To Native Instruments: the situation is CRITIC, probably worst than it has ever been

LostInFoundation · 2023-04-25T03:03:03+00:00

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Seriously: all of you, take a stop. Make all your employees stop what they are doing for a day or two and have a look at the last month’s forum posts and the hundreds of reports about things not working, programs not installing, serials not registering, shopping not processing, instruments not opening, NI products not working with other softwares, sounds being distorted on very performant computers, support not answering, people saying “I will abandon the whole NI ecosystem”,…

Then ask yourselves “is THIS what we want to be?”

And then put your act together and give us back the top of the notch, industry leader company you built before

And fix the mess you made, even if it takes a period in which you have to work also on saturdays…instead of saying things like “when we will have some developer time”, “you’ll have your fixes in 6 months so we don’t have to make the work twice”, “now I leave you cause I got to go home/personal things to do”. In the end, is you who made this mess…and your users who paid with they hardly earned money to have this…awful experience…

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Comments

LostInFoundation

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/67018#Comment_67018

I agree. Even in this case, a support department is made for this. And when we pay for something, we pay for support too.

But…as I said…THIS many issues with NA2 all together all of a sudden? And many of them confirmed by the NI staff?

No, it’s not about the usual, typical, NORMAL problems that can arise with softwares and different configurations. Not only at least

LostInFoundation

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/67017#Comment_67017

Perfect. I got your point. Can you let the adults speak now?

Thank you, bye

I’m here to help other users. Not to defend NI. Not to make new friends

LostInFoundation

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/67017#Comment_67017

Btw…nice edit…now your very helpful for NI community sarcasm is really at an higher level 👍🏼. Probably talking about "messiah of the deprived minority" didn’t make you sound as cool as “messiah of doom”. Things will improve for sure, after this

LostInFoundation

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/67031#Comment_67031

Ok. I can take it. But I don’t think I’m talking about conspiracy at all…just calling them to fix the mess NA is now. There is no conspiracy behind this…maybe only a little indifference towards users

LostInFoundation

Btw: can I copy your “Use the ignore list, it’s free!” statement? 👍🏼

LostInFoundation

Frankly…I don’t mind about “these users”.

I mind about users disproving me cause there is something to disprove. I mind about the people I can help to get things fixed (cause this is what I would like to find coming in a forum if I had troubles). And I mind about seeing if NI (the company that makes the hardwares I like) can improve themself and not fall into the abyss of musicians talking bad about them in other forums (and therefore ending up failing…and therefore leaving me without my beloved Maschine (yes, I’m a bit egoist too)).

The people just saying “A little dramatic today, are we? 😉” thinking that this brings something interesting for the NI community or that it will make them appear cool…this I don’t mind at all

PK The DJ

thinking that....[blah blah blah]...it will make them appear cool

Your replies are coming across in exactly the same way. Saying things like "let the adults speak" is not necessary - especially if you want to be taken seriously.

Yes of course there are posts on the forum from people having problems, but that's all we can see.

It paints an inaccurate picture of the situation because what we DON'T see is all the thousands of others who have no problems at all. I'm one of those people. Native Access (and NI products in general) caused no issues here.

Cretin Dilettante

Everything's stable right now on my system, but I agree with the sentiment. I mean, poop, even guitarists seem to get "better" gear than electronic musicians...you buy a ****** $30 guitar and it's got enough strings, tone controls, etc. for you to play guitar like everyone else (even if it "sounds like ******")...you buy a $1500 "Standalone groovebox" and you can't automate tempo or time signature change. Great. Thank you. So glad I decided to make music with computers instead of learning an instrument. :P

just_jump

I mean some of the issues are just reposts of problems like a lot of Windows 11 related things and I think a couple MacOS too with its latest update.

Some posts are things that should have been directed to support in the first place that sound like account level things.

What I am perhaps concerned about is the number of posts I’ve seen here and on Reddit about long / no responses to support requests. I think they largely started after the layoffs which isn’t surprising, but doesn’t make it good either. Complaining here is unlikely to change anything either since they can see such basic metrics.

Native Access issues which seem common right now either could use a dedicated support thread or people should report those issues to support in case there’s something on the NI side that needs fixing. It’s not to say I refuse to help, but that beyond a couple of basics like updating to current version there often isn’t much to suggest.

getting long so cutting it short.

Ranting over multiple posts in your own thread doesn’t really help. Though I’m not sure what does since NI are likely aware of the situation. People utilizing search more might help a title, but that’s an issue on every platform. And admittedly if people aren’t getting support responses then they’re going to post somewhere (here or Reddit).

Ed M

Maybe it's because you see more posts about problems or people who complain. Happy customers rarely voice their happiness.

I'm not saying all is ok for everybody, and if you want to raise an issue or ask for help, this is the place to be. I just don't think it's as bad as you make it seem.

LostInFoundation

What I was trying to say is just that YES, surely NI is aware of the situation. But if WE the users continue accepting it (because it doesn’t touch us directly or because we don’t think that we are able to make changements like Waves users did) a company like NI will only think that they can go on like this. And tell us “we will fix this in 6 months cause otherwise we will have to make the work twice”. In any case, people who bought things now already payed, and in 6 months they’ll have other buying and paying. The only suffering from the situation will be the users struggling for 6 month.

But…since I see that this doesn’t interest NI users…and that I’m only “playing the messiah”…ok…I’ll remain with my working NI hardwares/softwares and don’t care about others with problems or NI health. Till the day NI will fail and I’ll use my Maschine, the product I made music on, to keep the door open.

Sorry for causing this much disturbance. Don’t worry, I will not cause anymore. I’ll just continue helping users when I can and never mess again with this kind of arguments. D-One was very right.

Everybody is happy, everybody don’t care. And for the ones unhappy cause they can’t use what they paid for…it’s their business

Just last thing for @PK The DJ: I NEVER wrote to no one in this way…just to the very few that just come in to just say “dramatic” or “you play the messiah”. As you said, I REPLY, I never ATTACK. But if someone thinks that he can attack me just to be the “cool funny guy” and that I won’t answer…they chose the wrong target

Peace out

Kaiwan_NI

Hi @LostInFoundation I saw that you've been very active in our recent DevTalks with the Native Access Product Manager. Hayo has answered all your questions and addressed your concerns raised in this thread there. Curious if there's any reason why you still don't have the confidence that our product team is aware of these ongoing issues and is doing their best to fix them?

LostInFoundation

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/67251#Comment_67251

I want to start by saying that IN ANY CASE having someone from NI answering our questions was more than welcome and a good sign of a sort of transparency that lately has been flaunt here in the forum but is not yet something we can clearly say is effective 100%.

And I want also to add that here I’m listing things that concerned me a little bit, but Hayo was very kind and provided also good answers, so I don’t want to sound like I’m all against everything he said. I’m not.

About your question now

More than one reason

Firstly, the most evident one: almost 1 month (or more) passed from the release of the NA version that started to give these serious problems and from the users starting to ask for help for the many problems caused by it (asking to NI, which is not too much involved into the helping yet, I see surely more users trying to solve the other users problems than people from NI). And users come here cause they open tickets and after one week of no answer at all (not even solutions, no answers) they try to find help from someone else. And seeing only one new release (3.3.1) of the problematic software (and a release that didn’t solve any problem) doesn’t reassure me too much. Maybe I’ve been lucky till now, but I’m not used to companies that if they have a big problem (having a program that manage the entry point of everything else (installation, registration, update…all things that if not working don’t allow even to use any instrument IS a BIG problem) don’t hurry up to solve this problem and give users what they paid for
What worries me is that a team, as you say aware of these ongoing issues, has not even thought about withdrawing the malfunctioning, probably not well tested before release version and/or warned users to not install it. Just in few posts here some of you suggested for specific problems (like Guitar rig in demo mode) to revert to previous NA version. Only to see then appear other users saying that also the other instruments started to work in demo version. And practically ignoring all other users saying that the programs don’t even install, they can’t be registered or that NA itself doesn’t install or has problems with its NTK Daemon. I surely would admit that the program we released wasn’t ready, remove it so new users won’t install it, and put a BIIIIIG warning on top of every page of the forum to not update to it and giving the links to install a FUNCTIONING version on a pinned thread that everyone can find. Not waiting for users to come and complain 200 times and relying on other users to point them to a small thread where someone from NI gave the links to a previous working version to be able even only to install and register the instrument someone just bought
Speaking of our beloved NTK Daemon…half of the DevTalks was around it, with users asking why we must have a program like this working under the hood from our computer startup, when we need it only once in a while when we need to install or update instruments. The answers were quite sibylline and must be read between the lines to see that it is for interests of NI future plans (legitimately). But before being pressed, Hayo tried to sell it to us as the only way to installing products, having faster installations and improve NA startup times. Thing that was practically all his focus on what to tell us before we started to ask other questions. He started the discussion saying that the team spent 6 or more months working practically only to improve the startup time of NA by 5-10 seconds. Which is something appreciable, but thinking this was the main concern for 6 and more months of a team with such an important program for the whole NI ecosystem in their hand is…again…not that much reassuring. Specially if I think that they worked that much for this purpose and the results are…that they put out a program that for many users don’t even allow them to install or register the instruments
The answer he gave us were very “political”, often beating around the bush and not answering directly to direct questions. And when a question was too “delicate”, he simply ignored it answering to things like “oh yeah…we can think about giving you different colors for the UI of NA”… I understand users without problems can have requests about specific, cosmetic things…but the certainty of a WORKING installers hub should be the main priority, in my opinion
Coming to a discussion with a member of the team, where we give feedbacks, reading his answers to this feedback ending with “If you feel we could do better at being transparent here, we're open to feedback, so let us know!” Is quite strange. We are ALREADY giving our feedback! We are letting you know NOW!
Reading a Product Team Leader saying “oh yes…we know about this…but we will fix it during the time and you’ll have the update in six months. Cause if we fix it now for users, when we will come closer to the big update in six months we will have to rework it and I don’t want to make my developers work twice on one thing” isn’t the answer I expect as an user. Happy for the developers having a cool boss…not so much for the users…. It’s like a hospital doctor saying to someone who have medical problems “we will investigate them in 6 months, when all your symptoms will be very serious so our nurses don’t have to make blood collection 2 times and analyze it twice”. Hoping that in the meanwhile he didn’t die
As I don’t expect him to give answers like

“NA2 was not released very stably.”. “due to the desire to get Native Access v. 2 rolled out faster”. “We're still working on addressing bugs that require NA1 to circumvent on NA2”. After 1 year of its release to substitute a previous WORKING version??? And 6 months spent almost only to improve it’s startup time of 5 sec???

“We haven't taken a look at offline usage, but at some point we'll visit this work environment. I'll check to see what the experience is like at the moment.”. Or “I must ask my developers”. If THEY don’t know if the NI instruments can be used offline at the moment, who must?

“we never really thought about the branding of said installer”’

”we're looking at how we could provide product backversioning”. It was already provided, when we could download installation files from the site. Then you removed it to force us using only NA

“we're not obligated to share this information”

”we are allowed to prevent opt outs”

”when we will have some developer time”

I could go on…but I think this already show that if you ask me…

“Curious if there's any reason why you still don't have the confidence that our product team is aware of these ongoing issues and is doing their best to fix them?”

…I have something to answer.

As I said in the DevTalks, “I want to believe”. I want to believe everything Hayo told us was sincere and not only to keep the waters quiet. I want to believe that people at NI really cares to improve their programs and the company behavior. I want to believe that users get listened. But there’s an easy way to help somebody believe: showing him FACTS that what he believes in is becoming a tangible reality.

With all of this I don’t want to say that everything works bad at NI. In some answers to other users I also make evident all the strong points NI and its product have. But…am I worried? Yes, I am.

Showing that serious issues like the ones emerging now gets addressed IMMEDIATELY and with SERIOUSNESS would help me decrease my worries

Charlo

On 7th April I got a message from NI support saying they had received my support request. I had tried to upgrade to NA 2 and couldn't do it. Now, on 26th May, I've sent them the info zip from running the support tool 4 days ago and still no word.

I've been trying to get to simply be able to use any Kontakt instrument for 7 weeks - it took them 6 weeks to send me the support tool, and now they don't get back anyway.

It won't be a decision for me to leave the whole NA system - I won't have a choice. I've invested a small fortune in Kontakt Instruments and now I can't use any of them and they don't respond.

When I bought the instruments, I wasn't told that they may or may not work on my computer, I was told they would work, and they don't. And support are not helping.

It seems to me that LostInFoundation is trying hard to make things better. What else would a forum be for? It would be just a bunch of people saying "Yes, nothing's happening over here either."

Aurasic

Yep, we simply a bunch of 'purses and wallets', so it seems!

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