Good Bye Reaktor, good bye NI synths

[parma]

There are synths that do a better job of being both "fun" and "serious tool". It reminds me of Zebra which is extremely capable in the right hands but not enjoyable to work with (just my opinion of course). It's a sound designer's synth and not a "tweaker's". Which is fine. I'll just use one of the hundreds of other synths available.

[CrystalWizard]

Look at their last synth release- sounds great, but it's so half a$$ed it's ridiculous.

That would have been okay if the release was followed by a series of updates addressing the stuff that didn't made it to begin with. Unfortunately it's been almost 6 years since release and there've been no significant updates.

Definitely. I didn't buy Massive X, i waited for the to update (by that i mean finish) it, i was already in the "don't give money to NI mindset, but, i was prepared to change my mind. Waited...waited..waited...nothing, it's still not finished.

[Michael L]

This thread is useful as a way for some people who once liked NI products to clarify the ways that they and NI are now going in different directions artistically, for the various reasons described above.


Edit: fixed “growing” to “going”

[BBFG#]

That implies NI is growing when so much evidence says the opposite.

[BONES]

You both have points. Just because you can't find a use for Abyss, it doesn't mean that it's not innovative and interesting to other people.

Maybe, but innovation should do something positive and things like Abyss are, to me, just sideways moves. "Different" and "innovative" are not always the same thing and Abyss is a lot more different than it is innovative. I mean, how is it really different to NI's Straylight? He's just given the modulators meaningless, stupid names. That's not innovation. Kult's sound reminds me of a VSTi that was around at the turn of the Century. I can't even remember what it was called but it did similar kinds of unconvincing digital timbres. And Myth is more of the same with a GUI copied from Softube's Parallels.

Similarly, I could care less about TRK-01, because it does not fit in with the way I make music at all.

Why not? It's just a synth. The workflow was a bit of a nightmare when it was released but they sorted it out in an update and it's a lot easier to put into a project now than it used to be.

Massive X is not only a very innovative synthesizer, but has still yet to be equalled in many ways.

I'm sure it is but I've never so much as listened to demos. It's just not something I need or am interested in. That's the thing, it is possible to acknowledge that something is good but you 're not interested and, similarly, that something is pretty ordinary but you still like it for whatever reason. I'd say Union falls into that category for me - it's not much of a synth, really, but there is something about the sounds I can get from it that easily makes it my most used synth over the last 10 years.

Heat Pumps are all the rage as the latest "innovation." They're literally just air conditioners that you can run in either direction, depending on your needs...
... My point? It's not always about overt features. Lots of stuff that's going on under the hood can be really innovative, yet be fairly opaque to the end user.

In this case, though, the innovator was the marketing person who thought to call it a heat pump and make it seem like something new and innovative. In reality, as you say, it's just reverse cycle air-conditioning, which companies like Fujitsu and Mitsubishi have been flogging here for 20 or 30 years. Of course, I live where keeping cool in summer is way more important than keeping warm in winter, so reverse-cycle air-con was just an upsell, a way to do away with your little fan-heater or bar radiator, rather than a whole new paradigm. Central heating, a furnace, is pretty much unheard of here.

[Ah_Dziz]

I installed my own split heat pump system a while back. It's a good deal for cooling, it's pretty okay when it gets cool. It was insanely cheaper to buy the equipment, but would have been more expensive than a gas/ electric combo if I had just payed the HVAC company.....

I gotta say, NI has some really nice FX plugins. Raum, Dirt, Driver, etc. Then all the stuff they outsourced to softube is nice.

[zerocrossing]

You both have points. Just because you can't find a use for Abyss, it doesn't mean that it's not innovative and interesting to other people.

Maybe, but innovation should do something positive and things like Abyss are, to me, just sideways moves. "Different" and "innovative" are not always the same thing and Abyss is a lot more different than it is innovative. I mean, how is it really different to NI's Straylight? He's just given the modulators meaningless, stupid names. That's not innovation. Kult's sound reminds me of a VSTi that was around at the turn of the Century. I can't even remember what it was called but it did similar kinds of unconvincing digital timbres. And Myth is more of the same with a GUI copied from Softube's Parallels.

I'm not even going to get into all the reasons you're wrong, but you don't even know what you don't know on this topic, so I'll move on.

Similarly, I could care less about TRK-01, because it does not fit in with the way I make music at all.

Why not? It's just a synth. The workflow was a bit of a nightmare when it was released but they sorted it out in an update and it's a lot easier to put into a project now than it used to be.

I'm just not really a step sequencer guy, or if I am, I'm happy to do it with my DAW, which is Bitwig.

Massive X is not only a very innovative synthesizer, but has still yet to be equalled in many ways.

I'm sure it is but I've never so much as listened to demos. It's just not something I need or am interested in. That's the thing, it is possible to acknowledge that something is good but you 're not interested and, similarly, that something is pretty ordinary but you still like it for whatever reason. I'd say Union falls into that category for me - it's not much of a synth, really, but there is something about the sounds I can get from it that easily makes it my most used synth over the last 10 years.

Trust me, for the music that you produce, Massive X should be in your plugin folder. When it comes to next level aggressive stuff, it rivals hardware that costs $3000 or more.

Heat Pumps are all the rage as the latest "innovation." They're literally just air conditioners that you can run in either direction, depending on your needs...
... My point? It's not always about overt features. Lots of stuff that's going on under the hood can be really innovative, yet be fairly opaque to the end user.

In this case, though, the innovator was the marketing person who thought to call it a heat pump and make it seem like something new and innovative. In reality, as you say, it's just reverse cycle air-conditioning, which companies like Fujitsu and Mitsubishi have been flogging here for 20 or 30 years. Of course, I live where keeping cool in summer is way more important than keeping warm in winter, so reverse-cycle air-con was just an upsell, a way to do away with your little fan-heater or bar radiator, rather than a whole new paradigm. Central heating, a furnace, is pretty much unheard of here.

[/quote]

You're missing the point. The point isn't that the heat pump is new, it's that evolution has produced something that can get you a lot of fuel savings. It's not sexy and flashy, but very few innovations are. Most are the results of years of incremental improvements. Hell, the electric car goes back to 1888, but everyone hailed Tesla for putting batteries and an electric motor in a Lotus (before it was taken over by fElon) as if it was some major innovation. Smart Phones existed before the iPhone, but Apple figured out how to get the right configuration and the innovation was really how they got carriers to subsidize the purchase. Similarly, something like Dawesome's Myth doesn't have anything particularly "new" about it, but the quality is high and the flexibility is great. The interface invites you to be experimental.

[swilow11]

I installed my own split heat pump system a while back. It's a good deal for cooling, it's pretty okay when it gets cool. It was insanely cheaper to buy the equipment, but would have been more expensive than a gas/ electric combo if I had just payed the HVAC company.....

I gotta say, NI has some really nice FX plugins. Raum, Dirt, Driver, etc. Then all the stuff they outsourced to softube is nice.

Curious, what did they outsource to Softube?

Ni problem can be the large amount of bloat with some absolute gems nestled in there. Massive X, FM8, Monark/Prism/Razor/Super8 (and Resktor blocks in general) are so good. Raum is beautiful, Replika XT is my goto delay (love how you can see how long the tail decays for relative to your DAW timeline, hate the filter option which just never makes sense to me), Phasis/Flair are excellent phaseflanger, brilliant Kontakt instruments like Ashlight, Session Percussion, Ireland, Analog Dreams, and my absolute favourite, Stradivari Cello, Transient Master (the best transient shaper imo). But to find this goodness, one must wade through masses of garbage. The ratio for good to bad would be 1:10. I purchased Komplete Standard maybe 3 years ago and there is still stuff I haven't even heard of in there. I think this sort of product assumes more is better. This is just not true, and I believe that this terrible ratio subtly degrades the quality of their truly great products.

Anyway, damn, forgot about Reaktor Form, and Kontour, and some of the awesome grooveboxez in the factory library. This is a lifetime of exploration tbh.

[gentleclockdivider]

I installed my own split heat pump system a while back. It's a good deal for cooling, it's pretty okay when it gets cool. It was insanely cheaper to buy the equipment, but would have been more expensive than a gas/ electric combo if I had just payed the HVAC company.....

I gotta say, NI has some really nice FX plugins. Raum, Dirt, Driver, etc. Then all the stuff they outsourced to softube is nice.

Curious, what did they outsource to Softube?

Ni problem can be the large amount of bloat with some absolute gems nestled in there. Massive X, FM8, Monark/Prism/Razor/Super8 (and Resktor blocks in general) are so good. Raum is beautiful, Replika XT is my goto delay (love how you can see how long the tail decays for relative to your DAW timeline, hate the filter option which just never makes sense to me), Phasis/Flair are excellent phaseflanger, brilliant Kontakt instruments like Ashlight, Session Percussion, Ireland, Analog Dreams, and my absolute favourite, Stradivari Cello, Transient Master (the best transient shaper imo). But to find this goodness, one must wade through masses of garbage. The ratio for good to bad would be 1:10. I purchased Komplete Standard maybe 3 years ago and there is still stuff I haven't even heard of in there. I think this sort of product assumes more is better. This is just not true, and I believe that this terrible ratio subtly degrades the quality of their truly great products.

Anyway, damn, forgot about Reaktor Form, and Kontour, and some of the awesome grooveboxez in the factory library. This is a lifetime of exploration tbh.

The vintage compressors were outsourced to softube , the mainley stuff etc..
Also the ssl solid bus comp and supercharger was done by another company ( forgot the name of it )
Found it : cool stuff labs
https://coolstufflabs.com/portfolio.html
So does arturia , it's nothing really special , once a company becomes bigger they can hire Expert coders

[concealed identity]

I believe Softube also did the two Lexicon reverb emulations

[Vocalpoint Studios]

That implies NI is growing when so much evidence says the opposite.

They are growing in the only area that matters to the private equity firm that owns them - the bottom line. Cool "circa-2008" synth innovation is a non-starter now.

Reaktor is in permanent maintenance mode (updates considered for OS compatibility only)

The modern day NI = Kontakt, Maschine, Komplete and Traktor now (and into the future) - in that order.

VP

[Ah_Dziz]

I installed my own split heat pump system a while back. It's a good deal for cooling, it's pretty okay when it gets cool. It was insanely cheaper to buy the equipment, but would have been more expensive than a gas/ electric combo if I had just payed the HVAC company.....

I gotta say, NI has some really nice FX plugins. Raum, Dirt, Driver, etc. Then all the stuff they outsourced to softube is nice.

Curious, what did they outsource to Softube?

Ni problem can be the large amount of bloat with some absolute gems nestled in there. Massive X, FM8, Monark/Prism/Razor/Super8 (and Resktor blocks in general) are so good. Raum is beautiful, Replika XT is my goto delay (love how you can see how long the tail decays for relative to your DAW timeline, hate the filter option which just never makes sense to me), Phasis/Flair are excellent phaseflanger, brilliant Kontakt instruments like Ashlight, Session Percussion, Ireland, Analog Dreams, and my absolute favourite, Stradivari Cello, Transient Master (the best transient shaper imo). But to find this goodness, one must wade through masses of garbage. The ratio for good to bad would be 1:10. I purchased Komplete Standard maybe 3 years ago and there is still stuff I haven't even heard of in there. I think this sort of product assumes more is better. This is just not true, and I believe that this terrible ratio subtly degrades the quality of their truly great products.

Anyway, damn, forgot about Reaktor Form, and Kontour, and some of the awesome grooveboxez in the factory library. This is a lifetime of exploration tbh.

I know the compressors la2a, solid comp, solid bus, 1176. Maybe the reverbs. I like all those. I also use dirt all the time for super jacked up drums. Combined with The Drop they can turn any little kit into something insane.

Reaktor is one of the first "connect the boxes" dsp platform I spent lots of time with. It continues to be easier to integrate with a DAW than most (PD, Supercollider etc). Nice to make a simple device that does exactly what you want it to do.

[_leras]

I gotta say, NI has some really nice FX plugins. Raum, Dirt, Driver, etc. Then all the stuff they outsourced to softube is nice.

Yes their more recent plug ins are all great and also look the part.

Two of those three get regular use from me, and I would still use Battery if I was using cubase and not Bitwig.

I think their synths still hold up pretty well too. Massive X has become a go to for a lot of things for me. The og massive, if you skirt overused sounds, is also still a great synth.

There are also a number of great kontakt instruments in Komplete.

[blatanville]

Pigments is the best synth, and you dont have to use Native Access to get it.

agreed. and if you can't afford to buy a synth, SurgeXT can do SO much, and sound good doing it, for free.

[Milkman]

Pigments is the best synth, and you dont have to use Native Access to get it.

agreed. and if you can't afford to buy a synth, SurgeXT can do SO much, and sound good doing it, for free.

Surge is pretty good. Ive been using that on/off for about 4 years now, along with the free version of Vital, which is also good. I think Surge has a bit wider sound palette than Vital, although Vital's premium version contains more than the free version.

(and I was being somewhat silly when I said "pigments is the best synth" - not that I dont LOVE pigments, but that I know "the best" synth is a subjective thing for many musicians. I was jumping on the "this is the best synth" train lol)