Kontakt crashes

Dogma

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.

BIF

Man, that's a lot of TLDR, most of it I can't do anything about.

How about we try this? What problem are you having? Maybe we can help.

If you're just here to vent, I get it, but I ain't going through all that.

Merry Christmas!

Mark Oxley

Personally speaking I have to feel for the op.

I've been on the recieving end of countless problems that have left me unable to meet deadlines and left me out of pocket. Sadly with the exception of Kontakt (and only because there is no real alternative) I took the decision to find alternative products to meet my needs.

For the last couple of years it seems the Devs are highly over worked and probably under a lot of pressure from the bosses to release software that isn't fully tested and not ready to be released. So many times an update gets released to fix bug A only to introduce a new bug B. Until this practice improves NI are only going to alienate more and more customers with the possibility of driving them away.

Don't get me wrong, I've been a largely happy NI customer who invested heavily in their ecosystem but in recent times things just declined to the point it was no longer a pleasure to continue.

NI need to do better, they owe it to themselves and their paying customers.

DunedinDragon

The thing that comes to mind when I see generalizations like this is how is it possible that so many people are able to function with this software without these kind of problems?

I'm not a new user but I'm far from a long-time customer and yet everything I own from NI works fine for me? It makes me wonder how rampant these problems are and how many of these problems are self-inflicted by either a lack of understanding or a lack of proper system maintenance.

There's no doubt there have been cases of NI products that have been released too quickly without adequate testing across all possible platforms. But that's not entirely on NI since they have a wide range of dependencies on other manufacturers of DAWs, operating system and operating system releases. That means it's more important than ever that users take responsibility for maintaining good system management discipline.

Like everyone I've lost work at times because I simply forgot to save a project I'd worked on. That blame is on me, not the software vendor. But I do know enough about how my overall system works to typically be able to salvage the work if necessary. But that comes down to me having a certain depth of knowledge about how the components being used in my system work so I can diagnose what happened and figure out the best steps to recover it.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/40528/this-company-is-a-joke

If I were you I would quit music and find a publisher for your novels and short stories instead.

If you want to make music and have a point to make here then please keep it short and to the point so that people don't have to read your novels to get to the point !

stephen24

how much brilliant, heart-rendingly beautiful music didn't see the light of day

(stifles a snigger)

Makes you think, though, doesn't it. Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, that lot, however did they cope?

LostInFoundation

People don’t HAVE to read anything.

You don’t like how long a post is or with which style someone writes?

Simple solution: don’t read him.

Unless the only reason you read him for is to then make jokes about him.

In that case, one could always quit music and find a manager that will find stages to do the comedian instead

Kaiwan_NI

Hey @Dogma sorry to hear about Kontakt crashing in your DAW. Unfortunately your post doesn't include any details for us to pinpoint the issue. Check out the steps in this article or reach out to our support team directly via chat here: https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/sections/360000092857

Illepak

My question is really short and concise:
how do I send NI the files that are produced by kontakt 8 crashes 'Kontakt 8-mini.nicrash'?

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/200578#Comment_200578

Contact N.I. Kontakt Support , In case that you need guidance contacting support : How to contact NI Support and How to get in touch with our Customer Care

There is no direct email support not initialized through the web support interface and there is no phone support either.