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

@MorrisEd

While I agree the S mk3 has been a botched release, and while Native Access has been a pain, I disagree with the rest of your post.

I think you’re being a bit unfair, sure for you, that might have been your experience, but it’s not everyone’s experience. I have Komplete collectors edition along with a fair few other bits from NI.

Yes Native Access has been a pain at times, and on a handful of occasions in the past I had to contact support for direct download links, only for two or three things out of the many I own. I occasionally wish they had never gone the NA route (although I can’t think of one competitor who doesn’t also insist I install their install manager type program, so it’s not like NI are alone with this). 

This May I got my very first Mac. Everything from NI installed 100% fine and so far I’ve had zero problems with any of it, OK it’s only been nearly two months, but everything installed fine and so far, works fine..

I also have a 13yr old I7 Windows 10 pro, that up until last week was my main music PC, again same thing there, reinstalled everything three times this year due to hardware things (nothing to do with NI hardware) no problems at all.

From my experience this year on both Mac and Windows, I think Native Instruments are virtually there working out all the bugs, I suspect it won’t be long until Native Access is working fine for most users hence becomes a non issue.

Sure the odd user will still have problems, but that goes for all software companies, especially on Windows where there’s so many almost endless different PC hardware configurations. It’s impossible for a company to try their software with them all.

I rarely, if ever, watch say a 2hr long clip of a professional on YouTube, showing how they go about their music composition say for part of a film etc, without them firing up Kontakt at some point, usually multiple times. I’m sure if NIs software was unstable, they would find alternatives in seconds,

While I did have problems with my S88 mk3 with firmware updates just after Christmas, they were sorted within a few days and I was lucky enough to have read about this before purchasing and decided to purchase anyway, of course it should never have happened.

Not sure if I’ve already said this here or not, when the Korg Kronos was originally released, I purchased the 88 note, it was over 3 times as much as the S88 mk3. Korg had huge problems with the keybed, it took them a fair few months to openly admit there was a problem, the store replaced mine but the replacement was the same, my problem was finally solved by the store giving me the v2 Kronos (that’s how long it took) and while these things ave very very unpleasant for the end users, sadly from time to time it does happen, and when it does, it can turn many away from the company but usually most people know how good the companies products are, so while annoyed, stick with it.

I really really really enjoy playing my S88 mk3, I enjoy using the browser. I never used the Maschine buttons on my mk2 so don’t miss them. 

Yes there’s been bad publicity over the launch, and almost a year later we still have the odd one or two (very very few) people buying them and still having firmware problems that support has to sort out. Personally I think that all official distributors should be sent USB sticks with both Mac and Windows firmware on, to give to any customer that buys one. 

But as I said, very few people come here with that problem anymore, meanwhile the many satisfied users who have never joined this forum, are happily playing on their S mk3’s

What I do know is that in January when I bought mine, the store I usually use (musicmatter.co.uk) as they tend to give long warranties (3 years on the S mk3) and be one of the cheapest, had such a backlog of orders to fill, that they advised me to go elsewhere if I couldn’t wait for a couple of months, the next store also had a waiting list and I finally found a store with one in stock. Only NI know how well it’s sold, but from my experience, I think it’s sold quite well

I do sometimes worry that there’s not enough staff working on the S mk3 software, but midi templates is in beta now so hopefully after that, more new stuff will come along.

I often see posts on competitors forums complaining about installations going wrong, download problems, no support phone numbers, no response from support, or saying they are done with said company and are never giving them a penny more. No different than on here. Ok when there’s a particular problem with a companies product, then for a few months or so that company can seem to get more negative posts than the competition. The amount of people on Korg Forum that complained (myself included) and the amount that said they were never giving Korg a penny more due to the Kronos issue was a lot until they finally fixed the issue. 

The other thing we have to remember is (please correct me if I’m wrong) that going purely on the amount of general discussions/questions etc (not counting complaints), Native instruments has many many more daily posts than any of their competitors.

That can be viewed in a number of ways, such as (many more than these):

A) The forum with the least posts has the least customers.

B) The forum with the least posts has the easiest software to use, hence no questions to ask on the forum

C) The forum with the least posts has the best documentation, no need to ask on the forum

D) The forum with the least posts has the most stable and bug free software.

E) The forum with the least posts has users that aren’t all that impressed with the software, don’t really use it, are using something else now and have simply forgotten about it

F) The forum with the most posts has the most customers

G) The forum with the most posts has very complicated software, hence users often have questions to ask.

H) The forum with the most posts has the worst documentation, hence the forums needed

I) The forum with the most posts has the most unstable software, full of bugs.

J) The forum with the most posts, has very happy users who like to discuss different ideas about using the software with each other

K) The forum with the most posts, has users that love the software, and post to make suggestions to make it even better

L) The forum with the most posts, simply has far far far more products than its competitors.

Etc

Mind you, most companies, regardless of which company we choose, the vast majority of their customers are happily using their products, hence never have the need to register and post.

What I do know is that there aren’t many new posters on any of these forums, most posts are from people like me who are long term members, you get the odd poster join a forum, ask one question then never return, or ask a question, take part in the thread, thank everyone if their question is solved, then they disappear, which is good really as hopefully they are busy writing music. 

I struggle sleeping, when I can’t sleep (usually a few hrs at some point every night) I grab my iPad and have a read. Sometimes I go on to competitors forums and there’s only a few posts since the previous night. Native Instruments is the one companies forum that I can guarantee I will find a load of new posts every day and the vast majority are asking if this can be done, if that could be added etc. They are not upset and ditching NI etc.

Sorry you’ve lost faith in them, would be interested to know what companies you use to reproduce the stuff I have in K14 CE, I’m always amazed at what I find in that package, especially in Kontakt.

Your choice of course, but deciding never to use a company that is effectively number one (when it comes to the amount of 3rd parties using Kontakt) kind of seems like cutting your own nose off to spite your face.

Only today I bought a Harp from Sonuscore, needs the full version of Kontakt.

ps, sorry if I’ve said any of this before in this thread or elsewhere.

I guess I spoke too soon. I just downloaded the new Native Access 3.13 and tried out the new Maintenance menu which doesn't function when I select any of my parent library folders on different drives. It just says there's no content found. I'm on Windows 10 latest release.

Hope I'm wrong but the way it keeps sounding we wait until the 31st for a video then so after a release of midi templates.. whoo hoo I didn't ask for that.. I think I want the software to work like it should have in November 2023.. oh well my other product is coming out with and update..

Now I’ve noticed, even though everything’s working fine, it’s going to drive me nuts, the question is, do I do the sensible thing and simply ignore it or do I risk seeing if NA can move everything.

That mis-spelling lol, heart breaking when you find out! I done the same, except I have an audio folder and accidentally put the 'NI' one inside another company and not at the root of my audio folder. I decided I couldn't deal with that moving forwards, so..

I used Native Access to move them (on Mac), and not a hitch. Just moved folder, set the new location in Native Access and it was simple. Done this about 2 weeks back.

I don't think we are talking about OS related performance.. software and controller issues and what the software was designed to do that have not been met in almost a year..

Actually there have been some very long and detailed discussions in this forum by a number of NI people regarding these issues going back into last year. Unfortunately they're scattered all over this forum and NI has been pretty forthcoming with owning up to their mistakes, and the steps they've taken to get things worked out.

My personal perspective is that a lot of this has to do with the legitimate forward thinking business plans to try and re-engineer the underpinnings of the NI ecosystem to incorporate some significant industry changes moving toward things like VST3 and a more standardized architecture being used across the industry for the things NI does and have incorporated into some of their newer hardware such as the MK3 keyboards. The problem being when moving toward "standards" the standards are commonly vague enough that there are differences in approaches and understandings by different vendors in how to implement it. This applies as much to DAWs as it does computer operating systems and OS versions, and that's where a lot of these collisions came from and were so troublesome to diagnose. Some of these problems were owned up to by NI as far as their development environment and organization and have also been addressed.

I think we're finally getting close to being over that hump with many of these newer releases of the products as well as firmware updates to the MK3 keyboards. We'll see in a few weeks when these things start coming out of Beta testing.

Yep, and everyone said exactly the same thing on the Korg forum about Korg with their Kronos screwup.

For some reason, in the business (and political) world, holding your hands up and admitting you got it wrong and apologising etc, is seen as showing some kind of weakness.

Whereas if say NI admitted they got it wrong (doesn’t matter whether it was due to Microsoft for the firmware updates, still should have been sorted before release) , most users would accept that, furthermore there would be a load of posts praising NI for accepting their error and saying how more companies should take a leaf from their book.

In many ways had they done this, the free positive posts that would abound, would probably have given NI better advertising for the S series than any campaign they could come up with.