Sad state of Native Instruments

[Greenstorm33]

Usually I struggle with convincing myself I don't need to update when a new version of something I own comes out. Fortunately NI makes it easy with Komplete. Keep up the good work y'all!

[glokraw]

I think it's pretty hard to design interesting and new synthesizers from the ground up. There is already soooo much. Which is one of the reasons they milk the masses with their ridiculous play series instruments. To me NI is your typical neolibral, soulless profit focused corporation.

The 'Play' series is not primarily for synth experts. It's meant to provide quick and easy combinations of a collection of sounds, that almost anyone can use. There are hobbyists and creatives to whom those sounds are wonderful, who greatly enjoy the limited creativity possible. Then when someone has a larger Play Series collection, it's no longer such a limited a range. Some of those non-experts will go on to choose one of the Komplete packages. Simple marketing.
Cheers

I know, Sherlock.

If you really 'knew', why bother to call them 'ridiculous', just because they serve a market that you may not have an interest in? NI don't 'milk the masses', nobody is forced to buy, and they produce videos so people can hear/see a bit of what's possible. Many of their products have repeatable 30 minute full access demos, so customers can decide to buy, or not, based on experience. Hardly the actions of the 'soulless'. And 'profits' pay the increasing salaries for research, coding, and advertising. Equipment and infrastructure need repairs and upgrades. And there is competition inviting your best employess to jump ship. Successful people don't go into business to break even.

[Atlatnesiti]

Latest Native Access ver. 3.8 finally resolved long standing issue on macOS prompting for entering password with "Installing Dependencies" after each restart of computer.
BIG Thanks NI

[ians]

Support have sent me a new voucher which is great, but I'm now more interested in the UVI offer on the NI site which doesn't work with the voucher as it's third party. They seem to have kept it pretty quiet on that one https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... nks-offer/

[Atlatnesiti]

That is bloody good deal…
On it now

[ians]

That is bloody good deal…
On it now

Very tempting. Better than the voucher deals in my view & I don’t have any of those libraries. Seems to be the first batch of UVI NKS libraries

[Songwriter101]

Support have sent me a new voucher which is great, but I'm now more interested in the UVI offer on the NI site which doesn't work with the voucher as it's third party. They seem to have kept it pretty quiet on that one https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... nks-offer/

That's quite a steal.

[Atlatnesiti]

Requires iLok - NO Thanks

[noiseboyuk]

Requires iLok - NO Thanks

Just FYI - only need an account, not a physical iLok.

[ians]

Never had a problem with ilok myself in 20 years & don’t have the dongle plugged in any more, just the software version, but I know others haven’t had a good experience

[Echoes in the Attic]

Well to my surprise I actually upgraded from Komplete 13 CE to 14 CE. The 50% along with the extra 50$ off voucher brought it own to around $200 and there's quite a bit there. Pleasant surprises are Knifonium and Lo-Fi AF from Plugin Alliance. Those are quite good.

[machinesworking]

If you really 'knew', why bother to call them 'ridiculous', just because they serve a market that you may not have an interest in? NI don't 'milk the masses', nobody is forced to buy, and they produce videos so people can hear/see a bit of what's possible. Many of their products have repeatable 30 minute full access demos, so customers can decide to buy, or not, based on experience. Hardly the actions of the 'soulless'. And 'profits' pay the increasing salaries for research, coding, and advertising. Equipment and infrastructure need repairs and upgrades. And there is competition inviting your best employess to jump ship. Successful people don't go into business to break even.

OK first off, of course they milk the market, because they didn't go into business to break even. I mean you sandwiched your thoughts on this with a contradiction, albeit worded to spin.

That said, it's absolutely foolish to think NI are anything like your average small established software company. They have a history of deprecation dating back at least 15 years. Compare this to U-He, you will never get a 15 year old product like Filterscape upgraded for free, it's just not happening. There is always the possibility with software of a company going under of course, recently FXpansion, so that doesn't change with the smaller companies.

NI are arguably the largest plugin developer, that comes at a cost, and that cost is the long term viability of your product. Like you said developers jump ship, leaving them with the choice to hire them to code something they may be indirectly competing against with their independent product, or to ditch the product and move on. NI have consistently chosen the later.

There was and is the fact that they decided to stop supporting new instals of deprecated products, this seems to have changed? I'm not certain, they're at least hosting the installers which they were saying they wouldn't do.

Anyway my point is simple, NI make great products, they aren't "liars" or fooling anyone, but it's patently foolish to think they have longevity of product in mind when selling you software or hardware even, they deprecate things at a consistent rate, and that hasn't changed. [Case in point, Komplete Kontrol version one hardware is not supported anymore, that happened within the last couple months.] Buy with that in mind, that the product is sold in the state it's in, for the OS version it's rated for and with the functionality it has right now and you won't be disappointed.

[TruthTraderAudio]

My 2c,

I’m a music hobbyist so not creating or working with audio for money. I say this because kontakt is very much a pro audio product and probably features on most commercial projects.

I bought komplete maybe 15 years ago. I think it was version 8. There were two reasons I purchased it.

1. Internet in my country wasn’t the greatest at the time so when it came to research and purchasing it made it very difficult. Komplete also came on a hard drive so this was a massive bonus for me.

2. At the time it was pretty much the pinnacle of audio plugins and as a suite it was pretty much “komplete” you could produce anything you wanted with it.

I upgraded every year untill komplete 11.

I have started to loose interest in native instruments and it saddens me the way they have decided to go. I get that they are a business and appeal to the market, but by doing that I feel like they are eroding away an incredible history of audio and music production.

When I got into music production it wasn’t main stream at all. I’m sure a lot of you got into before I did. Back then music was super niche and I pretty much learnt most things from computer music and hanging around my local music shop.

I remember having to work at it. Meaning that I opened fm8 or massive and apart from the presets you had to make your own sounds. There wasn’t YouTube where you can learn to make the deadmau5 pluck etc.

I remember spending hours sometimes days tweaking things until it sounded cool or sounded like what was in my head.

I even remember that samples weren’t easy to get your hands on either. You had to buy a sample pack which was usually one shots and multi samples. Not preproduced loops ladened with effects.

I guess my point is that we had to do a lot more work to get the results we wanted where as today ……..

I don’t want to come across as an old grumpy dude, but he let’s be honest if you have an iPhone you can write a song. You could even just put a whole bunch of loops together and release it internationally in 24 hours.

(The newest thing grinding my gears is the fact and the amount of time I spent learning music theory. I was never musically inclined but what option did you have back then? You had to learn how to write music that conformed to scales you had to write chord progressions and harmonise. Today daws come with midi writing tools baked in. So anyone can write a banger)

So back to NI and their products.

I think a couple things happened.

The market changed from being super niche where we would work with those synths for days months years. (Giving these vsts a much longer lifespan, not needing new features every year etc)

The majority market now I believe is preset based, they don’t want to design sounds and spend hours. They want to write a melodic line and find a preset that sounds good, or sounds like what’s in the top 40’s that day.

The last couple of years has been useless to me from komplete. They play series and all the other rompler type instruments that use kontakt are unusable for me. I’m not writing trap or whatever is fashionable. These are litrelly multi samples with a pretty gui. They are not impressive at all and not much work goes into it. That’s my opinion.

So what does this mean. To me it means that NI is catering to the market, but does that mean they need to complete forget about us old guys who use their older products.

I was honestly hurt when I saw they dropped absynth. That vst was incredible and I saw how hurt the guy who made it was. He did a video explaining that NI dropped him.

Guys absynth was and is an incredible piece of software.

Fm8 another incredible piece of software.

Massive. Was pretty much used on what, like 70% of dance music in the 90’s and 00’s.

So yeah I don’t see why they had too choose between the two if you know what I mean. As a large company surely they can invest in the incredible “legacy” software?

The other thing that happened which I think really rocked the market, was Steve Duda and serum.

Think about it. You are sitting in the boardroom at NI and serum drops and becomes the best selling vst for the last x years. To top it off it was written by one person over 5 or so years.

That’s bad for business. Especially with the overheads that NI has. A relative unknown release a plugin on his own with no infrastructure and blows away most of NI library.

I would also shit my pants and start looking at my business model.

Anyways, I love the old NI stuff. Spent years on it and still do. The new rompler crap? No not interested thanks.

Ps reaktor is also such an underrated platform and I wish they would pump money into it. I love reaktor and with real investment that could easily become an industry leading product.

That’s my rant.

TL:DR

Native instruments have let down their user base by releasing over priced romplers that appeal to a more casual market. As a large company why choose between the two. Why not develop both sides.

Also dropping absynth actually hurt me

Keep well guys

Things have changed.

PSS: noir, stray light,pharlight,mysteria are good.

[jancivil]

"stopped supporting new installs of deprecated products"
Hmmm. Only one of these I have is Absynth 5. It's installed here and installable still. I can't use it in the SOC silicon situation except as under Rosetta 2 translation to the machine, but it worked really snappily like that, as did BFD3 (the other thing I can't use in all-silicon projects), which survived fxpansion's floundering shockingly enough. Is this not true per se?
I'm on Mac OS 14.3 on an M1 Macbook, this is connected to Cubase 12 or now 13.

I just bought Mysteria, Low End Strings, and Electric Mint. and as I have two accounts, two vouchers so Thrill was also under a hundred bucks, list is what, $299? Mysteria's three years ago or something. Sorry, I'm kind of enthused about NI despite certain moves. I was part of a whole sue NI FB group which started here, behind their ending Kore 2. It's business, Jake, there's not a lot we can say about it as we evidently have no power to do anything. so life goes on...

[jancivil]

per iLok, I have no choice as I rely heavily on VSL samples. Lately their support has been not just good, but amazingly fast response and they go down to the ground with you with a problem.
The problem is that I don't use their dongle which means use their cloud; which means if/when wifi fails here, I'm SOL and can't work. Fortunately it reconnects pretty quick here. But I'm sick of seeing '_ needs authorizing, insert your key' or whatever, so I may buy the dongle so long as I don't have to buy another hub, ie., it fits as the old kind of USB.