June 2024 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer
Comments
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@nightjar It's very early days for Kompanion, but in general our principle is to make products which enable creative control, not just a black box. Right now, Kompanion generates samples, and the way you control that is via you input prompt which does offer a lot of creative freedom (ask it anything!) but what you get is broadly what you get. However, in our internal trials, it gets fun when you drop that sample into Kontakt and turn it into a playable instrument — then you can have a lot of fun with Kontakt's FX and DSP.
So early days, but having novel new sounds you can run with using a standard sampler & FX chain is a lot of fun.
And reducing the friction to have that kind of experience is where we'd like to take this tech — once the core gen AI model is more regularly producing more useable sounds.
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With Absynth being discontinued/not updated or modernized, it seems to me that Native Instruments is KNOWINGLY leaving a significant gap in its instruments line for the future.
Especially with VST2 being deprecated and soon becoming incompatible with modern hosts as those hosts get updated and upgraded in the near-term to mid-term future.
I get it, updating Absynth would likely be a big effort which might require some resources you don't have at this time. However, the original author of Absynth, about a year ago, expressed a genuine and enthusiastic desire to work with Native Instruments on a new version of Absynthe, modernized in a proper way for the future.
Simon, in all of NI's catalogue of instruments, effects, and sounds, there is absolutely NOTHING like Absynth. It would be a shame to lose the ability to use it one day in the future when VST2 is finally no longer supported by DAW makers and other host-makers.
This is my plea to you and NI management to either work with Brian Clevenger on a new version, or come up with a deal whereby Brian can get the rights back so that he can work on it himself/with his team. Let's NOT do the lame thing and make Absynth just another Kontakt library. I don't touch the libraries that replaced Akoustic and Elektric because as Kontakt libraries, they just don't come close to what the instruments were.
And finally, Absynth has been used in countless musical pieces, video games, television, and movie content. It has proven itself as being worthy of consideration and proper curation for the future. Please don't allow the world to lose it.
Thank you for listening.
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Your comment caught my attention. Do you realize potential of Razor or Prism , they are absolutely Amazing especially Razor with ability to raise number of particles so you get so rich and detailed sound like nothing I heard. Massive X is maybe confusing but in general it's simplicity that is main feature of this Ulta high quality sound. Maybe visual presentation is not what users expected but it's a Beast. Sub Bass tones are so easy to achieve and they're clear on the first octave so people asking me how. Leads Pads and Modulation is so easy and maybe it's best to stick with having simplicity in mind and everything is just possibility that are choice and good music doesn't mean that it's complicate to produce as we tend to we idealize and experience music as a supernatural phenomenon, thereby putting ourselves in a position where it is either impossible or expensive.
When I saw how one big Artists is producing I was in denail because he was using stock Bass and Stock Saturation plugin in a way for just passthrough. Psy Trance Bass was a mistery for couple of years from 2000 to 2004 and it countinued to be outworldy phenomenon until Massive and similar Synths didn't get presets by Genre so everything become more transparent. Prism is amazing with RAUM it's enough for Music Production from Techno House to Ambiental and instrumentals in New Age Category.
This is Preset that I used for making Music that end up in Editorial playlist.
It's free version but Settings altered on this Preset and later I resampled and had endless possibilities with Live sound with color of flute or something based on real material.
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The big gap left by Absynth is NI dropped one of the very few softsynths capable of working in surround and multichannel at just the point where immersive audio is finally becoming mainstream.
Far from being outdated, it was way ahead of its time.
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@Simon_NI , Thanks for the updates and proactive communication. I know you've been asked this question a bunch in the past, but just wondering if there have been any updates/decisions made regarding bringing back some level of Maschine integration to the Kontrol Mk3 line? Frankly, that's what has me on pause on the purchase of an S88 - it would be great to know one way or another, with some specificity, what your vision is for the future of Maschine integration in Kontrol. Thanks again!
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any chance in an fm8 UI revamp? It’s so small on modern monitors that it’s barely readable.
other than that I’m happy with NI progress as of late keep it up!oh what’s to happen with the izotope product managaer, something happened to it and it requires me to login every time now, I think one of the other product managers said it will soon be merging with native access?
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Having the generated samples become a playable instrument within Kontakt and having it be modified with Kontakt's FX and DSP is good…. but…
There is a whole other level of hope for what AI-assisted instrument creation could be.
The generative process of the samples themself could present a spectrum of articulations.. an approach that is sort of a quasi-modeled instrument with near limitless possibilities.
I dream of something more fundamental than adding Kontak DSP and FX on top.
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I am grateful for the poor rollout of Kontrol MK3 and the subscription reveal. It saved me from buying NI’s new releases and moving back towards dedicated hardware or older software that I own. It’s been such a good move as all these plug-ins really are unnecessary. Do we really need Alicia’s personal electric piano? No. MIDI templates on the Kontrol MK3 on the other hand would have been nice to have last year, but really doesn’t matter to me anymore since that thing is now on perpetual closet duty.
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@Nikhil We plan to bring some level of integration between Kontrol Mk3 and Maschine later this year.
The Kontrol Mk3 is built on a totally different technical architecture to the Kontrol Mk2 and Maschine Mk3/Plus which means building the integration between these platforms is non-trivial.
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maybe AI can write the new Maschine+ firmware and Maschine sw feature updates. Heck, AI can probably also create a new survey about what features users are missing ;)
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@Scott Frost Thanks - we're working hard to move our products forward and re-engage with the community (hence this post and me engaging here).
We don't currently have plans to update FM8.
Re iZotope Product Portal, yeah, the team updated it to use a new authentication system that'll support us making iZotope products available via Native Access. But this was implemented in such a way that authentication sessions were shorter. This is being rectified right now and soon people who login to Product Portal will stay logged in for longer. Sorry to those who got logged out.
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Simon, I want to share with you a "macro" problem that I and others experienced when jumping into the NI ecosystem for the first time, and the problem with relying on the Community Forum as a solution. I joined NI for the first time with a combination of the S-61 MK3 keyboard and Komplete Standard about 9 months ago. The initiation was daunting and the experience was quite negative due to fundamental terminology and user interface problems with NI products and lack of good tutorials.
Native Instruments does a poor job with terminology to identify and separate their products. This unnecessarily makes it confusing and intimidating to get started with their software and hardware. Komplete Kontrol means one thing for software and another for hardware. Given the scope and complexity of Native Instruments products, it is natural and to be expected that new users will have lots of questions in the beginning. They will turn to the internet, including YouTube and eventually find themselves to this Community Forum. When people are talking about "Komplete" or "Kontrol" on the forum or in these YouTube videos, it's hard to know if they are referring to software or hardware. Two other needlessly confusing terminology problems are the use of terms "Snapshots" and "Ensembles". I do not understand why Native Instruments has to use the term "snapshot" instead of preset, and why they must then allocate the term "preset" for something else. In Reaktor, this gets even more confusing, as you use both terms, snapshots and ensembles, instead of calling these things for what everyone else intuitively thinks of them as- synths and presets.
By and large, NI user interfaces are not very well designed and there is no cohesive design language. The best examples of good user interfaces that Native Instruments created are Massive, Battery, and FM8. These are clean and relatively intuitive interfaces, can be opened in standalone, and a new user can figure out how to start making music with them right away. Everything else designed by Native Instruments, however, is daunting, confusing, or just suboptimal. Kontakt and Reaktor share the same confusing and redundant stuff at the top. You look at this stuff as a new user, and the only thought that comes to mind is "****** is this?". You also have a hard time seeing any of the controls, as the text is tiny and is inexplicably low contrast (gray text on black background?). No one can see any of this on 4K monitors, which are now ubiquitous. The user experience workflows within these programs are also confusing. Stacking instruments within Kontakt or navigating between synths (not ensembles!) and factory or user presets (not snapshots!) in Reaktor is just plain weird. Komplete is suboptimal, simply because it sacrifices too much functionality for a "clean" look.
There are a few Community members, like Kymeia above, who try to help new users. But, many of the responses to newbie-type questions here are simply rude, and many longtime members choose to blame the new user for their ignorance rather than just helping them. I suppose it is the nature of internet beast, but it makes it a bad solution to help new users. So, besides investing a cohesive design language that carries over to user interfaces and makes approaching their software and hardware more approachable, Native Instruments needs better official tutorials. And upfront links to these tutorials need to be available from within the plugin itself. Brian's tutorial on Komplete is pretty good. But, we need stuff like that for everything that Native Instruments makes. It took more than 6 months to have a decent grasp on this ecosystem and navigate through it all with some proficiency. That's too long, and the experience has not been positive. It makes me not want to reach for a NI product when making music in favor of products that I have had great experiences instead. I know that I am not alone.
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Dear Chief Officer,
Why is it that Maschine updates are always laced with bugs? Is there any action done to prevent this?
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