Why does the Kontakt team keep neglecting UX—starting with poor tagging capabilities?

Shutara

Hello

I wanted to touch base on the tagging feature handicap that has been mentioned in multiple threads over past few years without any comment from the Kontakt/KK product team, leaving us with tedious workarounds that do not work as we'd expect anyway:

With thousands of presets being added each year by library developers across the world, it is getting more and more tedious to organise your work inside Kontakt / Komplete Kontrol, simply because:

1. You can't change properties / add extra tags to non-user presets without moving them to User folder first, making you rely either on:
   1. marking everything as Favorite and praying you'll remember which presets you wanna use for each project a few weeks from now.
   2. writing down your preset names (i.e. in Excel) = time that could've been spent on music instead.
   3. making another forum thread that will not get enough attention from NI.

As a composer who's working on projects spanning across multiple sound genres, being forced to rely on pre-made Sound Type/Character unless I want to move all my presets back and forth to User folder, just so that I can add a handful of custom tags that would make my life 10x better in the future, it just escapes my mind why this is such a big deal and won't get addressed.

So please tell me, what's with all this "I will forward your comments as feature requests" if there's literally nothing we're given in response?

The only proof of NI acknowledging this is an area of improvement is a random comment on another forum: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/adding-custom-tags-and-brand-to-non-nks-libraries.155880/#post-5613909

Is UX so low on your priority list that you keep ignoring our requests or has the development team shrunk so much that there isn't enough manpower/experience to handle any additional request other than fixing new bugs and releasing even more cool tools?

I know it might sound bitter and come across as a rant, but it just seriously feels disappointing to be ignored for years, especially while you've been promising more transparent communication and whatnot years ago.

Maybe a bit extreme take, but at this point it just starts to feel like premium-sounding libraries has become the sole area that still feels premium when I think of Native Instruments, while Kontakt has still backlog full of basic features that wouldn't be wishful thinking even a decade ago.

I know there is credit to be given in other areas, but given how advanced technology in general has become, K8 is still far from being a fully functional product in my book.

This whole situation just takes away the drive to contribute & help you make better software for everyone. I really wish to be proven wrong, eventually.

Kymeia

I agree - and this is part of a larger picture which is that current NI does not seem to want to make it easy for users to create or organise their own content, apparently preferring to spoon feed to people NI created content, already tagged etc.

The symptoms of this include:

1. The impossibility of creating user banks in Massive X and Komplete Kontrol without hacks/third party software (plus long-standing bugs related to user sub banks)
2. Limitations on further tagging of factory content in KK or Kontakt - if the factory tagging was at least accurate it would help but it appears many NI content developers do not consistently follow their own standards
3. The ludicrous situation where if you import a third party bank into Kontakt it makes it read only so you can't tag it at all.
4. The recent statement from NI support that the sale of user created Massive X banks is discouraged or even against the EULA, although they later backtracked to allow free shared content (although you still can't actually give it a bank name) - and this seems to apply to all their products actually