Native Access Q1 Update

@Hayo_NI

"I take your point that the nomenclature introduces some confusion. We'll look into making this clearer, thanks for the feedback"

FWIW: I continue see "Relocate" (button label) being quite pointless when used for this scenario:

"When your product has already been activated, but it seems to be missing files/has been moved"

This is a "Repair" - period. The use of the term "Relocate" - especially when "Locate" is already in play just makes this more confusing.

Labels and functions here that only a programmer could love :)

VP

NI first said MIDI templates would be available in Dec 2023; then mid-Q1 24; and now first half 2024. I went in another direction so it doesn’t matter anymore. I doubt I will go back to using the MK3 unless I need to control a NI plug-in, which hopefully is not frequently.

That is always the danger. We ask for news, we ask for details, if they don’t estimate a date, we are not happy, so a business gives a date that they are aiming for, things happen and it’s taking longer than hoped, we then say “hey you said we would have that by now….”

Or a business releases a product on the date that they originally said, and as the product needs a few more weeks/months to sort out the bugs, we complain saying they shouldn’t have released it in that buggy state.

In a way they can’t win.

But, presuming they had a good number of beta testers for the mk3 series, problems should have been noticed before release.

While I appreciate with all the different hardware that we use, it’s inevitable that there will be some customers where things don’t go smoothly regardless of how much testing has been done, in my opinion the mk3 was released before it was ready.

Sadly most people don’t tend to make posts or vids saying how much they love something, they tend to only do this when things go wrong, and the mk3 series has some really negative reviews out there and if there is say a good YouTube vid about the series, you can almost guarantee that in the comments will be people slagging both it and NI off. I think the way this has happened has done them a lot of short term damage.

I bought mine in January knowing the problems people were having, because I needed an 88 weighted keyboard, and I reasoned that hopefully over the year, it will turn out to be the beast we all hoped it would be.

Initially I thought that NI made the correct decision not including a power supply in the box, thinking that only a few people would actually need them, but it appears, especially with the 88 note, that tons of us need them. I had to wait a day from delivery just to get a power supply from Amazon. A lot of people would be really pissed off having their brand new and expensive keyboard unusable because of no included power supply.

Thing is, not having a power supply, yes it’s annoying but people will get over it. But if they wait a day or so to get one, then turn it on and it won’t do anything except tell us to update the firmware, then we follow the instructions and it fails, we then look on the internet and see we are not alone, we contact support and they are inundated with sales etc so slower to respond, we have an unusable product in our houses/studios that cost well over £1000 (88 note).

We then follow instructions to get the driver installed and yes it works. But that whole rigmarole can really really really annoy people, and when they’ve experienced that, and then find out say midi templates aren’t working yet, people understandably blow their top, hence the bad press follows.

Then, in my case I saw the firmware update to 1.5.7, as my previous update had worked and as device manager showed my S88 was correctly installed, I go to update it and it fails just like the original one failed.

Sure NI were very helpful, Jeremy posted instructions that fixed it, but add all that together and it’s understandable why people are unhappy. And people are obviously going to wonder “is this sort of thing going to happen every firmware update”

It’s only because I’ve got a lot of new stuff lately including Collectors edition, a new DAW (Studio One) and a new Arturia Keylab mk2 61 that I’ve been so relaxed about my S88, I’ve been enjoying playing with the rest of my gear hence have been kept busy enough to keep a level head. If my S88 had been my only keyboard it would have been a completely different situation.

I do really like my S88 though and think it has great potential.

Speaking of Native Access...

@Hayo_NI I remembered another bug I've seen happen a few times before so tonight while downloading some new libraries, so I decided to do a test so I could take screenshots to illustrate the issue.

Basically the issue is that it appears some installations are halted or waiting for the next download to complete before they can finish installing. Some sort of locking/blocking issue going on here.

In this case Anima Ascent is just under 1GB and Lores is over 70GB. I have a Mac Studio M2 Ultra and I'm using an external NVMe for storage, so shouldn't be any computer limitations. Yes Anima Ascent didn't finish installing until more than 2 hours later when Lores finished downloading. Once it did, it was only a matter of seconds before it installed.

I can do another test if you think it would be helpful of timing how long it takes to download and install Anima Ascent by itself. But I think it's safe to say that at least some downloads disrupt the installation process of other libraries.

This has happened to me a few times before, I just picked two of the most extreme libraries to screen shot as an example.

Can’t respond here.