Sad state of Native Instruments

[mi-os]

This is a hilarious thread. NI are still the absolute top dogs in the virtual instrument game and Komplete is by far the best deal around.

They have a few issues but nothing worth this circlejerk.

I tend to agree. I'm rather interested in their wellbeing because many of my expensive libraries depend on it. I just want to use all my NI stuff without being afraid it stops working one day and would also prefer they stop EOLing products.

Some people here obviously want to see them burn. But i personally don't really see much justification for all the hate.

[osiris]

I seem to remember that NI hired the guy that did Sync Modular (https://www.kvraudio.com/product/sync-m ... by-dr-sync) and Sync Modular morphed into Reaktor. Does anyone remember this, or do I have my facts wrong? NI reminds me of Microsoft & Facebook. Buy or hire the best other company/talent and squash whatever competition they perceive is out there.

[jeffn1]

As long as Kontakt is available for free for small developers I am happy (I know there is a cost of they go the nicnt route. That is fine).

I don't want to have to pay to upgrade ever year. I suppose I am okay with a modest upgrade fee every three years.

(I am just sort of making this up, but that is what I am thinking).

[vurt]

not even sure why we are discussing ni, they were going out of business years ago according to some threads back then. none of those people predicted anything correctly when they did drop kore, they seemed to bounce back stronger if anything

To be fair though I predicted they would drop more stuff, and lots of people including their own moderators on the NI forum said I was mistaken, that NI were done dropping things, and Absynth is tah Dah! GONE!

Also to be fair, NI are a huge target, and we're probably always going to have people complaining about them, just like Melda will always complain about Apple, and Bones will get banned on occasion. It's part of the KVR fabric like your off topic posts.

yup, they drop stuff many of us are attached to, and some see this as the end!!! when it's just the business changing to new customers. that's my point.

and i imagine the ni going out of business posting will outlast my off topicness. i am but a single mortal.

bones is a cyborg so im not sure how long he will go on being powered by grrr.

[whassup]

I seem to remember that NI hired the guy that did Sync Modular (https://www.kvraudio.com/product/sync-m ... by-dr-sync) and Sync Modular morphed into Reaktor. Does anyone remember this, or do I have my facts wrong? NI reminds me of Microsoft & Facebook. Buy or hire the best other company/talent and squash whatever competition they perceive is out there.

Yes, Vadim is an extremely nice guy and AFAIK still working at NI. Here's a video with him talking about Reaktor internals:

[masterhiggins]

I think the hate is somewhat justified. If they would stop discontinuing products that people like instead of improving them like a normal developer, that would alleviate a lot of it. Unfortunately, they’re much more likely to simply dispatch corporate shills to forums to convince the plebs that NI euthanizing their favorite tool is akschually a good thing.

[vurt]

corporate shill. not i!
im as pissed as anyone about absynth, while i can still use it, id love to have seen further development.
i just don't think it will kill them off. there's obviously more money in the things they do release. even if it's things i personally don't want.

[Bartone]

Well, they seem to be shipping mostly hip-hop expansions and trivial sampled instruments lately, as they're cheap and easy to create, and to market. At the same time it's difficult to come up with yet another cutting-edge synth and convince a large number of people that they need this new one in particular.

An uncomfortable truth - there are so many synths now, after the underwhelming Massive X they may have called time on it as a bottomless pit in an extremely over-saturated market.

As compared to IK who have pretty much everything acoustic covered to some degree in their SampleTank range, NI's Komplete is more piecemeal. It's also usually done better. So there is some logic in them adding new libraries to fill other niches.

Yesterday they released Valves, which doesn't really fit the description of either hip-hop or trivial sampled instruments.



Sounds pretty good. An ensemble of 5 brass instruments with true legato and a lot of clever programming, and at 89 euros it's a fair price. This is a typical NI release these days, it performs a specific function very well. It's just that for many people here they don't want or need that specific function.

This would have been a nice addition to the current Kontakt/Komplete bundle… Since quite many were commenting there wasn’t very much anything included except more sample/preset packs. This would have been a nice extra filling.

[Ficciones]

As a long time Reaktor user I've seen people complaining about time between updates since not long after Reaktor 5 debuted. How long was it between Reaktor 5 and 6? Yes there were some interim updates and one of them brought a lot to the table. Nevertheless, constant complaints and fear of abandonment.

I'm very happy to see it receiving an update even if it's only for AS. It means they recognize it's still one of the crown jewels. Maybe we'll see a major update in a year or five, if the vulture capitalists will allow it. In the meantime it still hits a sweet spot that all challengers miss, in the intersection of sound quality, relatively low CPU usage, versatility, and humongous library.

[gentleclockdivider]

I seem to remember that NI hired the guy that did Sync Modular (https://www.kvraudio.com/product/sync-m ... by-dr-sync) and Sync Modular morphed into Reaktor. Does anyone remember this, or do I have my facts wrong? NI reminds me of Microsoft & Facebook. Buy or hire the best other company/talent and squash whatever competition they perceive is out there.

Sync modular guy is Vadim Zavalishin who still works for N.I., he is the main reaktor developer and also did the reaktor core dsp language , also made the first zdf filters .
Without vadim zavalishin, reaktor would not be the powerhouse that it is today , the guy is a legend ..
P.s. I already wrote this on the third page of this thread as a reaction to user martiu’s idiot comment that all the big brains have left N.I.

[Dencheg]

1) NI forgot that they became THE MAN cause they made Massive.

WHat makes you think that ?
N.I. was the man right from the start with the release of generator( pre reaktor ).

Cause Massive influenced music

[CrystalWizard]

...
NI are near done with their VST3 and Apple Silicon ports. Audio Ease, VSL, Sononym, AudioFinder etc. haven't even started from the looks of it. PSP and U-He are at the same level, a little over halfway yet we don't see threads on their stagnation. PSP are actually way behind NI in terms of porting.

Not a very good comparison, NI has way more resources than U-he and PSP.

Although Absynth is a huge loss, it's been almost a decade since NI abandoned Kore. Same with the hardware. I'm not saying they're beyond trashing a bit here for their scorched earth policies, but they at least have slowed down a bit.

huh?

I answered the resources argument above. More resources literally translates into more products from NI, not more developers working on the same product.

I don't think I need to explain the other statement. NI in the past deprecated a ton of things, but it's been a long time between Kore and Absynth. Literally over a decade. I'm not happy about it, but it's unrealistic to say they discontinue things all the time lately, which is the way it's being framed in this thread.

They seem to be deprecating things at about the same rate. Is two years ago lately? I'll use a search engine on the internet and look it up. My memory is subjective.
If one reads this thread carefully one can see that NI doesn't actually develop a lot of their software, U-he and PSP develop everything in house. My opinion is that is a flawed comparison.

[GHOST19]

1) NI forgot that they became THE MAN cause they made Massive.

WHat makes you think that ?
N.I. was the man right from the start with the release of generator( pre reaktor ).

Cause Massive influenced music

Massive influenced a few EDM subgenres over ~10 years. Kontakt influenced the whole musical landscape over decades, is by itself a huge ecosystem and still the backbone of NI.

[machinesworking]

They seem to be deprecating things at about the same rate. Is two years ago lately? I'll use a search engine on the internet and look it up. My memory is subjective.

Yeah your memory is flawed here. Ten years ago they stopped developing Kore, This was after alluding that the great kill offs they'd done in the past (Pro 53, B4, Spectral Delay, Kompact, Intakt, etc. etc.) were over. They swore up and down that Battery was safe and Maschine would be developed at Kores pace etc. Since then it's been two incidences that I can think of Absynth last year, and hardware drivers for Mac OS for Rig Kontrol. So their kill rate is more like rest of the industry than when they were just abandoning things left and right pre 2012.

If one reads this thread carefully one can see that NI doesn't actually develop a lot of their software, U-he and PSP develop everything in house. My opinion is that is a flawed comparison.

Yeah this is just speculation without any logic behind it. A company making a sample library they incorporate into Kontakt isn't them not doing things in house.

Every single software company including audio ones is subject to buy outs and developers quitting. U-He could have the same issues if some of Urs's developers leave to work for Meta or Apple etc. and are forced to be exclusive to those companies. What we see with larger companies is just a higher chance this happens. XiLs is a company made up of ex Arturia developers, it might be why the Jupiter emulations are separate instals, too hard to backwards engineer the original at the core level they wanted to. It's arguably why Arturia abandoned Storm back in the day. It's probably why Iced Audio doesn't respond to emails and haven't developed AudioFinder at all for over a year after stating they were. The rumor is they were bought up by Meta.

We see the developer of Absynth say he would have been happy to have been hired to develop on Absynth but we do not know what he was asking money wise to do that, it's a business and they have to make decisions about where the money goes. I don't have to like it, but it doesn't mean that Reaktor, Kontakt, Komplete Control or Maschine are not built in house. On that line though, one of Maschines developers is the guy behind New Sonic Arts. That sort of thing where a developer leaves will slow down development.

On that line, this means that U-He for instance should be miles ahead of NI in terms of Apple Silicon Support etc. They're small enough with a dedicated enough staff to where I don't think any developer has up and left? so in some ways NI getting Maschine done before U-He port Filterscape is a more impressive achievement.

[zvenx]

This.. https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-park ... bdomain=de


and this

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elpiniki-pappa/

is not good news to add to it all.

#IYKYK

rsp