Software aside, how are people who own the S mk3 series liking or disliking it?

Hi! Nope, different guy. I had a feeling of "musical kismet" listening to some of this stuff, as well as having seen some of his free material on You Tube. I need to spend more time on it before I decide to personally recommend. But he has hit the high points very well in the areas of Circle of 5ths, and other theory fundamentals.

This is very common for new or newer dev teams to get a handle on how long it takes for the development process. They'll make their best guesses, but they'll probably be overly optimistic for the dates on the deliverables. Everybody is, even the guy redoing your bathroom!

Also...I've had to read other peoples' code, embark on countless quests for understanding, and then change said code and hope I'm not ripping a jagged hole in the space-time continuum. It's probably the worst part of any dev job. Yeah, probably even with QT. Some things just don't change all that much.

And that right there is also very common.

The risk of constantly missing promised deliverables dates is that the customer [whether that is the "Big C-Customer" (us, the paying customer) or the "Little c-customer" (internal teams that use the outputs of one team as inputs into their own processes)] can lose enthusiasm and heart over time. This is why "big launch" success is so very critical. The lower the success rate of the launch, the more labor will be needed to fix all the things borked by the launch. Once you reach a critical mass of launch-borked stuff, you find yourself with not enough resources to even begin to look at the backlog of "legacy borked" stuff from before the launch.

It's super difficult for small dev teams to "move the needle" when there's so much to fix. For every guy like me who can't see the tiny fonts, there'll be 100 others who will insist that 50 something elses are a million times more important. And they're not wrong either!

We need to continue being patient, of course. But I feel that the current situation is very precarious because the risks are very real as I mentioned in my post over the weekend. Senior leadership could reduce or withdraw support and funding at any time in favor of other projects. Hey, there might be a Komplete 15 this year, right? Or just because somebody with "VP" after their name has an itch for near sighted cost-cutting, which is probably most likely when a venture capital firm is the corporate owner and they're eyeing their next big purchase.

We need some wins. Big wins. And repeated big wins. Each big win will quiet down some of the dissent. And we need more than one or two of them with each release.

Hoping for a good week!

Continuing on with my discoveries as I explore my new S88 MK3 in the studio.

Overall the keyboard has worked very well in a studio environment using the current release of Ableton Live 10. Since I already had a S49 MK2 I was reasonably familiar with getting it setup although there's a few additional steps and capabilities. That's where I came across an unexpected anomaly in configuring the external hardware, in particular my sustain pedal. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it appears to have lost it's configuration between sessions, sometimes not. I'm still working this out so it could be the pedal or it could be me not understanding how/when the configuration gets saved.

Other than that it's connection and control with Komplete Kontrol is very robust and useable. I can pretty much operate autonomously from my PC although it's often more convenient to just use the PC interface for some things. I've been pretty happy also working with a non-NKS environment such as Soundpaint, but of course I have to depend more on my PC interface. But it's fine for capturing a track configuring and using their libraries.

I've been bit surprised at the velocity settings and how hard I have to hit the keys to raise the velocity on the notes, but that may simply be a factor of an adjustment I haven't yet discovered in the Komplete Kontrol and S88 configuration. The same goes for the polyphonic touch sensitivity. Again, it's likely me trying to understand how that's configured.

This is a big and fairly complex system, so it's worth noting that so new users know what to expect and the depths of knowledge you may need to get this performing the way you want.

Consistent yes... but it does seem like a slowish pace for something so fundamental.

What is the biggest reason for the slowish pace?

What could speed it up?

Actually that's pretty much standard for digital hardware firmware upgrades across the industry. Generally you get about 2 per year from all the modeling companies and pretty close to that with new audio interfaces. A little longer with things like more complex MIDI controllers. That's why they tend to line up with the big tech shows in summer and winter. I think the initial Line 6 Helix went about 11 months for their first big upgrade. But that was a MASSIVE update.

Imo these so called updates are basic fundamentals that should have been ready at launch. Having to wait for them after purchasing a flag ship product is nothing less than a joke. NI can try and sugarcoat this is much as they want but they slipped up big time here.