And the shitty stuck in the 1990s Fatar Keybeds

 

Native Instrument's Khazi.

 

Great! Eye-opening sci-fi, can't get enough of that.

Rumor says NI will spare our life and let us use Battery and Kompakt 0.9alpha. Even offline! That's altruism for you

Again!? Damn. I don't know what are you talking of but usually people is right when they answer me that

 

Humans just press play.

 

I laid off Native Instruments when they stopped supporting Guitar Rig years ago.

 

Native instruments is doing something shitty?

 

That's not what I love personnally.I hate monthly subscription for life.Their won't get my money for sure.

 

totally agree, if that happens I would rather use the cracked version then subscribing ...

 

I wonder if Akais quaslity is better , yoiu ever tried them ? or heard about failing pots /shitty keybeds ? I am sceptic about akai since the coder are from AIR which negelect their own buggy products and give a $hit about their customers.

 

I have Akai Advance 61 and no,it's not a very good keyboard.It's beautiful,its keys are not unpleasant with your fingers but some keys have a spring sound,and I own it since 2 years.But I use it everyday.However it's well sensitive to velocity and aftertouch.Its knobs are too big,so it's difficult to do a filter sweep from 0 to max valu,and you must rotate your wrist.Its VIP software is 100% useless for me.
If I had to buy a new keyboard again,I would take the Native instruments or a Novation,way cheaper and similar quality I think,and more knobs/sliders.

 

I thought it was the main selling point of this keyboard: Why is it useless, too buggy?

 

Perhaps people are being a little dramatic. Sure, it may make it harder for the pirates. But what if it makes it better for paying customers ? At some point the DSP will be run on your machine. If it means a slightly different business model maybe it will make it cheaper... EG does anyone really need hundereds of gigs of samples or is it all a bit overkill to satisfy a 'more is better' attitude.

I think its different to the monopoly that is Adobe. Which basically hasn't been properly updated in years but charges an extortionate monthly fee for software that is a prerequiste to nearly all imagery, everywhere. I don't use Kontakt, maybe they are this bad. But they can't have the same kind of market share as adobe. They certainly have a hell of a lot more competition.

Well getting fired is what happens to an unproductive workforce. I'm not saying every firing is justified. But to assume firings are directly related to profit margins is naive. Amazingly, people want their governments to behave like businesses. How does a government fire it's unproductive citizens???

 

Hmm.. I spent years resisting NI, the minute I realised the extent of their monopoly over there sector. Alas... (maybe their Teutonic work ethic, who knows?) but attrition - and the desire to break into areas like the media music industry, just left me no option! I've tried encouraging people like Eric Persing at Spectrasonics and others to step up, but they seem disinclined.

I admire Troels and 8 Dio for holding out and refusing to pay NI the exorbitant fees it demands from developers, to join their Native Access scheme, which is - as you might have noticed - designed to 'troll' through your entire system gathering info on not just NI products.

Talking to Olymoon and briefly to SAINT when I signed up, they touched on the many 'work-arounds' ("crack" is such an ugly word - bit like "crossover!" I much prefer "Transgnere" but that's by the by!) that are featured here. If you care to use something like Little Snitch, you become aware that little NI "Auth Helper" or "App Helper" "bots" are scouring your system, hidden under things like Adobe, or more recently Google App "helper" bots (I call them bots). That's why a lot of these workarounds find they have a limited shelf-life. My average is about 3 months, before I start losing my favourite libs, (usually the ones you need a small mortgage for!) and have to start looking on (these days) Chinese or Russian sites for new (and I mean brand new) solutions. Rutracker is a very good one, but they're currently under attack, so my advice is to access using their .onion website. I can give you the link, if anyone wants. Audiotop was ok for a while. although I found a LOT of the multiple folder-downloads were corrupted, simple because I think they were repackaged, and had lost content along the way. They did seem quite responsive to suggestions for software to be "treated," and I have a contact email for that - which ironically used the name Daniel Haver - who's head of NI! I don't honestly think - given the number of times he's made sure I got missing sections to complete a download - that it's the REAL Daniel Haver - wouldn't that be perverse!?

However, there's a flip side to all this. Because like many of you, I operate a philosophy whereby if I discover a bit of kit I really like - I buy it. I wouldn't honestly be able to sleep at night (and I mean this!) thinking I was putting out of business a company simply because they'd created something that helped facilitate my artistic expression. That REALY is then just theft, and that's not pretty. And I also happen to believe that there's a greater artistic "Karma" at play here - and if you do that sort of thing exclusively, your output will be punished accordingly.

And so it's with great irony, that the other day I bought the S88 full-sized, fully-weighted pro keyboard from NI, via a store in London. NO freebies from the store, and - wait for this - a £22 "voucher" available to redeem at NI's website!

Gosh! What to spend that on....!!?? "A violin" in one of the Orchestra Libraries, I imagine!! Wouldn't even pay enough to get through the door of Air Studios, never mind actually making any noise once there!

It's a beautiful, beautiful keyboard btw! Fatar keyed, best there is. And an ergonomic stylishness (in modern parlance - "lots of flat space to put coffee mugs down or balance your iPad on!") and I for one love having a full 88 keyboard to knock around on.

Now, I can tell you how I know that this 'creeping around' goes on: because I have two machines, and ALL my - let's call them - "liberated libraries" are on an external hard drive connected to my MacBook, from where I run Vienna Ensemble Pro 6 into my iMac, where I've got Logic and Pro Tools. And trying to install my new keyboard ostensibly only onto the iMac (coz I dont anticipate using it with the MacBook, it's not exactly a portable keyboard!) the newly downloaded Native Access duly rattled off EVERYTHING! Well - almost everything! It cant find my (legit) Spitfire Symphony, because that's on a separate drive! A good thing to do, btw - if you ever have the need for one of these guys to come in via Team Viewer to fix your Spitfire problem - DON'T have the legit libraries stored alongside your illegitimates Alecia's Keys ( did anybody EVER buy that!!?) or Sacconi or whatever - as alas I did, and Sandy at Spitfire - who's fucking brilliant but also fucking honest, reported me to their lawyer, and resulted in a LOT of bowing and scraping and apologising, to avoid litigation!! So word to the wise - legit on one drive, liberated somewhere else!


And here's where "karma" might be kicking in! Because, despite having disabled all my Little Snitch "kill" rules to stop these little buggers from taking away my Orchestral Tools Metropolis Ark 4 (Oh YES!! Got that working the other day - like manna from heaven!) I now CANNOT get Native Access (which was also blocked obviously, and replaced with a 'genetically-modified' Russian module lol) to work AT ALL!

I've registered the keyboard on the website, so they know I've bought it. But I cant even download the freebie Komplete Kontrol, to at least get things started, or any of the firmware. Literally NOTHING downloads. Or I should correct that: it starts to, then stops, so my download folder is full of 'corrupted' incomplete .isos. And it's been like this all week.

So I'm gearing myself up to actually call them, and be prepared to have them cone in via team viewer, to fix whatever's wrong. Which is going to mean I have to get rid of all traces of any 'inappropriate' "software liberation front" activity LOL before they arrive.

And for other Mac users, I cannot recommend strongly enough, the brilliant Thomas Tempelmann's "Find Any File." I've had it for a few years now. He asks I think it's $6 for it. I paid him about $25, and I tell you why: It's the most comprehensive, non nonsense file detection app I've come across. I've run it against Spotlight, and it's won every time.

So - for all those of you languishing under mountains of "M-Audio" driver this/that (rarely actually drives anything any more in recent years, being run into the ground I hear, I never forgave them for dumping all of us who had spent a lot of money of the Firewire 410 interface!) "Find Any File" will do just that. Just make a point of searching for ALL the M-Audio names: hyphenated, non-hyphenated, case-sensitive too!

I've actually forgotten what I was writing about - because it's just fun to be 'amongst' friends! Artistic co-conspirators, whose urgency to express themselves artistically, quite naturally, over-rides their normal 'moral compass.' I totally get it, and think it actually makes commercial sense!

By using and encouraging 'liberated' software, we're experiencing them, over a period of time longer than a normal trial period. And I cant think of a better way of marketing your wares. because if they're really good, if you're like me, you buy them. Just buy them later than perhaps they'd like!!

SO - I remember now what I was talking about - any advice on what the fuck to do, to get this lovely bit of kit working without having to call "Der Führer!" please let me know.

Also - usual still anyone with advice on that perennial "This library" (which is in the left hand column of Kontakt, as that's where I'm choosing it!) belongs to a library yet to be installed (Urgh! When you've just gone and found the xml in Service Centre, AND fished out the .nicnt files - and got to the stage where you're thinking "I'm no longer a musician, I'm now just a rogue IT technician, coz I spend all my time fiddling with bits of Kontakt I dont understand, and not enough time writing music with the bloody thing, which is sort of the point of the exercise...)

Ahhhh. (cathartic sigh....!)

God to get that off my chest!

Anyone with any advice on all of that, or who just fancies a chat while I start to try and read all the gobbledegook you can see (wing nuts - or whatever the hell that 'language' is supposed to be!!?) that would be great!

And apologies to the bosses upstairs. I realise I've just written a message that makes Tolstoy look like a short hand secretary's notes! And its about more than one topic... Shoot me at dawn, if that's the website policy..? )

Much love form London!

 

is much better in puncto quality

 

They use pots which loos their resistance after a few week/month, then you get parameter jumps, and finally they get useless.

that validates my impression of Akai / AIR software.

Years ago I had a SL MK2 something, its built quality was very low, even lower than the pots from Maschine, the pots had a low resolution with parameter jumps, and the built quality was that cheap that when you turn a knob it's axis move since they weren't mounted properly. Which do you have ?

decades ago I bought an ancient Evolution UC16 used on ebay and its pots all works as on day one ! they all have the same resistance, and no parameter jumps.

 

.

 

Last edited: Sep 6, 2019

If it's like a rent-to-own model I'm ok with it.
Although i still prefer to pay something upfront.

 

The rent to own model is great when the purchase price is beyond the means of paying outright. I have huge issues with the rental model that you never end up owning. I understand you always have the latest version, but a subscriber would ultimately end up with nothing when they cancel their subscription. A better model would be keeping the current version if they cancelled their subscription if they have paid equal to or more than the cost of the product.

 

I love my near future dystopian sci-fi and the first story in the book, where the rich can pay for things out right and have freedom of choice, but the poor buy the cheap products that are locked to DRM'ed merchandise and end up paying twice as much, is so relevant in today's world. Thought provoking stuff.