Absynth 6

[glokraw]

There are enough fundamental things that it does well in skillfull or lucky hands, and enough free and inexpensive products demonstrating this, that it's more a matter of one's preferences. Some mainly want the developement capabilities, some mainly want the results that others share or sell. I think it's a fine product in both areas, and let accurate market research determine it's future. In the interim, it's likely the user library will leep growing, and a compatability update would fuel that for a long time.
Mi dos centavos

[faxinadu]

I never said Reaktor is no good, nothing of the sort... I implied things to be read between the lines, bringing this back is a no-go on levels people who are not aware of inner workings of course can not see, I no longer have a say on any of this, so my opinion is as good as any other on KVR (but before I was maybe as close as you are gonna get as someone from the Reaktor team commenting on this thread).

[Broken]

AI development tools could make a future Reaktor update economically viable. They're probably already using AI for some tasks.

Does anyone here friendly with Brian know if he used AI assistance for A6?

[machinesworking]

I never said Reaktor is no good, nothing of the sort... I implied things to be read between the lines, bringing this back is a no-go on levels people who are not aware of inner workings of course can not see, I no longer have a say on any of this, so my opinion is as good as any other on KVR (but before I was maybe as close as you are gonna get as someone from the Reaktor team commenting on this thread).

Sometimes I wish the entire software industry wasn't so goddamned strung out on secrecy. I don't want to "read between the lines", but there's only a couple reasons why software like this cannot be pushed forward; it's buried in technical debt (they made it to VST3 and Apple Silicon so I have a hard time believing that), Stephan Schmitt the developer and original NI founder has no interest in working on it, (which is a reverse issue that Absynth faced), or the new owners of NI have no interest in a product that could in theory replace all their products.

I'm banking on the last one, Reaktor is likely a much larger project to fix the GUI of than Absynth was, and NI can't see the investment vs return margin it would like to. It is possible all of us on place like KVR are outliers and the regular buying community loves the modern ROMplers that PLAY instruments are.

[Echoes in the Attic]

My one best reason is I worked at NI for 5 years and I know that this is pure madness to go that route at this point, let's leave it at that.

What does this mean though? What route? Keeping Reaktor alive? It's the best product NI has ever made.

What would be the pure madness? They made reaktor from scratch as a much smaller company. Why could they not keep it alive and make some QOL updates?

[machinesworking]

My one best reason is I worked at NI for 5 years and I know that this is pure madness to go that route at this point, let's leave it at that.

What does this mean though? What route? Keeping Reaktor alive? It's the best product NI has ever made.

What would be the pure madness? They made reaktor from scratch as a much smaller company. Why could they not keep it alive and make some QOL updates?

Stephan Schmitt one of the founders of NI and the main programmer behind Reaktor now runs a hardware synth company. He hasn't really done much with NI for years now. It's very possible there's a clash of interests that is beyond any weirdness between Brian Clevinger and NI.

Hopefully I'm just spouting anxious conjecture and faxinadu is being slightly histrionic? Reaktor was almost as big of a part of what I did in the 2010's as Absynth and Zebra, pretty much the unholy triad.

[crawlingwind]

I use Novation Launch Control XL, and I assign the knobs to match the existing Init patch macros. So all my patches work the same, but I keep running into patches from the library that have different cc configurations.

I am liking it for the most part, but wish the macros could be assigned globally to the CC of my choice, instead of per preset. That is very time consuming to override the mapping every time.

[noiseboyuk]

Reaktor is likely a much larger project to fix the GUI of than Absynth was

Really? I don't think they have to touch the GUI much, that's not a key issue they need to address imo. Absynth looked almost Winamp with its tiny blocky fonts etc.

[EvilDragon]

Reaktor GUI is several orders of magnitude more complex than anything else NI has ever made. So yes, overhauling that would be a multi-year effort that would never really result in equal or higher returns.

There are some ways to improve parts of it UI wise (the most important one: ensemble panels), but I would not hope for a full GUI overhaul to ever materialize.

Some people may consider Reaktor as the best product NI ever made, but sales numbers never ever showed that, even when Reaktor was much more relevant, Kontakt had way better sales, and that simply continues to be the case.

[EvilDragon]

AI development tools could make a future Reaktor update economically viable.

Not really, not with that clusterfk of a codebase.

[EvilDragon]

Stephan Schmitt one of the founders of NI and the main programmer behind Reaktor

Stephan was the main programmer for Reaktor for a very short time, when it was still called Generator. But that didn't really continue. He was the guy with ideas, other people made them work.

[mothra]

Some people may consider Reaktor as the best product NI ever made, but sales numbers never ever showed that, even when Reaktor was much more relevant, Kontakt had way better sales, and that simply continues to be the case.

As awesome and capable as it was, let's be realistic, Reaktor was a synth nerd's dream. It was the software equivalent for the folks that ran out and dropped $4k on a modular system and based everything around it. It was not something every up and coming "producer" was running to get and learn to use, and the 'preset pack' generation definitely was not interested in something like it. I am pretty sure Kontakt wipes the floor with all of the rest of their entire lineups sales numbers all the way back to Generator.

[zvenx]

....

Some people may consider Reaktor as the best product NI ever made, but sales numbers never ever showed that, even when Reaktor was much more relevant, Kontakt had way better sales, and that simply continues to be the case.

But but but, they should do it still cause people love it and want it...

Clearly the two people who both worked with NI have shed light on why it probably won't happen, if only for feasibility reasons.
rsp

[ericj23]

The fact that reaktor ensembles could open on maschine plus always intrigued me. It would make sense if reaktor was marketed as the method for making plugins for maschine plus. Updates to make that easier could keep development going. But I think Maschine plus was not the huge hit that was needed for this. But a new more powerful maschine plus might change things.

[machinesworking]

Some people may consider Reaktor as the best product NI ever made, but sales numbers never ever showed that, even when Reaktor was much more relevant, Kontakt had way better sales, and that simply continues to be the case.

This logic is one of the reasons why I often think our whole system is screwed. The elephant in the room here is Ensembles VS Kontakt instruments, for whatever reason the sales of Reaktor ensembles was dwarfed by Kontakt instruments from the start, likely because most people needed a sample library of some kind, a piano etc. so it wasn't a stretch to buy something from your company for instance that acted more like a synth.

Ditching a good idea because of technical debt, because a company had another more profitable area of it's business is exactly why we almost lost Absynth here. Because of the holy profit margin we're at some point in the future here stuck with an older machine that can run Reaktor, or using Live as the only DAW that fully integrates with Max/MSP.