They got convenience on their side, I don’t think NI can rely on that tbh.
But I really hope they find a solution that works and doesn’t srew over their employees…
I’ve been a customer on and off since machine and kore 2, I’ve owned every variant of maschine, loads of kontrol keyboards, tractor controllers and mixers and a few versions of komplete, the one thing that drove me away for good was the maschine debacle, the open letters from upper management and the resulting fallout on their boards and in the beta program, it was an absolute shit show in my opinion, poorly handled from start to finish both from a consumer relations perspective and from a product management perspective… I’ve still got an account over there stuff to the brim with licenses I’ll never use again, I even got thrown a free maschine 3 key but what’s the point? It’s the same turd rolled in glitter…
Obvs these are just my opinions, not looking for an argument, if you’re happy with the products and the company I can respect that and more power to you…
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I remember Traktor coming out and I thought it was going to be a revolution as I was DJing a lot and making music. I thought it was going to be a hybrid setup that changed the scene. Had so much potential which imo it never met.
I moved to serato when it started developing at a more steady pace and gave up on the hybrid setup.
I then bought maschine which again on paper looked revolutionary. It wasn’t and I went back to Ableton which progressed while maschine sat stagnant. Again, a real shame
I do have komplete and I’m always having to reinstall it and get load issues in kontakt. I’ve swore I’ll never buy anything from them again but it’s a real shame to see them this way as it was such a cool company in its early days.
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I’ve only used Traktor from Native Instruments since 2002 and it’s my favorite DJ software. I don’t know what I would do without it because after so many years I can’t get used to anything else.
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Teenage Engineering? Just throwing that out there.
Let’s start by saying I hope nobody at NI loses their job. The tech job market is horrendous at the moment.
As a customer, I feel their best days are long behind them. I just think they’re spread too thin. Kontakt and the sample library stuff, the sample packs, the Maschine line, the keyboards, Reaktor, the Synths, the DJ stuff. Too much.
I always thought Traktor was interesting and I owned a few of their DJ controllers, which I always thought struck a great balance between price and build quality etc. I owned more than one Maschine MK3 over the years, and I always felt it was a better groovebox than Ableton Push but it felt like it was left to stagnate.
I hope they find a buyer or whatever but I also hope they can pick a better or more focused direction and really start to innovate again.
On a side note, it just makes me think I want another DJ controller or a standalone DJ unit even though my DJing ability is questionable! I enjoyed my Traktor S5 when I had one, the effects and looping etc were great for doing techno and that sort of stuff, you could really mangle the tracks into something new.
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I don’t know too much about it, and the rhetorical questions below probably aren’t the right questions at all, but it seems like they’ve backed themselves into a corner either way (regardless of the present financial situation).
So many software products to maintain that even if useful and loved, feel really dated and disconnected. Or all the third-party products relying on Kontakt.
The Komplete Kontrol browser system was good, but if I remember right you couldn’t resize the UI at all.
So what do you do? Redevelop all your products into a new and more modern feeling software platform so they are more competitive with modern alternatives? But then that’s a heap of development without a ‘new’ product. Or do you create a new platform and new products and double the amount of maintenance and risk alienating your existing users? Or do you just keep adding new products and content and spreading yourself thinner and thinner?
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Great questions. I feel they should focus on their core USP’s and modernize an integrated stack: Kontakt, reaktor, traktor, Maschine.
If there would be a core “engine” that could support and integrate (audio, midi, timecode) all of these “interfaces” on top of the engine, and make them work together in some fashion (fe design a reaktor drum synth, make it run in Maschine, and also in traktor) it would be “the best of NI”. And then have the sample pack business running as a totally independent company (or sell it off)
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Tbh - the only bit of software I really rely on from NI, is Kontakt. I think that’s the one which so many people rely on for their sample libraries, I can’t see that going away.
If only the UI wasn’t so fiddly and clunky at the same time…
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soooo clunky man absolute resource hog for multi instruments but it sounds so good and helps me finish music. it’s one of those VST’s that i bounce to audio very fast and never rely on saving anything inside and it’s worked well for me that way
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Unrelated but still relevant
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I would expand on his point that realtor blocks was not such a good idea. The moment it started, the user library got drowned in boring modular setups and lost its appeal as a treasure trove innovative patch designs.
Plus, it made navigation Reaktor even more complicated.
I stopped caring about reaktor after the blocks release
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it’s a shame really, i actually quite liked blocks a lot at first, but VCV seemed to have much more appeal to developers.
i think ultimately having the patching happen in another window, plus the annoying way reaktor handled state saving with DAW projects proved to be its downfall. well that and the fact that VCV had the mutable ports, which reaktor never did - those really were the killer app back then.
the weird backpedaling where they released “blocks prime” afterwards with front-panel patching was the nail in the coffin really. now there’s 2 sets of reaktor blocks which are not compatible, and iirc reaktor itself behaved differently depending on which ones you were using, it was all just so messy.
i gotta say though, visually and sonically i much prefer the OG reaktor blocks to 90% of what’s going on in VCV, which always felt a bit goofy in comparison.
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I don’t have or use Reactor. What would be cool is if they’d go the gen~ route and allow exporting to various targets
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"One of the clearest assessments comes from Music Trades magazine and its editor, Brian T. Majeski. He describes Native Instruments as the latest example of a company that encountered difficulties after being acquired by the investor Francisco Partners. "
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This makes so much sense to me. Apple gets to integrate Reaktor into Logic to make the Live M4L or Bitwig Grid it so desperately needs. Isotope’s tech can be used to expand their Mastering Assistant. They’ll finally get a flexible FM synth built-in. And there are quite a few tricks Alchemy could learn from Absynth. And maybe, at long last, we can put the rift between ESX24 and Kontakt behind us. All while inheriting a digital marketplace for purchasing packs of sound — something Apple’s particularly fond of.
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I posted basically the same thought (but the text deviated to another round of the same rants, so I deleted it).
Many people acclaimed Blocks’ sound quality and prefer it to VCV. I like EuroReakt stuff (which is not without the flaws, like modules missing many useful modulations forcing to use midi CC instead).
It’s nice ecosystem with a lot of possibilities and opportunities… wasted. Blocks even don’t need to re-create Mutable stuff one by one, just follow the same ideas.
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the issue is is apple currently more like a version of native instruments that you remember liking, or more like the current version of native instruments that exist right now?
So this is a little off topic, but anyone know why Maschine Studio photo (EFTA02714072.pdf) and Native Instruments Controller Editor manual (EFTA01810123.pdf) made it into the Epstein documents repository? What’s weird is that the manual even has redactions on Page 3:
Now scouring the web, I found a 1.2.5 Copyright 2010 version of this manual doc and redactions are just info & sales email addresses:
Given redactions, I’m wondering if the staffers read through all of the 122 pages of the manual?
Wonder what that Maschine Studio was used for?
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