I hope NI treats Reaktor like they treat Guitar Rigs

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Comments

  • afros
    afros Member Posts: 12 Member

    Sorry for the typo.

  • colB
    colB Member Posts: 991 Guru

    Understand Reaktor is relatively easy - a few weeks working through the Manuals

    'Bringing it's potential' would take many lifetimes.

    Reaktor is a development environment. Learning all it's mechanisms doesn't take long at all - much easier than a DAW. All the info you need to get to an advanced level in terms of how the tools work is in the manuals.

    Learning all the possible different ways it can be used would take literally an eternity. Most of them haven't even been discovered yet.

    Demanding free lessons in DSP and audio engineering from first principals with no math to the level that would be required to designs e.g. pro quality filters and anti-aliasing oscillators... and the rest... that's like demanding that if you buy Cubase, Steinberg give you a nice packaged set of free lessons in musical composition, performance and production that get you from 'do re me' to a postgraduate level... in multiple genres too (else the important one that I want might be missing). It's ludicrous.

    Only thing I can thing of is that my idea of what DSP is, is different from that of some people who don't know what DSP is :-/

  • colB
    colB Member Posts: 991 Guru

    Max grew out of academia whereas Reaktor was developed much later, and specifically as a commercial product. So it makes total sense that there would be a lot of high quality learning materials at many different levels focussed around Max. It also makes sense that this would not be the case for Reaktor, and that for so long, Reaktor had better performance and better sound quality, with much more 'pro' level libraries. Those things don't matter nearly as much in academia as they do in the commercial world.

    10ish years ago I was working in a local University, and I was chatting with one of the lecturers in the muli-media dept. who was teaching some 'intro to digital audio' type of course using Max. I told him that I was doing a lot of stuff in Reaktor. He hadn't even heard of it! he didn't know it even existed.

    It is totally unreasonable to expect a purely commercial product to have the same weight of learning resources around it as set of tools that grew out of academia ~40 years ago and evolved alongside the knowledge being taught.

  • gentleclockdivider
    gentleclockdivider Member Posts: 215 Helper
    edited April 10

    If you say 'it doesn't sound great , then that's probably becasue you have downloaded user enembles that rely on the primary modules alone .

    The user libary is both a godsend and an annoyance , because tom many people just upload mediocre sounding stuff , .

    If thoussands of people upload ensembles with the stock pro 52 filter then it's understandable that the majoity thinks that reaktor has a certain sound , true the primary modules have a certain sound but reaktor core language does not .

    It's like saying a programming language has a sound .

    It doesn't .

    The filters and osc's in primary are 20+ years old(except the modal and sine bank ) , so it's old dsp code , they sounded great for that time.

    To be honoust I still use primary a lot , building a 512 band vocoder with primary with almost no cpu overhead ..awesome ..or splitting incoming audio and rejuggle them with 512 primary sine waves ...nice (the voice module is a source of power )

    And I think it sounds stellar

    Core language let's you make whatever you want , it's reaktor' own dsp language , and blocks, monark , super eight etc is proof that it sounds awesome .

  • Cretin Dilettante
    Cretin Dilettante Member Posts: 201 Pro

    I love how you acknowledge that Max has the exact kind of learning material I was asking for, but still pretend it doesn't/couldn't (or shouldn't?) possibly exist for Reaktor.

  • colB
    colB Member Posts: 991 Guru

    lol

    I'm not pretending anything. I've never said it couldn't or shouldn't. I'm saying it didn't, it doesn't and it won't. And I explained why.

    Anyway, good luck with Max. Once you've learned dsp and digital audio engineering using Max's goldilocks (for you) learning resources, it will be trivially easy to use that knowledge with Reaktor, just take a few days to work through the manuals, and you will be ready to rock!

  • tetsuneko
    tetsuneko Member Posts: 797 Expert
    edited April 11

    hmm, good point. Since max4live runs max patches, perhaps this is a good solution for me as well.. I think my actual Max/MSP licence is still for v 6, havent felt the need to upgrade since M4L comes with its own Max binaries

  • Studiowaves
    Studiowaves Member Posts: 640 Advisor

    After I got Reaktor the very first thing I said was "Reaktor Rocks"; and that is does. What great programmers with a great vision and they absolutely made a dream come true. Don't tell me they out did themselves with guitar rig. What did they do?

  • dreason85
    dreason85 Member Posts: 49 Member
    The issue with Native Access has kept me away from the Reaktor for a while, and I have been immersed in Puredata's embrace. I have found that Puredata is really wise to handle polyphony, and I admire Puredata for having an clone object. Then turned to the Reaktor and found that the signal processing between its blocks can still only be in monophony. I know that the rules for Reaktor signal processing are designed that way, so I can only get used to it. Additionally, I don't know if MaxMsp can also support polyphony and polyphony processing like Puredata's clone does. I have also seen some software, such as VCV Rack and Softube Modular, Some third-party modules of VCV Rack do not support polyphony, while the four polyphonic module of Softube Modular makes me feel too clumsy.

  • colB
    colB Member Posts: 991 Guru

    Reaktor has very powerful polyphony handling. It always has had that, since long before Blocks ever existed. Blocks are monophonic, so if you want polyphony, don't use Blocks! Easy!

    Blocks is just a tiny part of what Realtor can do, it's just the newest part, so gets more attention.

    If you prefer pd, go use pd, but please stop posting misinformation falsely criticising Reaktor. Thank you!

  • chk071
    chk071 Member Posts: 550 Pro
    edited May 28

    I think what most people don't understand is that the market changed. There are many more hobbyists which buy stuff these days, and, there are many more people who make beats with something like Maschine, or fire sample and loops with Ableton Push. As the biggest player in the business, Native Instruments can either decide whether they want to grow smaller, and concentrate on the niche market of synthesists, or even people who want to build their own instruments (Reaktor), or, they decide to stay big, and cater to a different market.

    You don't have to like it, but, you also have to see that the market changed rather radically.

  • Sunborn
    Sunborn NKS User Library Mod Posts: 3,094 mod
    edited May 28

    There are some Poly Blocks in the User Library
    Aren't those real poly? or just attempts to somehow imitate poly?

  • colB
    colB Member Posts: 991 Guru
    edited May 28

    "Aren't those real poly? or just attempts to somehow imitate poly?"

    They aren't real Blocks! (at least the ones that really are polyphonic)

    I developed a polyphonic Block extension myself (Toybox use a version of it in their polyphonic Blocks), but it is exactly that, an extension.

    Blocks is a specification framework, part of the specification defines Blocks as monophonic.

    You can extend that, or design your own complete different framework, whatever you like really, that's the beauty of Reaktor.

    The problem here is that non experts can easily confuse modules with Blocks with macros with instruments… it can be confusing if you don't read the manuals. So erroneous ideas like "Reaktor can't do polyphony properly" can start to spread... and unhappy noobs who didn't get exactly what they expected… they really don't care if the negative stories they spread are true. Yay internet :)

  • Sunborn
    Sunborn NKS User Library Mod Posts: 3,094 mod
  • KoaN
    KoaN Member Posts: 138 Advisor

    This made me think a little.

    I feel Reaktor has always been a niche product,it was never meant for everyone.Why was it fine back then and not anymore? In fact it is probably known to more people now than it was ever.

    The change as you mentionned is the market yes… in the sense that softwares are available to any wannabe musician now and there are a lot of them! Because of medias,ads and most companies wanting to make things the most easy,accessible possible to anyone on the whole planet.

    So there's more money to be made now than before if you cater to the mass. NI got bigger and every priorities changed.

    Someone can make money just selling sample packs and presets because the demand is so high…well i guess it gets harder to be noticed as well given the amount now.

    A niche product can only survive on a small team,sometimes even one guy…with lots of passion and no need to become rich.

    I feel they will try to keep Reaktor alive the longest possible but i really doubt they will invest any more developement or change. Maybe a resolution,GUI update at best? But just that probably too much work if they don't plan to add more ressources.

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