Reaktor

It's amazing but quite buggy since ever.

Like many other NI products, I find the presets' selection is not much efficient.

Reaktor is a very troublesome creature for musicians. Reaktor has incredible potential, and NI promises great things from its "factory ensembles" and its vaunted "user library".

The reality is somewhat different, however. Make no mistake - Reaktor is a truly amazing piece of technology. Reaktor may be the ultimate synthesizer construction kit.. hardware OR software. The problem is in *realizing its potential*.

Think about it for a minute: What do you get when you buy a Roland synth? Sure, you get a piece of hardware. And these days you also get some software. But you get something else: some very smart (usually Japanese) engineers spent years of their lives figuring out how to deliver the right software/hardware implementation to make a really great musical INSTRUMENT. THIS is the part that Reaktor doesn't provide.

Does NI provide a bunch of really great-sounding, MUSICAL factory ensembles with R5? No, not really. There are some awfully good ones, like the Junatik synth, the SpaceMaster reverb, the GrainState synth, and a few others. But most of the NI "factory ensembles" are novelties, good for making stunning squeaks and squonks that sell software, but not much use for making music.

What about the vaunted "user library"? Again, there's not that much there after you spend some time looking at it. Why? Because musical instrument design is hard, and the user ensembles (like the factory ensembles) lack the man-years of talented effort that it would take to make really great-sounding, useful Reaktor instruments.

If you are a talented instrument designer and you have lots of time, there's no doubt that Reaktor 5 will deliver incredible results for you. If you need usable synth/sampler sounds in the near future, you are much better off if you AVOID the abyss that is... Reaktor 5.