Using Komplete Kontrol s61 mk3 with Kontakt and CHANNELS

I'll let Jeremy respond of course, but to me "NI soon" means "maybe this year", but "the good Lord willing and the creek don't rise". Any emergencies, real or imagined, will probably delay it, along with everything else.

If he had said that the devs were "working on it", then I'd say maybe within 3-6 months.

If he had said it was in beta or "about to go to beta", then I would call it "sometime in the next 0 to 3 months".

I could be way off, of course. But probably not. 😉

All flood and creek rising warnings still apply of course. What kind of emergencies could happen? Well, anything from a local severe weather event anywhere where NI has team members, all the way up to some new Euro-zone drama. Or expanding war in the mideast. Or the US Congress forcing companies to replace all touch-screens with windmills. Hey, stranger things have happened.

Company leaders can also create emergencies, with orders like "Drop everything! We have to change the paint for the new Komplete!" to "Drop everything! We need to audit all employee potty breaks!"

Why yes...I've been in business for so long that the Dilbert cartoons aren't just humor pieces. They're outright DOCUMENTARIES!

Quite frankly this all depends on your perspective about "new" products.

IMHO "new" products should be just that...NEW. That means testing and expanding the limits of what the product can technically do. I've been through such things many times in various areas of music technology. The BIG differences come when you make significant architectural changes in the hardware, especially when it's necessary to embrace changing industry standards such as is the case of VST2 and VST3 and the expanding MIDI protocols and such.

What excited me most when I first began looking into the MK3 keyboard was the idea of it having its own embedded and programmable computing power. That opens a very wide door into a future of amazing capabilities a "dumb" MIDI keyboard simply can't do. I didn't expect this to be ready day one because it seldom is in this industry or most others. You get the basic stuff working on the new architecture then, as it stabilizes, you expand it to do things formerly impossible. The advantage to this approach is you get to really see what it is that will best utilize the new standards and over time to tend to really create amazing new features.

I went through this once before in the guitar modeling area in 2015 when the Line 6 Helix was introduced. It had some slight improvements over the Line 6 POD systems but it's architecture was VASTLY improved. Because the Helix has it's own memory model and functioning/programmable internal memory it wasn't long before we experienced updates that gave us capabilities that could never have been achieved by the POD architecture. Nowadays the features are so broad and vast and technically improved it still dominates the modeling scene after almost 10 years. The same can be said of progress that's been made in electronic drum kits with more intelligent controller modules, USB sensors and more memory to get closer and vastly exceed the capabilities of organic drums using mics and traditional sensors.

I see this as another example of such things. The difference being I'm old, so I've been through a lot of this and have more patience to see where this will all end up. I'm relatively certain it's going to eventually exceed what I could imagine it doing just like all the other examples I cited.