July 2025 – a community update from our Chief Product & Technology Officer

The communication is appreciated. I wish the path described sounded better to me. Maybe it is what the market says, but I cannot help but cringe that emphasis is on yet more 'player' interfaces (Circular, Massive X Player) and features that sound innovative, but are not always really doing much for usability. I keep seeing over and over these reimagined interfaces to help with 'creative roadblocks' or whatever, but they are all basically the same thing: mixing samples in layers with dumbed down mixer controls and some built in effects. I have no interest in more niche sample packs with such interfaces that are being added to pad the Komplete sales each year.

I want my NI workhorse tools to keep working over the years and be improved where they are sluggish or have bugs in a timely fashion. Customers have been clamoring for a focus on software fixes and modernization for a decade! How is it so impossible that NI continues not to understand that ignoring the software foundations leads only to ruin and people moving off the product line? Most of the NI products cannot even properly scale beyond a 1080P monitor as of Maschine 3.2, KK3, etc. and that is after the specific and incomplete effort NI made to try to make some of them DPI aware. Many of the menus and general usability remain clunky and unfinished version after version. Old great products never get new browsers. Any basic test from a common sense perspective shows how flawed the software is, yet each year they slap it all into Komplete to get yet more package sales without fixing much at all.

To be honest, after 15+ years and several thousands of dollars to NI, I'm starting to give up on thisi. I can't even make support tickets about obvious bugs because the website(s) are so broken. My Maschine and Komplete hardware have been shoved off to the side recently for the first time in a decade because I am tired of fighting with monitor resolution changes, clunky plugin handling, and the barely working NKS headache every time I try to use Maschine or KK either standalone or in my modernized DAW (Sonar, which managed to properly added modern plugin handling and high DPI support several years back even though they lack much market share).

Please hear those of us who have been longtime customers who do not want more sampler mixer or redundant effects plugins. We want software and integrated hardware that is cared about by developers and works well.

@Simon_NI Since this thread doesn't seem to be closed yet, I'll give it a try to provide some feedback and raise a few questions, or rather, point out communication problems.

These are mostly Traktor based, but they also cover other areas of NI quite well when it comes to problems with how the user base can communicate with the developer base or other stuff in your company. The repetitive statement that you at NI want to listen to your users seems to me, after x years, to be just empty words. They've already been used by everyone else in upper management before.

There's no real exchange taking place. Good ideas are usually thrown overboard, and there doesn't seem to be any consistent way of exchange. A bug forum (the one here in the community is still from 3.11 and closed). A feature forum, which was well received and generated good ideas, as well as pointed out other shortcomings compared to the competition is also closed. Also the roadmap was great for the feeling that it's not a dead product and that you're committed to working on it in the future is also gone.

So, this is the only way we have to get news, and when I realize that Traktor isn't even mentioned in your original post, it's hard for me, and probably many others, to find something to orient ourselves on.

Communication doesn't always have to mean taking a stand, announcing new hardware, or presenting every little advance. Sometimes a simple explanation would be enough for me. As to why two annoying bugs introduced with a new version aren't being addressed, or why a hot fix isn't possible. But if you can only hear between the lines that you're aware of the bugs, but aren't given any indication of whether, when, how, and which ones will finally be addressed, then that's simply annoying and contradicts the fact that you really want to take care of your user base.

Or, as it turned out following your post on answers to the questions, we might have some really great news to look forward to soon. But I'd like to point out to you this little piece of the puzzle was missing and we admittedly have to stick to three such community updates instead of the four announced, it's hard to understand.

When you say it's been a great year for Traktor, it's not understandable, at least not at this point. So far, nothing has happened this year. We received just one update with barely no new features or bugfixes and that unfortunately also brought with it some new critical bugs, since then, there's been no communication. Half the year is over, and honestly, we probably won't expect much more until after the summer holidays, so we can only hope that the remaining four months this year will ignite the fireworks that we were only able to coax out of you when we asked.

Even if you're not allowed to announce anything, it would be advisable to tell people that you're working on it. If, for example, the people at MWM Phase weren't so communicative, we wouldn't have any information about the possibilities of HID and Traktor. The current status and the possibility of development are therefore more likely to be reported by third-party manufacturers than by you, and that in no way enhances my user experience or my connection to your products. This vague approach simply doesn't suggest that the foundation is stable. For many years now, I've been much more afraid that the entire house of cards would collapse instead of that we will soon receive good news from Traktor.