March 2024 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer
Comments
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Hi Simon. thank you for all of the updates. You mentioned kontakt, are there plans to update and expand content for reaktor? there are a lot of libraries available but sadly, a lot of the material in the user forum isn't nks compliant so it would be nice if nI could expand reaktor with more banks of sounds at some point
I appreciate all you guys do regarding accessibility, it has exponentially improved my music over the last 3 and a half years.
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It sounds like there's some interesting stuff on the horizon, but right now my beef is with Native Access and its denial of a NAS as a valid storage location.
I understand that some people had problems with using a NAS in NA1, but that's not necessary a good reason to block it in future versions of Native Access. Users like myself who did have luck getting a NAS to work are effectively blocked from upgrading because NA2 won't register the NAS as the install location for libraries, old or new.
It would be really nice to see this rectified. Otherwise, I might be done with NI, not out of spite but simply because I can't make it work in my set up.
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My question is what's up with maschine Mk3 and Kontrol Mk3...I miss using maschine integration komplete Kontrol
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@BIF First, thanks for saying thanks to those folks who're active in this community -- I'm asking my team to lean into being present here -- and they are -- shoutouts to @Matt_NI @Kai_NI @Friedemann_NI @Chris_NI @MichaelK_NI among others.
I only joined a year ago, so I can't speak to some of the decisions made in the past.
But I also can't promise that we won't have to drop support for old hardware as we move forward. And we can't support all legacy products and apps forever -- the maintenance cost rises exponentially, not linearly, over time.
But what I can say is that when we do have to make changes like this, the community deserves clearer and more transparent communication than perhaps we have achieved in the past. A good example of us trying to improve here is how we communicated the news that had decided to drop support for Kontrol Mk1 in Komplete Kontrol v3. While some folks are understandably disappointed by this, we did try to be clear, transparent and up-front about what was happening and why. And the Mk1 will continue to work with the last version of KK (v2.9) which will work on most OS's for a while yet, and it'll will work as a vanilla MIDI controller indefinitely as this doesn't require any special desktop software.
A company that's been around for 26 years is going is going to have some products that have reached the limit of our ability to economically maintain them and have been deprecated or sunset. But as I mention in the above post, we actively maintain over 500 software products -- which is pretty extensive as it is -- and a non-trivial amount of our energy goes towards keeping this broad catalog up to date.
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@Simon_NI please take in serious consideration what expressed by mykejb about providing direct access to previous versions installers (as it was before on NI website).
This would solve many issues.
I’m sure many customers can understand the will of NI to move forward. What is less acceptable is putting obstacles on users simply wanting to use what they already paid for. Many signals lately point to a politic trying to make users being forced to “the new thing”.
If Kontakt (or KK) gets updated and the libraries follow increasing the requirements in order to use them, users not willing to update should be able to easily stay with the products they have and not struggle in order for them to work.
Giving back access to previous versions would allow NI to make the desired steps and simply say “this new version require X and Y to work. If you are not on X and Y, please install that other version”.
No one expects infinite updates for infinite time, but to be able to use what they bought…this is a must, not an expectation.
As I already said in other threads, there are 2 ways to make your users follow with you the path you are paving: the “good” way is to make extraordinary, enticing, innovative products/updates that will make users WANT the new version. The less condivisibile way is to make the products users already have less and less usable.
I’m sure the most prolific way for NI is the one that will make its users excited about what’s coming and not the one making them regretting what they were able to use before…and therefore unsatisfied.
What we see now is instead decisions like already programming the date in which NA1 will be abandoned before NA2 is even a reliable alternative or updating libraries requirements hoping people will buy the requested newer versions of softwares without providing an easy way to keep the own products working. Or even worst…not allowing to install old products with the new NA (the only way left to install and authorize them, since installers and authorizations are not provided anymore, physically nor in a database as the one that was given to us through NI website)
These are things that tend to annoy customers instead of convincing them of the goodness of the “new path”.
Users can understand not being able to use new functionalities with a product they bought years before. What they’ll digest with more difficulty is not being able to use that same product in that same version. Their investment must be assured working. What NI can eventually do is ask if they want to make a new investment in order to have new things. And the user will chose on his own if he is interested
And about the “teams being on the good road with the right priorities”…sometimes asking the final users if this is really the case could be the best way to be sure of it.
NI demonstrating to be sure of itself and thinking to know what’s right is a good thing…but the line between being sure of itself and being too much self confident is sometimes very thin. See the case of the new KK…I’m sure the team acted convinced to take all the right steps…but once confronted with the actual users, things started appearing differently.
Sometimes the infos collected with shared usage data are just…data. Impersonal, not specific, not analyzable. Once again, see the case of KK: some features like deep tagging have been removed because the data said they were used by few. Such a pity those data could not tell you that those few users work was so much useful to so many others, through their NKS for the community.
Maybe an earlier confrontation with the people that will decree the success or failure of a product (the ones that will concretely use it) would have helped. You can make the best red t-shirt in the world, but if when you launch it you discover users wanted green t-shirts…maybe it would have been better to ask them before “what color do you want?”
Please continue with the “new way” of collecting infos (like the threads about the interest users have in what to improve first in Maschine). I know it will end like usually on the internet: very few people will vote for them. But this doesn’t mean that if they don’t vote no one is interested in Maschine. Few people are really participating in forums. But sometimes those few are the voice of many others behind them. Suggestions like D-One ones are not only the fruit of his knowledge of the tool and what he wants to see for it, but also many years of experience reading others’ requests (the ones we hope won’t be ignored anymore)
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Hey @LostInFoundation:
Please take in serious consideration what expressed by @mykejb about providing direct access to previous versions installers (as it was before on NI website). This would solve many issues.
This is a legit point. I can follow up with our teams as to if we can make it easier to access old / no longer supported software -- @mykejb and you are right that hosting them on G Drive isn't super slick. You can get access to old installers etc often via our customer support teams, but it would indeed be better for everyone if customers didn't have to contact them. If we used to do this and stopped, I'd like to understand why as I think this was a change before my time.
And about the “teams being on the good road with the right priorities”…sometimes asking the final users if this is really the case could be the best way to be sure of it.
We do speak to a range of customers as part of our development cycle -- that's a critical part of how we build things -- but our customer base is broad and large, and we can't make everyone happy all of the time. What one cohort of customers might want/expect/need is often very different to what another group want/expect/need. For example, the lack of Machine integration in the Kontrol Mk3 at launch was a known issue -- but we made an informed decision to launch without it, knowing we can and will add it later. We did extensive user testing where people loved the keybed, screen, and poly-at features and decided to launch with those as the core features as they benefit the most customers.
...or updating libraries requirements hoping people will buy the requested newer versions of softwares without providing an easy way to keep the own products working.
I want to address this head on. We are not updating libraries to try and drive sales of the latest version of Kontakt -- that is 100% not our intent.
What's happening here is that our instrument builder teams are updating many older Kontakt instruments such that they're NKS2 and/or polyphonic aftertouch compatible so they work with the Kontrol Mk3. This has the inevitable consequence of increasing the minimum-supported version of Kontakt that these updated instruments will run in. Now, this is, I will admit, resulting in a poor user experience right now: people are clicking "update" on their libraries and then later find out the updated library no longer runs in their installed version of Kontakt.
While all the update libraries will run in the free Kontakt 7 player which can be installed alongside Konkakt 6 so no one is forced to pay to upgrade, I want to recognise that we know it's a poor user experience -- and one resulting from us not anticipating the friction that updating these older libraries would create.
Fixing this isn't super-easy it requires some pretty fundamental changes to how we handle version dependencies between Kontakt the app and Kontakt instruments. This is on the team's radar. This has actually been an issue for along time, it's just that it used to be very RARE that we went back and updated old Kontakt instruments -- it's the advent of NKS2 and PolyAT that is raising the visibility of this issue. We are looking at if there are simpler ways to make it less likely that people accidentally get into this state.
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And finally, a big gripe of the power-user community: Don't remove power user features! The latest example happened with Komplete Kontrol/Kontakt and the ability for power users to work up and maintain presets and banks for community sharing. @JesterMgee can add much more detail to this and other issues than I can. Jester is one of those power users who has generously donated his time and labor to the community over many years, but now with the latest versions of NI apps and instruments, he and his collaborators have suffered major setbacks. This should never happen in a healthy and robust vendor/customer relationship. Power user features, even if they were created by accident, should never just be removed under the excuse that we're cleaning up the back-end code, or we're using new tools now and it was easier to remove this old code than it would have been to keep it.
Well, the gripe from me is not specifically just about the loss of features, but the fact myself and many others have invested a LOT of time over the last decade offering feedback, suggestions, bug reports in a hope it will improve the software and then V3 rolls out and improves upon almost nothing anyone suggested, then also takes away several features and screws up the perfectly fine browser and carries over the same bugs we have waited years to have fixed. So more a case of why bother. I use to be rather active on the forums and in the Betas but i'm tired of waiting for improvements and throwing my own time into something I care less and less about every passing day. I stick with 2.9 for what I do and just have no interest in the future of v3 anymore.
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"So more a case of why bother. I stick with 2.9 for what I do and just have no interest in the future of v3 anymore."
+1 and a good takeaway for @Simon_NI
I too was hoping for the next "chapter" of the Komplete Kontrol framework - even tho I am happy with my MKII.
The KK 3 rollout - while "functional" for first time MKIII owners - is a shadow of its former self when compared with KK 2.9.6 I too am happy to stay right there as well.
VP
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Talking about updates to libraries breaking things, there was a bug in an update to the East Asia library for Kontakt where some patches were missing in Maschine/KK. From tagging @Jeremy_NI with the fault at 8:30 to having a fix rolled out by @Nicki_NI at 12:30 was pretty impressive, so there's definitely a good team there!
I think there probably needs to be more risk analysis done before rolling out some updates. The updates for Kontakt libraries are a perfect example. I've lost count of the number of times I've done a copy/paste of the thread containing links to old versions of libraries. Similarly for the update to KK3 that removed VST2 support. Yes it was in the release notes, but not everyone reads them all. Maybe a warning symbol next to items that have breaking changes would help?
Edit - one thought here - can Native Access do a selective roll-out? For example, roll out changes to a group of people who've agreed to do some basic installation and tests a few days before the general public release?
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As said, a first step could be as simple as providing access to previous versions.
And…the last 2 comments from Jester and Vocalpoint should show you exactly what I was trying to say: build to increase your users base with new users attracted by the new functionalities, but don’t forget that deluding existing ones will make that same users base decrease 😉
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Thankyou for this thread and your post. Also thanks for the confirmation that people will not be forced into subscriptions, which I believe is one of the most controversial areas on many peoples minds. Coming from a person in your postion solidifies it that much more.
Id like to echo @mykejb 's first post.
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Nice to see the comments about Native Access being improved. Really, that's the most important product you have as you can't deliver the other products without it. It needs to be made absolutely rock solid across all platforms, which at the moment it doesn't seem to be. It's a shame the beta program was discontinued because a lot of the current problems would have been spotted before it hit general release.
The other thing I think you need to look at is alternate delivery methods for when things go sideways. Hosting "older" products on Google drive is ok, but it doesn't look that professional when users get "That's been downloaded too much recently, please try later" messages. Ideally NA should allow you to download and install previous versions of products for the case when a newly released product breaks things. Offline installation and authorisation would be nice too for people who don't want their music computers online. I'm very much looking forward to the Komplete Kontrol/Traktor/Maschine updates, hopefully we'll see those in beta very soon?
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Because of a tiny slipup I made updating, (Im usually fastidious about updating) over the last 3 months I have had the most harrowing, gruelling and frustrating experience Ive ever hit using a computer. Hands down. And that is since the mid 1980s. Google drive is a nightmare. I stopped counting at 12 failed almost complete downloads not counting a raft of error messages like mykejb described. The whole ordeal brought in side issues and extended support going abck and forth with me, which could have all been avoided if I could've gotten a previous installer to downgrade through Native Access.
I also remain on an old version of KK because my ticket from around this time last year still remains open and unresolved. That was regarding KK hardcrashing Logic immediately after I updated KK which basically brought my work to a halt. I had to wait for Jeremy to come online to ask for the previous installer so I could work. May I please suggest, this is so very frustrating when people need the previous installer and they have to go through a lengthy one on one process sometimes waiting weeks by the time support gets things sorted. Id also like to suggest that as NI is a huge worldwide company, people should have access to a more efficient support system.
I realize this thread is not designed to get support requests fulfilled, and thats not my intention in posting here, but rather to give you a working example from one persons experience throughout the last year.
Thankyou for reading.
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@Simon_NI Thank you for this extensive update. As someone who plays (on keyboard), composes and records (real instruments and vocals) music using Maschine and NI plug-ins I remain however unconvinced.
The removal of Maschine functionality from the Mk3 keyboards was a watershed moment for me. I had planned to purchase a Maschine+ but I prefer to spend my money on gear where the vendor remains committed to its products by investing in maintenance (to make sure it keeps running on current platforms) and improvements to keep up with the competition. NI struggles to do the first (Maschine is still not on Sonoma) and has abandoned the second for a few years now.
I don’t know whether this is because of lack of (human and financial) resources or because of poor strategic choices. I hope NI gets out of this rut and can recover its lost ground.
In the meantime, my work will move to another platform.
Good luck. Sincerely.
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Two questions regarding Traktor.
Does "improvements that bring … a clean, modern interface" mean a high-resolution interface?
And will the flickering browser issue also dealt with?
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Hello @Simon_NI ,
First of all, thank you very much for your insights regarding Traktor.
I really appreciate your commitment and I'm really happy to hear that we can expect a significant update for Traktor this year.
I just have one question for you and maybe you can give us some information on this.
You wrote "And refreshing the interface in an old code base is hard - but re-writing everything from scratch take too long"
I'm a little surprised, about six years ago when Traktor Pro3 was released, there was an announcement that another dev team was working in parallel on a new codebase for Traktor. As a result, there were also the first versions of Traktor DJ2, which were very promising.
Is this now obsolete and have you decided to focus more on refactoring the old code? I understand, of course, that there may have been changes in the objectives in recent years, I would just be interested to know what development strategy we can now assume.
Many thanks Simon to you and the whole NI team.
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about six years ago when Traktor Pro3 was released, there was an announcement that another dev team was working in parallel on a new codebase for Traktor.
I'm curious about this too.
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