I cannot find Absynth 1 and Reaktor 3 anywhere. I've been using them in some productions years (more than decade) ago and since then I upgraded to higher versions. But now I want to open one old project that uses those two specific old VST instruments and I am stuck :/ Anyone can point me in some direction? PM if you can.

 

You should get in touch with NI support, it might take a few days but they should be able to send you the files (assuming you owned them?) I got in touch with them about some recently unsupported products in Komplete 6 and the responded with everything I needed within 48 hrs.

 

have you looked under the sofa cushions? i find a lot of stuff under there.

 

Thanks, thread can be closed, I solved my problem Never thought that it will be so hard to find 10-year old software... it's as rare as good old hardware!

 

i knew it was under the sofa cushions!

 

I hear your problems with it !! I have so many old legacy projects from years and years ago that I keep stuff like Absynth1 etc installed on my machine or whatever, bloating the system (Like Kontakt 2/3/4/etc and Guitar Rigs blah blah blah...), and a closet full of NI DVD installers (which I would have to boot from an old clone of a boot drive I imagine as they probably would not install over 10.8.5/10.9.5 etc...) ug... Now I try and commit this kind of stuff to audio earlier to future proof it to some degree...

but these are first world problems! Glad you got it figured out! (and did NI help you out or whatever?)

 

Something that I don't get : Reaktor, Absynth and so on are not backward compatible?

 

Where is the problem?
If you check the Support-Download page at Native Instruments you´re able to find also old installers.
What about Google? If you type it in you´ll find old installers.
Maybe some users have old installers. As old NI user i can also upload version 1.

 

yeah i was wandering the same thing with reaktor.
i think a current version can load old ensebles but the vsti is still named reaktor 6 in the daw which doesn't help if the daw asks for reaktor 3. yes, you could add it as a new track, thus losing all automation etc. so not really feasable...

 

I think Reaktor is fine, but there are some like Kontakt, if you have an older session saved with say a Kontakt 2 instance, and you have Kontakt 5, it won't automatically open Kontakt 5 and open the patch... so you either have to keep really good notes (which I can fail at) or whatnot... OR have older versions of Kontakt etc on your drive to easily open them. Same with guitar rig... it will upgrade your old patches when you install it, but won't remember what patch (due to changes in naming conventions/storage format etc), when you open it...

So doesn't happen with all, but with some, and I have encountered this a lot with NI products over the last decade or so...

 

The trouble is when in your old days you had for example Absynth 1 tracks and haven't named them - so you basically have the MIDI but don't have a clue what patch is it. And if you tweaked the patch in your old project, even the next version of Absynth will not help. Another thing is that from version to version there were some sound changes. Reaktor 4 sounds slightly differently (less harsh) than Reaktor 3. So you beed to install an old version and hope that DAW will recognize it. Well, it not ended well: my old Cubase haven't loaded proper VSTis on old project tracks, so I had to be creative again and make my track from a scratch. We'll se if it will be better than original idea ;) Luckily I am using Reaper right now - it's better when it comes to loading older projects and finding VSTis.