October 2024 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer

Hey everyone. It’s been a packed summer here at NI and we're still keeping very busy. We're hard at work channeling our energy into new releases and updates that we can't wait to share with you. From software upgrades to new hardware, we've got an exciting few months ahead.

Kontakt 8 and Komplete 15

Kontakt 8 is the biggest upgrade to Kontakt in more than a decade. I’m really proud of what the team has been able to accomplish. They’ve solved many difficult technical and design challenges to deliver a bunch of new features, which our customers also helped craft through hours of user research and community feedback.

While Komplete 15 includes a bunch of great new instruments like Kithara and Alicia’s Electric Keys, in Kontakt 8 we’ve focussed on new ways to inspire creativity and to help you get more value out of the instruments and sounds you already have.

Tools

Starting with Phrases and Chords, Tools are a new entity in Kontakt that will help you get started and overcome creative barriers. Tools can be added before any Kontakt instrument which unlocks immense creative flexibility when used with your existing library. Chords and Phrases are just the first two, we’re planning to release many more in the future. And Tools aren’t just features of the Kontakt app, they’re modules built in the same way as Kontakt instruments. This means anyone can design and release new Tools for the community to use. 

Leap

This is a new playground for creative manipulation of loops and one-shots. Leap makes some of the powerful, under-the-hood sampler features of Kontakt more accessible. And for the first time, all of your existing Expansions will appear in Kontakt so you can use them to create custom Leap Kits. We have also shipped 12 new Leap Expansions designed specifically for the Leap player, with more to come in the future.

Tools and Leap are also available in the free Kontakt 8 Player which means anyone can get started with them. 

Conflux

Our first in a new line of true hybrid instruments, Conflux demonstrates the significantly improved wavetable synth engine inside Kontakt 8. While there are many Kontakt instruments that sound like synths, they’re typically using samples under the hood. Kontakt 8’s upgraded wavetable synth engine has new FM, phase modulation, and ring modulation wavetable oscillators which offer instrument builders a totally new sonic toolkit. This will enable a whole new generation of Kontakt instruments with more diversity and depth than ever before.

Komplete Toolkit

With Kontakt 8, we’re bringing together all of our tools for instrument builders under the Komplete Toolkit banner. This includes the public release of a new user interface framework called Komplete UI which enables instrument builders to design instrument interfaces that are high-resolution, resizable, and reactive. This doesn’t mean every instrument will be high-definition and resizable on day one, but going forward, most new instruments will be. I know this is long overdue, but it’s a significant investment to design a framework which will stand the test of time, works across multiple platforms, and provides the flexibility to enable instrument builders to create unique, expressive, and animated user interfaces. 

Also coming very soon to Komplete Toolkit are the Tools SDK and Leap Expansion SDK, which give builders everything that they need to create their own Tools and Leap Expansions respectively – in much the same way as they can build instruments today.

Performance and stability

Lastly, we’ve worked hard to make Kontakt 8 faster (particularly around instrument loading times) and more reliable. Many of our customers have large libraries, big sessions, and Kontakt on many tracks, so performance matters, as does reliability when you’re in the flow or working to a deadline. This work never stops and we'll be investing more capacity in this critical area going forward.

We’re really excited to see how people use these new features in their projects, and how the new features of the Kontakt engine enable content creators and instrument builders to develop entirely new classes of product for Native Instruments’ platforms.

iZotope Catalyst Series

A few weeks ago we launched Plasma, an intelligent tube saturator that analyzes your sound and applies dynamic saturation to really bring out the best in your mixes and masters with added warmth and character. We followed that up with Aurora, an intelligent reverb that reacts to your audio and adaptively unmasks against the dry signal to add depth without losing clarity.

These are the first two plugins in a new line of iZotope products we’re calling the Catalyst series. While iZotope is known for our comprehensive, multi-functional toolkits like Ozone, RX, Nectar, and Neutron, the Catalyst series is different: it’s a collection of individual intelligent plugins, each of which is designed to quickly help you solve difficult mix problems. We’re really pleased with the response from our community so far – and there’s one more still to come this year.

NI 360

We also recently made our new subscription service, NI 360, available to everyone. NI 360 builds on the old Komplete Now subscription package by offering three tiers, each of which includes tools for the entire creative workflow. There’s Instruments and Sounds from Native Instruments, as well as world-class mixing and mastering tools from iZotope and Brainworx. What’s more, subscribers automatically get access to new instruments and tools as they’re released – further expanding the creative toolset they have access to. 360 subscribers got access to Kontakt 8 along with Leaps and Tools on the day it was released.

While subscriptions offer many people an easier way to access a wider range of music production tools, we know they’re not right for everyone. So, I wanted to restate, we have no plans to stop making our products available via perpetual licenses.

Kontrol

After the release of the new Kontrol S-Series MK3 controllers last year, we’ve been working hard to add new on-device features, taking advantage of the major upgrades to the internal capabilities vs the MK2.

On-device Play Assist

We recently released on-device Play Assist functionality as a free update for Kontrol MK3 owners. This means you’ll be able to use it with any software plugin or hardware synths (that accept MIDI) without the need for Komplete Kontrol software – making it a more versatile keyboard for your studio. We’ve divided the development work between Scale/Chords and Arpeggiator. The first is out now with Arp coming very soon. 

MIDI templates

Earlier in the summer we launched on-device MIDI templates – also as a free update. You can now create, edit, save, browse and load MIDI templates directly on the device and export and import them when connected to a computer. Because this is now running on the keyboard itself, it means you can control any MIDI-based device in standalone mode for the first time, or use them alongside your computer to control any DAW in unique ways. The response has been super positive and it’s great to see folks exporting and sharing templates in this thread on the forum. 

New Instruments, Sounds, and Plugins

As well as Kontakt 8 and Komplete 15, we recently launched more great instruments and sounds and powerful plugins for your projects:

• Alicia’s Electric Keys – the sounds of Alicia Keys’ personal electric grand piano
• Kithara – a premium collection of cinematic guitars and hard-to-find plucked string instruments
• Scene: Saffron – a lightweight cinematic instrument that sounds anything but lightweight
• Choir: Omnia Essentials – a lighter-weight version of our full Choir library at a lower price
• Play Series Bouquet and Velvet Bloom Expansion
• Play Series Nacht and Void Eclipse Expansion
• Brainworx bx_aura – their first reverb with five distinct algorithms controlled by intuitive parameters for maximum creativity, flexibility, and control 

What’s coming next?

Traktor 

We dropped Traktor Pro 4 back in July and we’ve been really pleased with the response. The team worked very hard to make this a meaningful update. Beyond the big features like stem separation and flexible beatgrids, even additions like the Pattern Player are really significant for expanding creativity in live performance. Right now the team is already starting to plan out the next areas of focus. These will likely be updates to help DJs discover new content, manage their library, prepare for performance, and play with an even wider range of setups. 

The team have also been working away on some new modular Traktor hardware to be announced in the next couple of weeks. Without revealing too much at this stage, it’s the first hardware to be designed specifically for Traktor Pro 4 software and there’s plenty of fresh features on board. Stay tuned.

New iZotope Plugins 

Later this year we’ll be launching a new version of Neutron with several new modules to take your mixes to the next level. We’ll also be releasing a third installment in the new Catalyst series – an intelligent delay – following on from Plasma and Aurora. These new products have been developed in close collaboration with some of the best mixing and mastering engineers in the business and we’re really encouraged by the beta feedback we’ve been getting so far.

Maschine

I know many of you have been waiting for news about Maschine. We’ll be releasing an upgrade to the software in November that brings several features including stem separation, MIDI editing workflow improvements, per-scene tempo, a basic Kontrol S-Series MK3 integration, a modern interface, and many other small but valuable improvements. There was a long list of features requested by the community, and while we’ve not been able to build them all – yet! But this upgrade significantly expands what you can do with Maschine.

We’ll also be releasing a new content library called the Maschine Central with 128 multi-sampled instruments that are fully compatible with Maschine+, as well as 70 new kits and over 100 new presets. You’ll be able to purchase the software upgrade on its own or purchase both the software upgrade and Maschine Central content library together. 

macOS Sequoia

As soon as the beta of macOS Sequoia came out, our teams started actively working to validate the compatibility of our products. We are now in the process of more extensive testing in the final release version of Sequoia. Different products are affected by major OS version updates in varied and sometimes unpredictable ways. As such, some products may require updates for compatibility while others may not. While not everything will be made Sequoia compatible all at once, it is our aim to have the majority of our products ready by the end of this year.

I know many of you are waiting for an update to Battery 4 – yes, it’s not yet even Sonoma compatible. Battery is built on some older code that’s been non-trivial to upgrade. Our teams have been focused on making Kontakt 8 the best it can be, but now that it has been released, we’ll release an update to Battery 4 in the coming weeks.

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I really appreciate the questions and engagement on my previous community updates back in March and June. I hope you can see from this post and several others from our team that we are investing more deeply in talking and listening to our community. I’ll do my best to answer the questions you post below.

Thanks

Simon Cross
Chief Product Officer
Native Instruments Group