Imagine the following scenario: You are sitting at your computer in your living room or studio or maybe in a cafe and are working on a project and suddenly you are inspired about how you can take the current project in a direction that could make it something special. You have exactly in mind what melody, what sound, what feeling you want to capture and you immediately drop everything to capture it. Even more: You even have in mind what sound you could use for it, what sound might even be exactly the right one for it.
Before the idea disappears into nothingness, you want to capture it quickly, to capture it quickly. You stop what you are currently doing, add a new instrument and open KontaKt. And then... nothing. You lift your hand from the mouse, think about when you last saved, whether you saved at all, curse yourself that it was a while ago, if at all, and wait. You wait and wait and wait and pray... but nothing. Your DAW does not respond. You suspect what just happened, but you still hope. You fear that it is already too late, but you don't dare to touch your mouse, let alone click. After a second you accept: your DAW has frozen, crashed. When you tried to open Kontakt, it froze. You know this because this is not the first time that this has happened. In fact, it seems to have happened to you more often recently than it works to open Kontakt. Normally, you save your session before opening it, but this time you were just in the flow and didn't think about it.
You didn't think about saving your current project and so the progress of the last 10 minutes, half an hour, or, if it comes down to it, all progress is gone. It's gone because a program, a product, a better sampler that you definitely spent several hundred on, simply doesn't work. And it does this so consistently that you have gotten into the habit of loading and saving this sampler before every attempt.
It doesn't take much imagination to picture this scenario. It happens to all of us, every day, probably dozens of times every minute somewhere in the world. It is a pitiful state of quality for a product that is so expensive and so essential to modern music. I am no longer willing to accept this desolate state. And neither should you!
I must ask you again for your imagination. Imagine the following: In Germany, my home country, there is this company. It is famous for building the most beautiful bridges. When it comes to design, beauty and functionality, this company is unbeatable. It didn't take long before this company's bridges adorned the whole of Germany. But then one bridge after another began to show critical defects. First the asphalt crumbled, then the steel rusted, so that the bridges had to be closed 4 out of 7 days a week. And what happened? That's right: The company continued to build bridges because everyone liked their beauty and because they were sure that there were no more beautiful bridges far and wide that were not built by this company.
What I want to say with this example: Native Instrument's software engineers, if they even employ any, are a joke. No company in the world would accept this state of affairs for its product. No company in the world would survive this state of affairs for long. It cannot be that Native's core product, their flagship, is in such a desolate state that the entire music production scene is so sure that a crash could happen that people get into the habit of saving their projects just to be on the safe side. Native Instruments is famous for three things:
They have the most and best libraries (monopoly)
They are ridiculously overpriced
Kontakt crashes more often than it works.
If I were running this company and taking stock, I would be ashamed. None of these qualities is something to be proud of. But the worst thing is: I don't want to know how many ideas, how much brilliant, heart-rendingly beautiful music didn't see the light of day because an instance of Kontakt killed the current session - and with it the artist's inspiration.
