Maschine Software w/ S88 MK3 only?

@nightjar That's where I hope they're going. Perhaps they will abandon Maschine and come out with new hardware that supports a new full featured NI DAW as well as other popular DAWs. This would explain why the Kontrol doesn't have Maschine support. Or maybe it's all wishful thinking and they are just dropping the ball. Something tells me we'll find out soon enough.

Yes.. I think you are on target with this theory.. time will tell.

I use Komplete Kontrol with Maschine all the time, and love the integration. But I have disabled user data sharing (I always do, just out of habit and because it has caused performance issues in the past).

I completely understand the dedicated Maschine buttons are annoying when you don’t use them, and frankly, although I am not happy with it, I am not too concerned by the removal of these either. They are not the most important part of what makes the Maschine and Kontrol work well together. For me, the seamless mapping of the entire the Kontrol interface with Maschine software is what makes them such a great experience to use together. So what baffles me is not the removal of these few extra buttons, but the complete removal of Maschine integration at launch of the KK3. For me that’s just beyond comprehension.

I understand anonymous user data can assist evaluation of user experience, but it can also lead to regressive designs. At first glance, it looks like the design of the KK3 is an example of this.

Building great products for creatives primarily requires vision of great designers and engineers. User data is always secondary to that. It’s easy to imagine how letting user data dictate design choices can lead to a regressive product development strategy, where, with every iteration, features are removed until it is dumbed down and becomes useless for most creative expressions (but will still look ‘super cool’ in studios of YouTubers and on stage).

If, while taking user data into consideration, the design of the new KK would have been led by a vision of how cross compatibility between Kontrol and Maschine could be improved, then it would have been expanded to address its apparent limited use in the previous iterations.

This could even have been done while ensuring all buttons can be used and mapped in other DAWs. Looking at the current UIs of for example Logic Pro and Ableton, it would have even been easy to map the existing dedicated KK Maschine buttons to similar regions in these applications.

It’s really puzzling and increasingly frustrating, but it looks like questionable marketing choices are more and more limiting the hardware and software of NI, to the extend that I am less and less enticed to buy new products from them, as much as I have loved them in the past.

Maybe, maybe not. I use it to write (my bastardization of) classical and orchestral

Well that’s interesting…. Here comes Jam MK2…