KK3 UX Feedback

I think what we would like is called a roadmap.

Of course that often leads to overpromising and underdelivering which is a faux pas. But these complaints are because the product is already underdelivered: it doesn't serve as a unified browser across all sounds available (it divides things into "Factory" and "User" banks with no unified view available FOR NO GOOD REASON). It offers plugin control but only on instruments within the wrapper or Kontakt 7 without the wrapper. It is partially extensible with user NKS but there's zero good tooling made available for the community to extend it. KK3 broke a good portion of the value of KK2...the implicit promise is that tech gets better not worse.

All of this is disappointing and demotivating to continue to add value, and one can have sympathy with Spitfire's apparent apathy updating their NKS because that apathy is even being shown by the company whose proprietary platform this is.

A roadmap that makes this all make sense would go a long ways toward clearing the air and reviving some enthusiasm for the NI NKS ecosystem. I'm glad I've only put $500 total into the Maschine mk3 and S61mk2, I am weighing an S88mk3, but I would need a lot more certainty these issues were going to be addressed before that splurge.

A universal, open-standard direct plugin control & metadata approach replacing NKS is a good way of addressing all of this, if that is what is being focused on. But I'm not sure we can't have something in the interim. If you open sourced your stuff I would probably have released FX Kontrol by now, though others would have long beaten me to it. You would still be selling the hardware and the libraries but wouldn't be getting as much criticism. You don't like the criticism and we don't like arbitrarily unfulfilled ecosystems.

So let me make this absolutely simple in summary, so zero people will misunderstand the product and why some of us are complaining about it.

Product Definition:

Komplete Kontrol serves as your single source of access, inspiration and control for all your virtual instruments and FX plugins. With all compatible Native Instruments hardware, KK gives you hands-on control over all your plugins wherever they are used in your sessions, for multiple pages of parameters with 8 convenient controller knobs. A unified browsing experience with compelling graphics allows you to filter, search, and preview all of your Native Instruments and 3rd party virtual instrument and FX patches based on a variety of subjective criteria, helping you sort through potentially hundreds of thousands of sounds to find exactly what you are looking for without taking you out of your creative flow. 

Vendors officially supporting the NKS standard also have their patches in the special "Factory" sub-bank. Other products that have received community support that you may install are in the "Community" sub-bank. Finally the patches you create yourself are in the "User" sub-bank. And from any of those, there are the "Favorites" you have designated. These four filter choices are always present and easy to access, they aren't mutually exclusive, and when none are activated, you are browsing everything at once.

Komplete Kontrol FX enables hardware control for all of your NI and 3rd party FX plugins, just instantiate it on any audio channel and load your FX plugins the same way you would after instrument plugins in KK. Unlike KK for instruments, KKFX doesn't offer previews, however it does offer instant temporary loading of FX settings across entire FX chains. So you can set your DAW playing and try out different KKFX preset chains, and you will instantly hear what they do. You can also have Macro settings that allow the 8 encoder knobs to apply across the entire FX chain (as you can in Maschine software). The same filters and subjective categories are available in KKFX as KK, and you can also preview and add KKFX presets directly to a virtual instrument in KK for instruments.

...OK? Is anyone unhappy with that definition of the product? Isn't that what a complete fulfillment of this product concept would do? And isn't it actually quite easy to modify what's already there into this? Are you gonna try to tell me this would be more than a week for your best coder who's already up to speed on your builds? There is absolutely zero hard here. Yes I know, although if your codebase is stinking mess of mistakes made by people who left the company 10 years ago then OK even changing the color of a button may take the 6 months a diseased big company suffers. But you managed to build KK3...

Let's enumerate the present KK3's failures on this definition, to remove any false sense of satisfaction:

FAILURE 1: "A unified browsing experience with compelling graphics allows you to filter, search, and preview all of your Native Instruments and 3rd party virtual instrument and FX patches"

Nope. The browsing experience is arbitrarily divided into Factory and User banks, You cannot unify them completely even with unsupported hacks, and there is ABSOLUTELY NO JUSTIFICATION for that limitation. This is penalizing the paying user for a dispute with 3rd party vendors whether they submit to your supervision and vigorish, leave us out of it, we have little patience for your bickering at our expense.

FAILURE 2: "These four filter choices are always present and easy to access, they aren't mutually exclusive, and when none are activated, you are browsing everything at once."

Not there again. Factory and User banks are mutually exclusive for no good reason and a user's own presets are forced into the same pile as unlicensed 3rd party presets. That is outright user abuse and forcing my stuff in with the stuff you don't like because they don't obey and pay you is really, really not a good look dude.

FAILURE 3: "With all compatible Native Instruments hardware, KK gives you hands-on control over all your plugins wherever they are used in your sessions"

Nope, Conway's Law has struck again, Machine hardware controls Maschine plugins, KK hardware controls KK plugins, even though they are all the same 8 knobs design and same NKS information. I buy your fancy controller, I should be able to use it anywhere for anything. You have a "controller" menu disambiguating who is in control of what, you have the ability to follow the active plugin in the DAW, Softube can do this with Console 1...kindly spare us lame and false excuses and make this work. I truly doubt every team was so poorly coordinated they all implemented redundant and incompatible protocols onto their plugins, but if so, let's examine senior management.

FAILURE 4: "Komplete Kontrol FX enables hardware control for all of your NI and 3rd party FX plugins, just instantiate it on any audio channel and load your FX plugins the same way you would after instrument plugins in KK."

AWOL. I paid for your hardware controllers, I paid for your FX plugins like Replika XT, and I can't use the controller on the plugin for my vocals and other tracks, just for your instruments. ******? I PAID YOU FOR EVERYTHING YOU OFFER. And this again is what, a week of work just making an alternate build in a monorepo with some conditionals to not load instrument plugins in the first slot and apply the FX patch immediately on browse but go back to the original patch if it isn't loaded? Seriously gonna try and tell me this is hard? Please.

FAILURE 5: "Other products that have received community support that you may install are in the "Community" sub-bank."

While I am super-appreciative of the yeoman work several users and small businesses have done trying to extend NKS support themselves by hand for products that don't officially have it, and I have even contributed some graphics myself, I took one look at the contortions they have to go through to do it that I gave up. Why doesn't NI distribute the tools it uses and offers its official 3rd parties to the community as unsupported assistance? It only helps your platform, and if users download these things themselves, and they end up in a "Community" bank that the user can exclude from browsing if they want, well it isn't your responsibility and it only helps your platform. There will still be motivation to release official NKS, and even more so, because the platform will be COMPLETED and none of this demoralizing, vibe-killing partial fulfillment wrecking its experience. Platforms want to be open source, but also be profitable enough to keep building, and this would do both at zero cost.

...OK you're just going to shrug your shoulders with this spectacular series of needless own-goals? I don't aim to demoralize the staff we're all relying on to build these things. But these failures are what is demoralizing, not the messenger pointing them out. All of this would be a couple person-months at most to fix? In a situation that was even vaguely healthy. And if your situation isn't that healthy then this will force a proper reckoning.

Good luck.

This latter paragraph is what I meant, in fact, there is no way to implement my recommendations without this being true. I have "Factory" "Community" and "User" as separate banks, rather than forcing together Community and User as KK3 does presently, and I have them browsable and searchable either all together or in any combination. KK3 disallows shared browsing of both, why wouldn't I want to consider both? Do I know going in which of these categories has the gold I'm digging for? Generally I won't, but I might, in which case these are opt-in filters as every other filter in the heterarchy is.

As for redundancy and priority, I don't have an issue with names being duplicated and neither does the present KK3. One thing I do notice is it isn't immediately clear where a preset came from. In this case, we could highlight the Factory/Community/User filters in the upper-right bar to demonstrate which of these a given preset was from, and as for sort order, I would probably prefer User then Factory then Community as a rank order. Of course I've also suggested they do a Google-era weighted search rather than a Yahoo-era alphabetical ontology, but that may be more than a couple person-months to deliver.

As for housekeeping of factory vs community NKS, when I did the hack to move my 3rd party NKS into the Factory folder, I just put them all in their own separate folder linked to in the XML/prefs file, I can see exactly what's mine vs. factory and since I had to put them there manually I can pull them out manually, and everything is cross-indexed and unified by the plugin name anyway just fine. I was going to go into approaches for managing community NKS in a more automated way over on the user NKS thread, but I think that may be too complicated for a relatively niche thing like this, unless NI decides to grant community full citizenship ("separate but equal" as you insist) in the ecosystem, and make it worth our investment. Right now too much unnecessary doubt hanging over this platform, all NI's fault.

See I've been doing this hobby of diagnosing the pathologies of little audio companies for 30 years and this is the typical defensive reply. Internally, what happens is the better developers all agree with me (many have come up to me in person at conferences and said so) but the managers assert themselves by saying "we're going to stick with our strategy until things change."

And when things change, and start looking bad enough to force a course correction, what has happened? Irreversible brand damage. They end up doing my suggestions anyway, but after 2-3 years instead of the 2-3 months that would have avoided the damage. This is all true, please google this history, I did use a few aliases over the years but everyone recognizes me by now.

For an in-process example, look at UA giving up and selling native perpetuals, only too late, and now desperate to bulk up the customer list for a better valuation in acquisition. I suppose they are waiting for the acquirer to kill the millstone DAW project which is the advice they are still ignoring. Pride cometh before the fall.

Anyway best of luck to the actual talent still there, the hardware is absolutely gorgeous and would be nice if they complete the software someday. I'm signing off.

While everything I've noted about the inexplicably bad product decisions has been noted long before, again I usually show up at the final inflection point when the company has effectively decided to forfeit a fundamentally winning position for no gain at all. As if they are tired and just want it over with. Danke.

But I have zero access to inside information as that would make my hobby not just shooting fish in a barrel, but totally pointless. Indeed the best way to get me to shut up isn't to ban me, but to give me inside information. But no one does. That segment want me to send these messages, because they still care.

But for an actual insider view of things in this unraveling rollup? How about Dirk Ulrich, founder of brainworx and Plugin Alliance and the largest private shareholder in the firm? What does he have to say about things?

https://www.audiopluginguy.com/news-dirk-ulrich-steps-down-from-native-instruments-board-of-directors/

...resigning from the Board of Directors in disgust?!? That's more histrionic than I ever get. He must also be "overthinking this." A little.

The dead-ender fanboi's aren't very numerous here and they must not be generous with the NFRs for them either. Now that would be a boring and pointless hobby. Anyway leadership is a de facto thing. The talent should go ahead and self-manage. Bring this to a head and show who's boss. European management will always back down.