Native Instruments file for insolvency...

[vertibration]

It´s technically surely possible for some 98% of all the Kontakt libraries out there. But it´s difficult to justify investing hundreds of hours into porting your library when you can´t recoup the time by extra sales. When you decide the target format, you look at the installed user base because, let´s face it, very few libraries are SO special that a significant lot of people would add another plugin.

That´s why there are... how many, 5, 6, 7 big names with their own players, a *few* handful smaller developers who buy into ecosystems like UVI´s and hundreds of "Kontakt only" developers.

Many of the small developers only develop for Kontact as they only have the resources to develop for one

Would also add that Yamaha could easily buy Native Instruments and fold Kontact right into HALion7 with minimal issues. There is no functionality in Kontact that isn't in HALion7, but loads of things in HALion7 that are not in Kontact

HALion7 even loads Kontact libraries perfectly that are previous to Kontact 5 when Native Instruments locked Kontact down with propriety encryption, and could easily do so with newer Kontact Libraries if they owned the encryption

Owning the encryption and being able to import Kontact libraries into Montage would also be a huge selling point for them

Ni might not make it out of this, if they do, great, but lots of moving parts, its not just NI. Brainworx, Izotope......I'd rather see Focusrite take over tbh. They did good by Novation and Sequential thus far.

[Sindikhate]

Fwiw, poor Brian Clevinger. Absynth just got revived and is now part of this.

As far as the rest of NI goes: They deserve it. Since quite some years already. They didn't learn, they didn't care one bit about what their loyal customers wanted and the best programmers have been jumping off the ship year ago already.
To this day, Kontakt's editor is a disgrace to human intelligence and Battery 4 has been the anti-thesis of the idea of evolution. Let alone they abandoned a galore of products for no reasons and even rendered plenty of hardware devices electro trash.
So really, f*** them, they've chosen this way by themselves.

Reactions like this all through the years have brought us in this situation too.

I have never bought hardware from NI, but I do own the latest K CE, and I have been a user since Komplete 5. I never had a single issue with NI. Their products are amazing. If someone spends the time needed with each one they will definitely get something good out of it. I for example never had installed the new el pianos (Diamond and Phoenix) and hearing the news today I thought to download the few things I have not installed (5/6 libraries) and booooom! Phoenix through my fx chain sounds absolutely amazing. I must have spent about 8 hours playing. Same goes with all the expansions and libraries. If someone is creative and likes to mangle, has good fx chains they can find great use out of everything. If only we had the time to go through it all.

[cryophonik]

Interestingly, this was posted by a NI staff member just yesterday on the NI Maschine forum:

I can't go into full detail just yet (and besides, I'm not an immediate member of the team covering Maschine, so don't wish to speak for them). But what I can say is that most of the Q1 efforts are in support of partner hardware integrations across our software (inclusive of Maschine), some of which is in support of various Superbooth announcements.

https://community.native-instruments.co ... chine-2026

[Kaboom75]

I think from now on I'm only going to buy from a company that owns itself and soon as a company gets owned by another I'm out. The small ones can still go bust but I think the small ones that govern themselves have way less running costs and they make better decisions.

It's really deadly to us lot when another big one like Plugin Alliance has to go down with them and what happens to NEOLD licenses its a huge domino effect.

[sellyoursoul]

Fwiw, poor Brian Clevinger. Absynth just got revived and is now part of this.

As far as the rest of NI goes: They deserve it. Since quite some years already. They didn't learn, they didn't care one bit about what their loyal customers wanted and the best programmers have been jumping off the ship year ago already.
To this day, Kontakt's editor is a disgrace to human intelligence and Battery 4 has been the anti-thesis of the idea of evolution. Let alone they abandoned a galore of products for no reasons and even rendered plenty of hardware devices electro trash.
So really, f*** them, they've chosen this way by themselves.

Reactions like this all through the years have brought us in this situation too.

You're partly blaming customer criticism of obvious major issues of products and product abandonment as NI's downfall? I think they haven't needed any help in getting to where they are.

A creative person can do something creative with a bag of trash. That doesn't make the bag of trash a good product. I still can't use half of the products that I paid for in Komplete because NI won't update them for hi res, while they continue to roll out new fluff products. It's difficult to get creative with something that you can't look at for long because it is so small, or alternatively is a blurry mess that makes your eyes hurt to look at for very long. And does NI warn anyone of this situation before selling these products? No. They're just money grabbing and continuing on in the same fashion.

I would say that companies end up in this sort of situation for the opposite of what you said. Had more customers been publicly critical along the way, warning other potential customers of the issues, NI just may have faced up to making things right. But that is neither here nor there. What ultimately matters is whether NI did the right things along the way and ended up in a good place, which they did not.

[mixyguy2]

I love how many people immediately go to doom and gloom when anything changes

There is still value in the brand name. They will get purchased by someone. All your software is not going to stop working and vanish from your systems overnight.

Yeah, it's all still up in the air, but all your NI-dependent software may indeed "stop working" if they go away and Native Access isn't there to re-install for whatever reason (for ex. new computer). Then the only hope is that at least some of those companies who built for the NI (Kontakt) platform will re-host to a platform not needing Kontakt (and happily many have been doing that in recent years).

[ATS]

I find it sort of humorous how people think these people buying out companies sole purpose is to bankrupt them. You do know they WANT to make money right? They don't buy something to kill it.

[mixyguy2]

The Kontakt user base alone is valuable enough to make sense to a company like Yamaha or Fender. Just pray it isn't Avid or Gibson.

That merits repeating. That'd be almost as bad as just going away.

[IvyBirds]

Ni might not make it out of this, if they do, great, but lots of moving parts, its not just NI. Brainworx, Izotope......I'd rather see Focusrite take over tbh. They did good by Novation and Sequential thus far.

Focusrite would be buying a company that is a shell of itself with most of it's top talent gone. That would be an issue for them since they farm out their software to Gforce for things like Bass Station and Oberheim and would be starting from scratch

[toonertik]

It would be ironic if Dirk bought PA back and got NI along with it. But IIRC, he sank a pile of cash into the Soundwide deal, and has already bought Apogee, so probably not a strong contender – though maybe he was able to extricate some cash from Soundwide.

And he's also bought Manley.

[mixyguy2]

Are they the first big victim of A.I. in this field?

? No, they're a victim of bad management.

[mixyguy2]

YouTube videos on the subject are starting to appear

What a surprise

Yes, but they have nothing more than what we have here to discuss...

Also a shocker!

[Cuauhtli]

I find it sort of humorous how people think these people buying out companies sole purpose is to bankrupt them. You do know they WANT to make money right? They don't buy something to kill it.

In the US anyway, that is a profitable tactic.

[mixyguy2]

Maybe one of the big sample library companies will buy Kontakt to protect their catalogue and then fund development with the income from other 3rd party library companies.

No, because most of the big sample library companies have already been saying F you to NI and building their own players, installers, etc to get away from them. In fact, that's no doubt a contributing factor to this happening.

[Mike777]

I was thinking that too but then heard some demos of new instruments like the Diamond elec piano and the new Session Percussionist. Both I found fantastic. All of the Session instruments are excellent. As still Abbey Roads drums etc. But a lot is fluff.

So how much are home music makers using AI over their plugins today?

Diamond is pretty mid to my ears. If someone wants something Rhodes like but not really Rhodes, sure. But I just don't find it's sound appealing.

Session Percussionist seems okay, but a Session Drummer would have been much more useful and popular, which should have been very obvious to NI.

Abbey Road Drums sound nice. But like functionality of many other drum samplers, they they aren't equipped to provide a means for someone who doesn't play drums to easily put together drums parts for their music (Session Drummer? Hello), and they aren't equipped with MIDI input processing for setting them up to be played well. They're really just a set of sounds to maybe be triggered by MIDI loops, after you find some loops, possibly having to remap them, deal with sorting through them for use with your current piece of music, and editing to better fit your music, or to be used as a set of sounds for playing crudely from a controller. A sampled drum kit for playing should provide a good velocity tool per articulation for getting the response dialed in and a tool for dialing in hi-hat control from a keyboard, pads, or e-drums hi-hat controller. Of course, these issues aren't unique to Abbey Road Drums.

I thought the same and passed on Diamond. Then I heard a guy play 3 chords of a Diamond patch and THAT was the vintage Rhodes sound I've been looking for! It's a very DI amp sound, not chimey. I think the patch is "Blue" or something.