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

As a manager, I constantly catch people who grossly underestimate the time it takes other people doing the things! Some of them even underestimate their own ability to do the things. And EVERYBODY underestimates the Q/A and testing needed, plus the documentation that never seems to be able to write itself! 😏

The problem is, metrics will flag you and bean-counters will hound you if you exceed a + or - 10% variance on what you said the project would take. And then people don't want to do those jobs anymore, so they jump teams. Or worse, they jump ship. And it always takes forever + a month to hire somebody new.

Over my decades long career in product management I can't even count the number of organizations that have these same deficiencies. The reality is the "bean counters" are only there to CYA for the management as they provide nothing of substance for those that actually have to deliver the projects. The bean counters have no skin in the game.

The reality is the only thing that ever matters in the delivery of a project are the milestones, and if those milestones are determined and owned by the group doing the work you have a MUCH better chance of delivering on time. Individual tasks often need to be changed during the course of the project and work often need to be re-allocated, but a well defined and measurable level of functionality defined by a milestone rarely does if done right.

The reality is the "bean counters" are only there to CYA for the
management as they provide nothing of substance for those that actually
have to deliver the projects. The bean counters have no skin in the
game.

The problem is, the bean counters aren't necessarily from accounting. Sometimes they're from school. School is the WORST place to find decision makers.

I've had only a couple of team members who actually came right out of school and became high-performers within 6 months to a year. Most team members, as good and as knowledgeable as they may be, were not high performers right out of school. We actually needed to train some or all of the schooling out of them, lol!

Patiently waiting hopefully something this month that will improve komplete kontrol software and controller..

@Matthew_NI I am a member of Kontakt Beta team but does that make me elligeable for the MK3 firmware Beta?

As best I understand it I think the current version being worked on should improve the DAW automation aspect. As far as improvements in FX automation within the plugin really depends on what the plugin offers in that regard. Some are pretty extensive others depend more on pairing up external plugins.

Well, I always operate under the guise that something claimed today as coming in the future may just be here before the end of time itself if lucky. That is as reliable as I can pin down and the only way you can have the slightest expectation without constant dissapointment.

Assume what it does right now is all you will ever get, tho never assume you are going to keep all the features it offers because as KK V3 has proven, even the features that we did have can be stripped out or messed up.

Nope, the issue is the way KK hosts plugins. There is not enough capability to fit all the automatable parameters of all plugins within a chain to allow control of everything from a DAW so the "fix" was simply to not allow control of the plugins from the host, only the instrument.

The way most large plugins overcome this is to force the user to "enable host automation" for parameters they want to control from the DAW to generate a host automation table the DAW can use to map to parameters but this cannot be done in KK due to how it is designed to work with the hardware, and not something I think anyone wants to have to do anyway.

As far as I understand, it will never be possible to automate FX loaded in KK from a DAW unless they can either auto generate a host automation table or force users to enable automation on the parameters they want to record which is the main reason we use KK to NOT have to mess around doing that with things like UVI products or Omnisphere for instance which is a pain to automate in projects without a lot of initial messing around. Maybe a separate FX version of KK would solve that, but that's a feature that has been requested for years and so likely, we won't see that happen in our lifetime.

This is why it's just less headache to directly load your FX into your DAW, not to mention far better on performance than having everything loaded into a single instance. Leave KK as just a simple preset browser for instruments and that is it.