Expansions discontinued? Something that doesn’t need updating, but makes the company a lot of money? Why on earth would they discontinue Expansions?
But there’s a lot of conjecture in this thread. It’s as poor as the journalism (?) on the Synth Anatomy site, which appears to start from a point of view of not wishing to report facts and instead relying on it’s wishful thinking of hoping that a big name leaving (but having a mere advisory role but whose opinions wasn’t always deemed useful to the company) is the straw that breaks the camels back.
“Image a hardware Massive, with corresponding knobs etc,…” Er, that’ll be Maschine +
The M+ to me is as good as any piece of gear has got to date in terms of getting polished sounding music produced with the least effort. Perhaps one day, when people look objectively at the gear of this era, they’ll be mystified that this machine made by this company has been mostly overlooked in favour of less capable gear, or more complicated gear? It’s like the ‘Jonathan Ive: Principles and Philosophy of Powerful Design’ in music making gear form.
This is the feeling I’ve been having lately as well. It’s the easy-start libraries for all your production needs to hook in the next generation, couple that with some AI for a truly bland main stream music scene 10 years down the road
Chords and Phrases: Tools to spark creativity and generate musical ideas
Leap: A platform for experimenting with loops
Conflux: A powerful instrument for modulating sounds with wavetable features
Which sounds like they’re pulling some of the creative tools out of Playbox and other tools and making them useable with any Kontakt sound.
All the classics are still in (Massive, FM8, Reaktor) as are the expansions. But they are not listed as major synths within the list at the top like K14, they’re under “classic.”
Something new seems to be “Leap Expansions” (no idea what that is tbh)
Im on 13 still and I don’t need another boring HipHop library for 500 dollars. I’m sad that Reaktor 6 has hit end of life. It’s one of the few inspirational soft synths ever
That’s what I do now.
I picked up Kontakt 7 when they had it for 49, though to be honest I don’t like the neon-color thing in plugins, so 8 doesn’t look appealing.
There’s a hardware editor company that does this and I just can’t look at it (particularly when it’s for editing hardware gear that’s so NOT neon). I know some people might like it though. Cool.
I’m on 10, and all I ever use is Guitar rig and Reaktor. If Reaktor is dead, I guess I’ll probably never buy another update. It’s become very sample-packy
All I really wanted from NI was an update to Reaktor. Session Percussionist is quite nice, but I don’t think it’s worth $200 for it and the Kontakt update. I have all of the expansion I could ever need for the next 10 lifetimes.
Update is 199€ for me from 14 Standard. That would be a NO. Too little useful stuff and the last thing I need is another terabyte of sample libraries I will never use.
Yeah, Reaktor was the only thing that I actually cared about so I’m out. I might update to the latest version of Kontakt if it’s ever in the sale but that’s about it
To be fair to NI, I thought Playbox was a pretty unique and fun intstrument. In fact I upgraded to Komplete 14 basically for that one. Glaze is cool too
No updates which is too bad, I feel like there’s a couple areas that could be improved.
I still really like the sound of Playbox, although I do find it a little hard to fit into an actual mix. I have more fun just playing around with it, than I do trying to incorporate it into actual music if that makes sense
Yeah I like Playbox for soundbeds and either little songstarters or elements that just add a finishing touch in transitions or backgrounds.
It does look like these new Kontakt modifier things are effectively breaking out the randomisation of chords and phrases from Playbox to make them applicable to other instruments. It’s also like a roll-your-own Arcade in a way. I thought Playbox was a novel idea and essentially allowed a fun workflow like Arcade but without a never ending subscription (yes I know NI360 is here also…)
K14 was my first Komplete, so perhaps I’m giving them the benefit they don’t deserve, but I do hear those who say they’re more interested in sound packs than synthesis. With Kontakt being what it is, it makes sense that they focus on that. Massive X and Super 8 were their last synth launches and they haven’t exactly been stellar. I’d almost rather them not play in that space when you’ve got Arturia, Minimal Audio and Kilohearts beating them hands down. I think they should put all their efforts into revamping Massive X imo, but the fact they’ve not done that says a lot. In that case I think the NKS partnerships makes more sense than bundling those synths in Komplete.
I think they’re taking cues from UVI and Falcon, which is more about making a sample based flagship instrument, and have everything revolve around that. The old synths are still in Komplete, so that should mean they’re there until at least 2026, which is longer than I thought, but I’m not sure beyond that. After that is anyone’s guess - Massive is 20 when Komplete 16 comes out, so that could be the end of the line for that synth at that point.
I’m one of those who thinks there should be a Kontakt only version of Komplete without all the old synths, but at this point it’s likely that in all but name. The old synths were going for very low prices, so I think that’s why they’re in the heritage/classic part of the bundle.
There’s not a lot of detail yet. But you know how you load a Kontakt instrument? It looks like you will be able to put a “thing” before it which will allow you to play Chords and Phrases on the currently selected instruments. You can see it at the top of this image from Low Heat’s video on it.
It’s super depressing. Reaktor is the best thing they ever made and to see it abandoned is just so sad. It truly is a bottomless well of potential and inspiration. It needs optimization badly though. Who knows how long the skeleton crew assigned to it will keep it working with new OS updates, but I foresee a point where I will need to dedicate a legacy computer to it to keep it around
