Kontrol 2024 outlook: what was, what now, what next?

Thanks tips. I had no idea there was other keyboards out there until you just told me now. It's not like I've had an Akai Advance, three of these NI keyboards, an M Audio piece of junk, and now an FL Key. You just told me to throw away the NKS Standard integration, that accounts for 3/4's of my plugins, instead of just tell the company to fix it for the future. Brilliant.

Sincerely appreciate the thoughtful response and effort to to do a mockup! That said, I personally would find your design quite frustrating on account of the fact that the buttons and knobs do not align with their on-screen counterparts. I think that would be endlessly frustrating, constantly turning the wrong knobs because it's not clear which on-screen knob is being controlled. I definitely agree with you that it'd be nice if the browser and plugin could both be on the screen at the same time, though.

I'm a UI designer by trade — trust me, there are countless things I would have done differently in Kontrol Mk3 design if I had full reign (even though I think it's pretty good, overall). But my question was a simpler one — "how would you improve the middle section of the existing plugin screen?"

"How would you entirely redesign the keyboard hardware and software from scratch?" is also an interesting exercise, but it's a pretty different one than what I was asking about.

There's a difference between asking devs to fix things and what you are suggesting which is a complete redesign. Also the tone you're using to present these suggestions won't get you very far, but you do you.

Yep, I mentioned a lot of these ideas (modulators, waveforms, etc.) in my original post. However, as I said there — that only really applies to synths. The Komplete library is chock full of instruments this wouldn't be appropriate for. So…what then? Envelopes and waveforms aren't going to be too useful in the East Asia instrument. Or The Gentleman. Or Session Bassist. Or Session Strings. Or Glaze. Or Studio Drummer. It's easy for us synth nerds to forget that there's a lot more than synths in Komplete. :)

But I think these are cool ideas and I'd love to see it. Realistically, though, I think the creator of each NKS instrument would need to do a lot custom UI work for this area that is appropriate for their instrument. The UI for the buttons and knobs on the top and bottom are NOT custom UI — those controls are provided at an API level, and done so in a standard way that is applicable to every instrument. Right now it's pretty easy for any plugin maker to adopt NKS. Most of the heavy lifting has been done by NI. The types of ideas we're talking about would require far more detailed work by the plugin makers, I think. And even if that were possible, I still don't know what the heck I'd put there for East Asia. :)

Comparrisons to the MicroFreak or the Montage I think aren't very fair — those are synths made by a single vendor that are entirely in control of the whole UI. That's not the case here. NKS is not a synth, it's a platform available to all instrument makers. NI doesn't just have to build a UI for a single synth — it has to build a platform for creating instrument UIs, and then instrument vendors need to adopt that platform, and then they need to do good design — a lot of which is outside the control of NI. And our expectation is that this all works great and has awesome UIs for thousands of different synths. It's just not the same thing as Artuia designing a handful of screens for a small OLED on the MicroFreak.

TL;DR: These ideas are cool, but I think they'd put a much heavier burden on the plugin makers, and NI might risk them not adopting NKS at all if too much is put on them.