When will Reaktor7 come?

There's a lot of software that hasn't received any feature updates in years, only updates to run on new Macs and occasional bug fixes, yet I don't see people speaking of how that means the developers are no longer invested and it will eventually stop working.

Reaktor was updated for new Macs. This is not the action of a company planning to drop a product. Absynth is an example of what you see in the latter case.

But new features for Reaktor are not going to happen in the near future, this is true.

I find the mindset of "it works well now, but one day it may not so I won't use it until I am certain" difficult to understand. There can be no certainty that any software (or hardware) will function until the day you die (or otherwise stop making music). Use what you have and enjoy it and if it stops being supported you still have the music you made. You can render instrument tracks to audio then if you must have them separate from the mix, and preserve it as much as anything can ever be preserved.

I wish operating systems would let us adjust the size of the window and shrink or expand the contents of the window by scaling the visuals. At least the magnifier in windows does that and that works for me.

Maybe use separate processor cores for each instance of a reaktor plugin. But since computer speeds have picked up that's not even necessary. Even though daw's can use all cores, that didn't work in the past. Nowadays it's no problem, so that problem is solved. Some people want Reaktor to report it's latency to the daw. That could be done but it's not exactly a new feature. Why do you need iteration inside a core cell?

It's always been like this with the Reaktor, I've been using it since the early 2000s. New versions haven't been released for a long time, and every time there was a feeling that this project would be closed. But it always unexpectedly returned like a phoenix. This time, I think it will be the same. Moreover, the era of AI has arrived. And it needs to be urgently integrated into the Reaktor! Just like the new tractor integrated the function of dividing the track into stems, which implies the use of AI. So they can attach an AI assistant to the reactor. Isn't it a new version?

All I can postulate is that there were a number of mentions in a few threads in the last year that Reaktor is now in permanent maintenance mode.

Meaning NI will break out the code if needed for a new MacOS compatibility update or other minor reason.

But many of the old school developers who really made Reaktor what is was - are gone and their knowledge went with them.

I think of Reaktor in the same space as Battery, FM8 and several other NI classics of the early 2000's - they are "there", still part of Komplete (for now at least) and they work when you need them to.

But the user base that NI is chasing now - is not those who want to build synths - it's those who seek ready made sounds from ready to go instruments with little care about how they were built.

VP

Absynth is a classic example. It was only receiving maintenance updates for years. So it came as no surprise they dropped it all together. Trash had a similar thing going on, but it was reborn after enough public pressure.

If Apple stoped making new phones and only made maintenance upgrades, many of us may be richer for it, but people would lose confidence in them. As the competitors gain their upper advantage people will stop buying Apple and their stocks would plummet. Apple would become extinct.

In my mind maintenance is almost always more important than new features. Here's the thing though, the act of investing in the future by adding new features, tells people that the product still has a future. It positively reinforces people's confidence as opposed to losing it to fear and doubt.

If a product didn't adapt to the changing of the times it risks becoming stale and non-relevant. That eventually leads it becoming extinct. It's happened many times. People are no different, adapt or risk becoming extinct. Though in modern-day terms that really means jobless and redundant.

It's just a simple fundamental of life and technology is no exception.