new architecture must have taken considerable effort. NI obviously decided it was worth it, rather than to let Reaktor die there and then.

On its face this suggests Reaktor has to have some kind of future, otherwise it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to waste that many resources on a dead end product. The announcement that there won’t be any short term updates doesn’t have to mean anything for Reaktor‘s long term future. But then again it’s NI we’re dealing with here, so who knows.

What I think is kind of tragic is that for the first time in my life, Reaktor is almost a light weight plugin when running on modern CPUs. In the past it’s always been a hassle, but now I can run literally dozens of Molekular instances on one core without it breaking a sweat, and it’s glorious.

I sure would love to see some new Reaktor ensembles, taking advantage of modern CPU’s horsepower. Think something like Form, but more advanced and really pushing the envelope again. Most likely NI wouldn’t even have to update Reaktor itself to achieve that.

[aMUSEd]

Doing some detective-work to get a sense of what is going on behind the scenes.

I think you forgot one important piece of information: NI made the strategic decision to port Reaktor to Apple Silicon. Porting a behemoth like that, including a compiler, to a new architecture must have taken considerable effort. NI obviously decided it was worth it, rather than to let Reaktor die there and then.

That doesn't mean they will develop it further though. They did there same with Kore, they ported it to x64 bit but made it clear that was the last thing they would do. What this means is it ensures longer terms sustainability (and it has for Kore too which still runs on many systems) but it is no guarantee of further development. It just means NI realised if they did not port it, it would effectively end it there and then and they were not prepared to do that at that point (particularly since they had just done that with Absynth).

[ghostwhistler]

They should absolutely revisit FM8 (or 9, as it would be). But improve the mod options and envelope programming. The FM is the best I've personally heard. But the envelopes are a bear to program

[Bombadil]

My KK mK2 will not configure with 2 expression pedals that they claim are compatible. I'm pissed off.

[nanostream]

That doesn't mean they will develop it further though. They did there same with Kore, they ported it to x64 bit but made it clear that was the last thing they would do. What this means is it ensures longer terms sustainability (and it has for Kore too which still runs on many systems) but it is no guarantee of further development. It just means NI realised if they did not port it, it would effectively end it there and then and they were not prepared to do that at that point (particularly since they had just done that with Absynth).

Kore was tied to hardware, which makes comparisons a bit difficult I guess. Absynth was a special case as well, for different reasons. Reaktor is special in its own way, too, but it plays a different role in NI‘s lineup: killing it would’ve meant to kill a shitload of still excellent synths, effects, KK presets and whatnot. This won’t change for the foreseeable future — but it also means they don’t need to add feature updates to keep it working.

Generally I would agree though, them porting Reaktor doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But I’d argue this goes both ways.

[noiseboyuk]

Doing some detective-work to get a sense of what is going on behind the scenes.

I think you forgot one important piece of information: NI made the strategic decision to port Reaktor to Apple Silicon. Porting a behemoth like that, including a compiler, to a new architecture must have taken considerable effort. NI obviously decided it was worth it, rather than to let Reaktor die there and then.

I should have put that in the timeline. But as others have said, it's perfectly logical - they get several more years of solid use, they can sell it without getting a ton of support requests about why it doesn't work on such-and-such. And it tides them over for a few years until Kontakt X is ready. But as their own developer said, it's the beginning of the end - they wanted Reaktor 6.5 to be a solid release that would have to last cos there ain't gonna be another one. A last hurrah.

BTW I guess it's possible that they port the bigger hitters like Monark and Razor (used in the expansions) to Kontakt X, but IMO it's more likely they just do new stuff.

(I love how I'm casually using the term Kontakt X now, like it's actually a thing and not just a term I plucked from thin air a few hours ago).