Native Instruments....is there something wrong?

[masterchain]

as with a lot of people here, my feelings about NI are bittersweet.

on the one hand, i believe that fm8 is probably the most powerful and most fun to play softsynth on the market.

on the other hand, installing and authorizing it was one of the most frustrating computer experiences i've ever had. and after several months, i still havn't received any answers from them about anything. the folks here who have never had problems with their products are lucky. if you do have a problem, you're basically screwed unless you can work it out yourself.

also, while the quality of fm8 is almost top notch, there is one performance idiosyncracy that i've never worked out (and at this point i think is something i'm stuck with) is that running as a vst in cubase 5, you can't do the usual right-click on an envelope to add a new node. as a standalone and as a vst in ableton live this works (as the manual tells you to do), but in cubase it doesn't. the reason i am fairly certain this is an fm8 problem and not a cubase problem is that an earlier demo version of fm8 i had was even worse: most of the controls you had to right-click instead of left-click to even move and many of the other functions were only controllable using weird combinations of clicks and other modifier keys like shift and option. overall not the end of the world because i can still edit envelopes in standalone mode, but that's rather annoying to edit a patch in one program, then load it in cubase.

in short i think NI can be summed up as: their innovation is great, their refinement leaves something to be desired.

[Simonator]

Originally Posted by masterchain

in short i think NI can be summed up as: their innovation is great, their refinement leaves something to be desired.

Or... Their innovation was great, up until about 5 years ago, now, like many big businesses, they've lost customer focus, and make every decision based on what will make them the quickest buck from the mass market.