I love Native Instruments. This is why I can say whole-heartedly, Fuck Native Instruments.
This is human nature now, yes..? To fuck what we love and love what we fuck.

The next step in human nature: to simply be FOND of. After this comes true love.

 

Nobody cares when they stop supporting old software, or stop offering updates or compatibility fixes. But to disallow activation for no good reason is just bad behaviour and disrespectful towards the customer. They have an infrastructure in place to authorize all their software, plugins and libraries. There's really no excuse for not continuing to offer that, or for not providing working offline copies to their customers. The backlash is justified and I hope that at some point enough people boycott them, or support their competition, so that they'll be forced to treat their customers better.

 

the Nintendo NES is 30 years old but you can still play with it when you want it.

 

I can understand a company doesn't support a legacy product anymore.But that the customer can't use the product anymore,no.
They should make these plugins as freewares.

 

Those are exactly the right summaries. I'm just repeating with a similar message.

The strangest part is how pathetically short-sighted it is for NI marketing to abuse their existing legit customers in this manner.
Of course NI needs to eventually abandon 'supporting' old software, no-one can complain about that, but 'abandoning support' and 'wilfully crippling' are not the same.
Wilfully crippling that old software hurts only their loyal customers and just gives pirates something to laugh about.
It also encourages future users to seriously notice how piracy users are the only ones managing to avoid NI's vandalism.
It's astonishing how the blind marketing idiots can, and do, get it so wrong? It reminds me of politicians 'feeling right' when they advocate waging wars on drugs - just so stupid.

If NI had scrapped support for old software but simultaneously took steps to not screw their loyal customers they would have gained huge respect and positive publicity all at negligible cost. Any competent cost-benefit analysis would have told these dumb marketers that they're making bad decisions. It must be frustrating to be a brilliant developer at NI watching their own marketing guys screw up the company's reputation.

 

Last edited: Mar 11, 2020

No offense,but I doubt you bought many plugins in your life....

 

But they won't never make the plugins as freewares because they think people will play with freewares and won't buy their new buggy stuff anymore.That's how capitalism reasons.

 

NEVER buy or support software you don't get to own/emulate subscription bullshit..

 

You're 100% right man,unfortunately all big companies on this world don't give a *uck about their customers and more generally about (poor) humans.Sad world.

 

Fortunately I still have my AiR version of the powerful vokator.
Also complete 12 legit...

 

Better would be Open Source like the Developer of Surge did.
One of the best free Synths I ever tried (and had a Price of 99$ before)

And another companies I love just because of the update Policy is Meldaproduction. If you buy the MXXX Plug always new stuff .(and that's with the same price as NI Komplette 12. ) thanks to MDrummer it can compare with Maschine and thanks to MFactory it can compare with all NI Synths . (Only question is how good they can compare but that’s another thread)

Also FL Studio love the one buy ever get mentally of the companies .

And on the other hand we have companies like Linplug.
Just before they went offline they made a sale with all Plug for 50$ (for one Synth with no further Support )
I loved Spectral but never bought it and now I never will.
(And In such cases I say Abandonware should be free and keyed Version should not forbidden by law. )

 

Yeah I think back in late 2019 when NI had those huge layoffs, some of the disgruntled employees wrote about having similar thoughts and experiences with the company. I can't remember where I read that though, was one of those corporate/workplace review sites. I am just so grateful to the people who continue to provide Kontakt and other NI software so that we at least have an "alternative solution" for this problem. Let's just hope they don't implement new protections that actually work in the long term. If that happens I'll stop buying anything from them for sure. I suppose or at least I would hope that this entire situation has made their products even more of a high value target for crackers than they already were.

 

Don't confuse "end of life" with "end of copyright" :D

 

Yeah, that sux indeed.

I can suggest to start making wav files. I do have a few projects with plugins in it that are behaving badly which means the sounds are no longer really useful anymore. Fortunately I have the right wav files before this issue start happening.

 

I was just guessing about disgruntled employees feeling frustrated - I knew nothing about their layoffs.
After your comments, I took a look and found these interesting list of comments from NI employees.
https://webcache.googleusercontent....uments-Reviews-E33496.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
Looks like maybe a bunch of incompetent suits are running amok with daft 'cloudy' business visions and no 'music tech industry' understanding of what made NI so good in the past. The chances of NI being as interesting in the future look like they might be fading fast.

 

Last edited: Mar 11, 2020

This argument is only valid if you keep the hardware on the specs the software demands. You cannot compare them as both dx7 and fm7 were the same types of entities. They are not! Or to put it simpker: you want old ass software to run? Keep an old ass pc around which supports it. It's that simple!

 

Respectfully, that's not the issue - it's not 'that simple'.
Assuming someone has kept a few spare 'old ass PCs' around specifically to maintain their old projects with old plugins, etc, and their license grants them the right to uninstall from one PC and reinstall on another, NI are now saying you will not be able to get the old NI plugin working on a spare old PC because NI won't activate it. You may have done everything according to your paid for license but NI will be saying 'tough shit - enforced obsolescence'. This is arguably not even legal, but I'm damned if I'm going to wade through the small print to find out. I doubt if there's anything in the terms and conditions which says "I agree to watch NI cancel the terms of the license, and cancel the functionality of my plugin at any moment they choose."

 

Fm7 works great on new computer with win7 or win10, your argument about old pc doesnt apply here.

 

Last edited: Mar 11, 2020

*35* years old

 

Okay, i can see that online actication is a serious issue. But don't these old plugins just use a simple offline serial?