I thought I'd share my general thoughts on Komplete Kontrol & its ecosystem while it's still new enough I haven't started ignoring the pain. I bought a refurb S61 mk2 from you just now, have a large VI collection including Komplete, and got the Maschine Factory Library upgrade so fairly komplete setup.
I understand a lot of the tradeoffs and business objectives but of course we have to balance those with user objectives well enough to stay in business. Yes? Fine.
In general I like the old GOMS framework of minimizing mouseclicks and keystrokes and if you challenge your staff to minimize the gestures required to reach a user goal while still having high usability without reading the manual or memorizing vulcan neck pinches you win the game. Gamification works well with a lot of today's staff.
OK so onto specifics:
- The browser in KK, yes a lot of anger for removed functionality but I do think 80/20 rule is solid for usability and reducing visual load when you're trying to be creative, and making the learning curve appear more shallow, is a win for musicians. You were braced for me to argue on the other side weren't you haha? But no I think the general direction with KK3 is solid. The problems are in the (rather unavoidable!) details.
- Why is the KK3 ... menu *between* the ||\ and the file name? Did anyone review the design for obvious errors? Yes it will annoy the doc team to have to redo all the screenshots but this was total amateur hour. Maschine 2 has the menu to the left where it belongs. Embarrassing. Please don't coddle the staff at the expense of absolute basics.
- It's 2023 (when you made this, yes it's now 2024) and we don't do search the way KK3 does it anymore, not for at least 15 years now, and Google for 25 years. When you enter text to be searched nowadays, you search the entire universe of targets by default, and the results are ranked in terms of probability you're going to want them. KK3 inverts this just hilariously wrong: User presets (far more likely to be selected than factory presets) **aren't even shown at all** unless you target and click the little user icon (Fitts' Law). And you have to do the same for favorites. This is more embarrassing than the menu being jumbled in the wrong place. I mean what were you thinking? Obviously, favorites and user presets should be prioritized in the search results without clicking anything. Furthermore, multiple constraints prioritize the intersection of terms rather than just the union. The union could still be there, down the ranking, but the more intersections the higher the ranking. Yes? I mean, can anyone argue against with a straight face? This search is what your product does, primarily.
- This was a bitter upgrade for many of your NKS partners I see. You must've changed some format and you think these 3rd parties will voluntarily update their support for *your* hardware and pay to ship out refreshed files while getting nothing back in return? No you need to support backward compatibility, so the Spitfire etc NKS still work in KK3 that were working fine in KK2. None of these inane "Apple Silicon" errors. You do not have dictatorial control of the business at this point, your old Pascal-flavored Kontakt sampler (already an antique programming language 20 years ago) is being replaced with proprietary players, and MIDI 2.0 is threatening to open up a lot of this indexing, and the people who really take all of this on the chin are your own users who are paying you extra for the pain. So get the old NKS files working again. As is no changes needed. That's an order. And for those wanting a workaround, you can always just use the plugin approach and add those instruments as direct plugins bypassing NKS but still getting some benefits of KK3. For that matter, doing that, and saving your own setups, obviates much of NKS, if you crawl through the silly roadblocks.
I should note that the fanboys for decades have always been very unhappy with my commentary, but they know that I'm advocating for the users, and the companies 100% always take my advice a few years later, after a lot of unnecessary and avoidable brand damage has been done and they've lost the luxury of premium pricing as a consequence. Tough love dude.
I will add more as I uncover it. Thanks, in general I am happy with the product, it's pretty and the hardware feels solid, but I'm glad I'm not in the credits.
