February 2025 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer

In January, a few of us from the team at Native Instruments, iZotope, and Plugin Alliance were at NAMM in LA for what is the biggest event in the music tech year. It was great to connect with our community, our customers, and many of our partners.

And, in fact, partnerships was the central theme of what we announced…

Expanding NKS to more hardware devices

Komplete Kontrol v3 will include integration with controllers from Akai Professional, M-Audio, Nektar, Novation and Korg.

NKS - the Native Control Standard - is the technology that enables seamless integration between hardware and not only NI’s software, but more than 2000 instruments and effects from more than 250 brands. Until now, the hardware side of that integration has been limited to NI’s own hardware. But many people use our software with other companies' hardware, which is why we’re delighted to expand the reach of NKS to devices from our 5 hardware partners: Akai Professional, M-Audio, Novation, Nektar and Korg.

In the next few weeks we’ll release an update to Komplete Kontrol which allows owners of supported hardware to select their device from a menu, and then the knobs, faders, and buttons for the default hardware configuration will be automatically mapped to the parameters of any NKS instrument or effect loaded within Komplete Kontrol.

And to enable owners of these supported devices to experience the benefits of NKS, they’ll soon get access to one of the three flavours of Komplete Select for free, empowering millions of creators to use our professional grade sound, no matter where they are in their music-making journey. 

This is just the start. We’re working on a way to bring deeper integration to our partners’ devices. More on that in future updates.

NI Expansions and Play Series on Akai Professional’s MPC standalone devices

Also at NAMM, we released a curated selection of 5 Expansions and 5 Play Series instruments for Akai Professional’s MPC standalone platform. 

By bringing a selection of NI’s sounds to the MPC, we’re expanding the number of creators who have access to these tools beyond the desktop and NI’s own hardware. It is something people have been asking for for a while.

It has been great to watch what musicians have created as they’ve got their hands on these new creative tools. And positive response to launch means we’re already starting to think about the next set of sounds we could bring to the MPC Standalone platform. Let me know in the comments if there’s specific content you’ll like to see available on the MPC.

I’ve read a lot of people questioning why our two companies are now working together. The reason is simple: NI and Akai share a similar view of what we're working towards. While NI’s strengths include our huge, high quality library of sounds and our desktop software, Akai’s MPC series of standalone devices are legendary in their own right. 

A quick note that the MPC Editions are not the same as the Expansions and Play Series on the desktop. The MPC Editions were rebuilt from the samples-up for the MPC with presets tailored to that platform crafted by our amazing Sound Design team. This is why they’re sold as different products vs the desktop versions.

For those using Maschine Plus, we plan to bring more content, including some Play Series instruments to that platform later in 2025 once we upgrade the on-device software. More on that below.

Leap

Leap is NI’s creative playground for loops and one-shots. We launched Leap with 12 curated Expansions back in September – and it’s been exciting to watch what people have created - including building their own custom Leap Kits.

We recently launched our 13th Leap Expansion – Italo Disco – and last month at NAMM in LA, we announced the Leap SDK which makes it possible for producers anywhere to create their own Leap Expansions and make them available to anyone using Kontakt 8.

While there’s a bit of a learning curve to develop your own Kontakt instrument, Leap Expansions are much easier to learn to create – with very little coding knowledge required. We’re excited to see producers bring new Leap Expansions to market that spark even more creative ideas.

New instruments, sounds, and effects

As well as these updates, we released a number of other products across NI, iZotope and Brainworx:

• Claire – a new instrument meticulously sampled from a world-class Italian concert grand piano known for its unmatched tonal clarity, depth, and power
• Claire: Avant – a new take on the Claire Piano with a focus on extended articulations and preparations.
• Session Guitarist: Electric Storm – an eight string metal guitar drop-tuned to span five octaves.
• SPL Machine Head – a new digital tape saturator on Plugin Alliance based on classic hardware from SPL
• Cremona Quartet Ensemble – crafting detailed string arrangements is easier than ever with four of the world’s most precious instruments.
• Play Series: Discoteca Keys & Discoteca Drums – capture the golden era of Italo Disco with these retro-futuristic instruments, and there’s a Leap expansion to go with it 
• bx_refinement V3 – clearer, smoother mixes with the latest version of the mixing multitool from Brainworx
• Hot List Expansion and Play Series LUXA – developed in collaboration with Snipe Young, this pair of products offers a genre-blending toolkit perfect for chart-topping pop R&B, modern alternative pop, pop rap, and K-pop.
• NEOLD OLDTIMER: 60s bucket brigade delay and 70s digital systems in one dual-topology delay.

Another tool for Kontakt

We launched the Chords and Phrases Tools as part of Kontakt 8 to help spark new creative ideas and overcome writer's block. We’ve been delighted to see the strong uptake of these new features which are now being used by a significant proportion of Kontakt users.

Last week we launched the 3rd Tool: Patterns – which is available as a free update for both Kontakt and Kontakt Player, plus we have more creative Tools launching later this year.

We also recently announced the Tools SDK which enables developers anywhere to build new Tools and Leap Expansions for the huge community of active Kontakt users.

Performance improvements for Kontakt 8 and Kontakt 7

We’re continuing to make Kontakt faster and more reliable, with the latest version of Kontakt 8 (v8.2) including more than 60 bug fixes and performance enhancements. But for those still happy with Kontakt 7, we also back-ported the performance improvements to the final version of Kontakt 7 so your old projects will load faster into the future.

And for instrument builders, the new UI framework that enables high-resolution and resizable interfaces is now ready to develop against – meaning customers will start to see more new high-DPI, resizable instruments launching in the coming months.

Native Access: more stable, more reliable

For the last 6 months, the Native Access team has been laser-focused on one mission: improving software reliability and install success rate. While Native Access works well for many users – we’ve consistently heard feedback from others who’ve encountered challenges with installation and authorisation. Ensuring you can access and update your NI products is our #1 priority, so our team has been diligently focused on strengthening this area. Installing software may seem straightforward, but reliably supporting a number of different platforms, operating systems, and products over a few million endpoints presents unique challenges that we’re diligently tackling. 

Our team has shipped a number of fixes to bugs related to installation and authorisation. We now also provide a way for you to share more detailed information about your system when contacting Customer Care. This helps us better get to the root of some of the more complex issues people are facing. As a result, we’ve seen a decline in error rates, as well as a dramatic reduction in the number of people contacting us for help with installation and authorisation. While this work is never done, in 2025 you’ll see us spending more time making Native Access the centre of your experience on the desktop, including new features that will help you get more out of your existing library of NI and iZotope products.

Sequoia compatibility

We invested significant time and energy ensuring more of our products were macOS Sequoia-ready more quickly than for macOS Sonoma. All iZotope products and Brainworx products are now Sequoia-ready as are Native Access, Maschine 3, Komplete Kontrol 3, Traktor Pro 4, Kontakt 7 and 8, and most other NI products. We also shipped a long overdue update to Battery 4 to ensure it works on the latest operating systems. While macOS Sequoia was a less disruptive update than Sonoma, we still have to test all our products on different hardware devices and in every major DAW which takes considerable time and effort.

A TEC Award for RX 11

The TEC Awards, held every year as part of NAMM, celebrate technical achievement in the world of audio. Competition is fierce, which is why we were delighted that RX 11 won the TEC Award for best signal processing software. Huge congratulations to the teams at iZotope who worked hard to make RX 11 yet another significant step forward in the field of music and audio repair and restoration.

So, what’s next?

Our teams have a packed roadmap for 2025 and there’s some things I’ll be excited to share a little closer to the time – but here’s some new products and features you can expect in the next few months.

iZotope Catalyst Series

2024 saw the launch of the new Catalyst series of intelligent plugins from iZotope with Plasma (a saturator), Aurora (a reverb), and Cascadia (a delay) rounding out the set. Each Catalyst plugin focussed on one important mixing problem – and with the success of the series so far, we’ll be releasing more Catalyst-series plugins throughout 2025.

Refreshed 3D reverbs

The Exponential Audio name has been synonymous with professional, high quality reverb effects for years – but the current products (Stratus 3D and Symphony 3D) are showing their age – and it was hard for us to add new features into their legacy codebase.

With the continuing growth of spatial audio, it’s time to give these incredible-sounding algorithms a new lease of life – so soon we’ll release a new product which brings together the Exponential Audio reverb algorithms with iZotope’s unmasking technology to create a modern, professional reverb designed for music and post production pros – especially those working with spatial audio. Stay tuned for more.

More for Maschine

As you may have read from Chris, we have some updates coming to Maschine. Following the release of Maschine v3 software last year, we’ll bring Custom Chord sets – another highly requested feature to Maschine 3 in the next few days after a successful beta-testing period. 

Following that, we’ll ship an update to Maschine Plus that brings several new FX and some key bugfixes, before bringing Maschine 3 to Maschine Plus in Q2. As part of this, we’re also working to update the version of Kontakt that runs on Maschine Plus from Kontakt 6 to the latest Kontakt 8. In combination with the bounce-to-audio feature in Maschine 3, this will finally allow us to bring more content including some Play Series instruments to Maschine Plus later in the year.

I know some of you have been frustrated with the limited updates to Maschine, and the Maschine Plus. The truth is that nearly all of our software development capacity has been focussed on building the completely new technology platform that underpins the Kontrol S-Series MK3 – and that has taken resources away from the platform used in the Maschine Mk3 and Maschine Plus. And we’re now shifting some development energy back towards Maschine as you can see from the launch of v3 and the roadmap shared above.

Kontrol S-Series MK3 updates

After releasing MIDI Templates and on-device Play Assist for scale & chords, in the next few weeks we’ll release an on-device arpeggiator as well a major upgrade to the accessibility features for our community of visually impaired users.

This is a reminder that with the release of Maschine 3, the Kontrol S-Series MK3 now integrates with Maschine, giving you control over transport, selecting your channel plugins, and hardware control of NKS 2 plugin parameters for the first time.

Kontakt

We’re continuing to modernise Kontakt – and you’ll see us move to shipping updates every month or two – with a continued focus on performance and reliability improvements, not just new user-facing features. We know how critical Kontakt is to many people’s professional workflows – and we consider performance itself to be a feature just like something you might see in the interface.

Since launching Tools in Kontakt 8, people have been asking for the ability to chain multiple Tools together just as you can chain multiple instruments together and good news: that’s something we’re going to be working on. 

We’re also working to make Kontakt integrate with 3rd party hardware from the NKS Hardware Partner program (see above) so owners of those devices will get a seamless workflow and access the thousands of instruments built for the world’s largest virtual instrument platform.

New Channel Strip

Plugin Alliance is excited to be working once again with Vertigo Sound, known for the acclaimed VSM-3 & VSC-2 plugins. In 2025, Vertigo will soon release the VSS-2 Discrete Channel Strip through Plugin Alliance – a high-end plugin blending its analog heritage with modern precision.

The VSS-2 features an Input Filter, VCA-style Compressor, Gyrator EQ, and vintage tube Saturation, faithfully emulating Vertigo’s iconic hardware. It delivers VSC-2/3-inspired compression, smooth VSE-2 EQ, and lush VSM-2 saturation, making it the perfect tool for adding punch, warmth, and depth to any mix.

Synths

While 2024 was the year Kontakt got its biggest update in years, in 2025 you’ll see more from NI in synths. It’s too early to share the rest of our plans, but I’m super jazzed about what the team is cooking up – including bringing some innovative new features to our synth products later this year.

Traktor

2024 was a big year for Traktor – new software and new hardware, and 2025 is another big year. The team are working to re-vamp Traktor’s already-comprehensive support for 3rd party controllers, as well as new features to help new DJs get started, and experienced DJs better manage their library. We’ve already started work on the next major version of Traktor which will bring a high resolution interface and a major upgrade to the browser.

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I really appreciate the questions and engagement on my previous community updates back in March, June, and October last year. I hope you can see from this post and several other recent posts from our product team that we are investing more time and energy in listening to and engaging with our community. As always, I’ll do my best to answer the questions you post below.

Simon Cross
Chief Product Officer
Native Instruments Group