R.I.P. Native Instruments.

 

"Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses."
These firms invest in companies (usually either at the beginning of the rise of a new technology when the startup has no more fund to grow alone, or when a company is struggling and the previous owners want to get to their money before the ship sinks) that they try to twist its strategy to a (more) profitable plan, many times leaving behind the original technological goals and the core of the development.
At the end they either reach the planned profit (no matter how) or they write that investment off, selling it to another (sometimes money-laundry) investment equity firm.
Don't expect much.

 

If you click on that arrow next to the Plasmonic name, you will get a small popup menu with the options for the manual, update check, and a number of window sizes up to 200%.

 

Last edited: Jan 21, 2021

My concern is that the smaller independent Kontakt library developers may get shut out of the proposed "singular platform for seamless music making experience".

 

If I was a cofounder of NI I would be sooooo damn happy I sold my company for millions of dollars.
I'd buy Real Estate for the cheapest and decent areas to renovate, let time pass by and if I REALLY needed money I would sell something.
I mean, money won't disappear as if it were in the bank.

 

Oh yeah, Flash was my favorite program by a mile, even the tutorials how to make an animation using frames and a line that was the guide
for the objects to move along was so easy and clear. In 1 minute you already made your first animation.
And interactivity using buttons and animations and what not was super easy.
Now what do we have to do that?
I even made a tutorial and uploaded it to Deviant Art "how to make a flash site"...
Saaaaad face!

 

Yes, and what we must think is that we can also choose to forward and port a chosen version if needed.
Devs are still releasing libs that work from 5.6.+, and even lower, because they used an older version to create the lib and it didn't use any of the new fx in Kontakt 6.
There would be the old-school, third party lib using types (the real musicians) and the nu-school who just play with one finger what the machine tells them to.
Our warez archives will be even more sought after.
This world obviously requires that with music production we wouldn't want to be following the latest OS, and eventually even the latest hardware.

 

@Smoove Grooves
That is a good point, but it begs the question, how long will it be sustainable to stay on old hardware and OSes? At some point in the possibly distant future, we will run out of functioning old hardware.

 

The answer is already in how many known and unknown commercial studios threre are that are still running on old cheese-grater or even G5, or still have their proper ProTools rig running with all the external DSP and Logic as the interface.
When people are queueing at your door to record, it just has to work.

 

Folks were mentioning Vegas/Magix... long story short the last sort of good version of Vegas was 10 or 11. basically whatever version isn't a crashfest is the best one.

 

The one thing I admit I don't take into consideration is the people using NI related hardware, like their keyboard controllers.
Coz MIDI is MIDI, right?
I've never needed to use any of their hardware. Although it was nice to experience the integration, I admit.

 

My very limited experience with acquisition by private equity corporates (far away from music software industry, but very explicit):

As an avid helicopter flying models hobbyist, I'm currently witnessing the fall of the most prestigious brands in this sector, and in the model-kit industry in general.
Thanks to a very extensive purchase policy, over the years "Horizon Hobby" has succeeded in acquiring the majority of main brands in this sector, while retaining the specific character of brands that was bought, whether in terms of high quality of their products or high innovation potential. By offering in addition a centralized and irreproachable quality customer service, Horizon Hobby thus managed to become the number one... until it sells its soul to an investment fund.
Today, plastics used in their models are breaking like glass (intentionally designed to force you to buy more spare parts) ; models themselves are poorly engineered and no longer individually tested by the quality control department ; spare parts (when available) are sold at the price of platinum ; customer service never respond to emails, and of course, everything is now made in China (at the cheapest possible cost)... where you can find exactly the same models for sale at 3 dollars... instead of 230!
Profits first.
Good luck, NI customers!

 

The only thing I've used Native Instruments for in about the last decade... was their website, to purchase some U-He synths recently via a N.I. bundle.

However, I 'Kompletely' (geddit?) ignored their own bundled-in N.I. products after the point of sale, never even bothering to download any of them. I just kept the U-He products which were a bargain, lol.

I mean, I used to quite like some N.I. stuff way way back in the day. But truthfully, with all the newer competition out right now, I honestly don't believe I'd even notice if N.I. were to disappear altogether.

I think nowadays, N.I. are kept mainly relevant with all the sample-hogs, due to their Kontakt software, which personally I've also never really been a fan of, since, Kontakt (and Battery) always felt kinda very clunky to me.

Plus, I'm predominantly synth-based anyway, rather than being overly sample-reliant. So, I've never really gravitated towards those sample-based products either.

These days, I view Native Instruments on a par with I.K. Multimedia. Both pretty well respected in their time, but becoming less and less relevant with each passing day (just my personal opinion.)

 

Last edited: Jan 21, 2021

I agree with almost all you said, some things though, i gotta say:
Being a long time Magix customer(Samplitude) and Acid Pro/Sound Forge/Vegas user from -literally- day one, i can vouch that Magix mean to make the most of their acquisitions. Acid Pro with Magix hasn't seen more fruitful, gloriest days since the late 90s with Sonic Foundry.
Acid became abandon-ware with Sony. They hadn't released an update for nearly 10 years and the soft was left operating at 32bit. I personally posted a guide in the Sony Acid forum of how to get Acid Pro 7 working with x64 plugs using JBridge. More over, with Sony, progressively any significant programmer left from Sonic Foundry was moved to Vegas and/or Sound Forge or terminated, in a constant shrinking of programming personnel and focusing on Vegas in a silly attempt to make it an accessory for the mother company's cameras instead of taking it full on to compete against Adobe's Premiere.
Back to Acid, in direct contrast with Sony's terrible management and development, Magix has completely resurrected the soft with frequent updates and Acid Pro now is finally a modern DAW with full 64bit support, VST3, easy sidechaining, ARA2 support coming soon (if not there already, haven't checked the latest updates) and some neat unique tricks like the StemMaker from re-knowned plugin creator zynaptiq and the midi playable Chopper window.
Thanks for listening and cheers

 

Last edited: Jan 22, 2021

@The Revenant
That's a good point. The customer service at NI has already worsened a lot. A few years back you could still phone them. Then suddenly they removed the phone hotline, and you could only chat. I had some moments where it took such a long time to finally get through to someone, and then it was fairly disappointing. It's gonna be 'fun' when it gets even worse.

 

Thanks, that works perfectly. The 200% are pretty perfect here. Thought the triangle was part of the logo
so I didn't click on it.

 

There are already good alternatives to Kontakt for small and independent sample lib developers, but I guess they are "lacking" DRM / copyright protection features, that NI Kontakt has (proprietary format, license managed through NI Access...).

Personally I prefer those other formats.

 

Yeah, so cool piece of soft.

I've got to ask. Are you like, for real?

 

They were located less than a mile from my home... The most impressive GPU assisted editing software i have seen and used. I loved Commotion too by the way... Visionary software !