Native Instruments....is there something wrong?

[djmukilteo]

Are there any satisfied NI customers out there?
Is there anyone who has never had a problem with their products?
Have you had problems? Were they resolved?
How much have you spent on NI products?
Have you had thoughts of never buying another one of there products?

[jbuonacc]

never had a problem. i only own Reaktor 5, but still. recently updated it as well (had to use their newer registration tool which i've heard horror stories about), but everything went smooth.

[Eric J]

Never had a problem. Own Massive, Battery and Traktor. Alll work great.

[Hi PHi]

I LOVE Kore, FM8, Battery, Absynth and Reaktor.

I've never had a problem with any of their software, authorization, the Service Center...anything really. It works well and sounds great. I'm on both Mac and PC, too.

[Jorg]

i currently run komplete 5 (soon 6)
never had any problems

[timbreman]

When I updated to Win7 NI Electronic Instruments was the ONLY vsti I had issues with. Told me the version I am using changed or something I cant remember. Havent had a chance to resolve it yet.

[UH417]

AK1, Komplete 5, Absynth 5 user, extremely pleased.

Only issue I have is the weird midi control issue with OS X 10.6 and the Audio Kontrol mapping software, but that is just a minor bother, it'll get updated eventually.

[Doktorfuture]

I am satisfied now. But their stuff has crashed for years. There've been products like Spektral Delay that crashed pretty much constantly. A lot of times Reaktor would crash in the old days. It's more stable now. Still, I think their QA needs an entirely different paradigm.

I'm more worried about what the future holds for NI. They'll have to get into performance controllers like Maschine to deal with piracy. Also, any new development in soft-synths is probably going to start showing diminishing returns as they've got so much in so many areas.

Some strategies for NI that make sense to me:
- Create inter-application modules like DCAM synth-squad, esp. for control signals.
A cross-platform strategy for managing control signals (like beat up / beat down / frequency gates, LFO's and complex CV generated or extracted from audio) would be awesome.

- License Karma from Stephen Kay and extend it with a lot of performance note information modifiers. Again, with a common bus across applications.

- Create a GPU assisted convolution reverb system would be very good, esp. with lots of strange convolutions.

- Make an internet patch browser for collaborative sharing.

- More internet collaboration for real-time remote artists.

- Enter real time accelerated video processing market. This is a big leap, but would be good for them.


But whatever they do, they need a whole new QA paradigm.

Originally Posted by djmukilteo

Are there any satisfied NI customers out there?
Is there anyone who has never had a problem with their products?
Have you had problems? Were they resolved?
How much have you spent on NI products?
Have you had thoughts of never buying another one of there products?

[ohmicide]

komplete 5 over here... gotta get me some komplete 6

[C Heat]

Being a Pro Tools user I have NEVER used ANY of the products before (for obvious reasons).

I recently picked up SSD and some Chris Hein stuff that uses the Kontakt 3.5 player and so far everything has run very nicely. No hiccups—yet (touch wood).

Pro Tools LE 8.0.1 Mac 10.5.8

[questionable]

From my experience, NI has 3 major problems:

1) Their authentication scheme is a pain in the arse. The "NI Service Center" has serious problems. Most recently, when attempting to upgrade my copy of Traktor, the Service Center got stuck in a endless loop of upgrading. It was a real pain to get that squared. I can't even really tell you how I got it sorted, it was just a long process of uninstalling and reinstalling.

2) They're slow updating their products. It seems like bugs stick around for a long time.

3) Their customer support is pitiful. I've not had any first hand experience, but the internets are full of people complaining that it's been weeks since they sent a support request with no response.

That being said, I currently own and use Traktor and Komplete 5, and they are both fine products.

[W-W-Int]

haven't had any complaints with their stuff other than reaktor 3 and absynth 2 being a bit buggy and a few times crashing at random. other than that fm-8 is a great softie as was fm-7 before it. like pro-52/53 as a good softie for a nord lead replacement. massive i tried and didn't resonante with it and i really don't like the metallic sound of absynth and gave up on it after version 3. b4 i have no use for the sound of, and battery was never a very good product for the price. kontakt is an okay sampler and now has a huge library and a lot of thrid parties use the player version for their library releases. it's stable and doesn't eat the cpu. my main beef with it is of course the full version's price is too high, for that money I fell that emulator x is a much better product with much better features and sound and filtering and modulation possibilities etc...

basically i have not had a problem that was really all that great with the performance of their products. my only problems were with the pricing of some of their synths and the flatness of the sound of the majority of them. fm-8 is the best thing they have and then probably pro-53. after that i just go meh when i hear the others and don't particularly like the pricing in general. reaktor is a pain to do anything simple in and unless you need to start fresh with a specific controller arangement or do something completely requiring an in depth completely customised sound pathway it's not the best out there. there are better alternative modular soft synths.

vaz modular kills it in sound and ease of setup, vaz loses in some areas like customization and odd routing or rerouting controllers for iterative loops with multiple destinations dependant on using conditionals. (which for a 4 osc with filter setup isn't neccesary which is where it completely kills reaktor in ease of use and quality of result)

[C Heat]

Originally Posted by briansmallroom

2) They're slow updating their products. It seems like bugs stick around for a long time.

They can't be as bad as a certain DAW maker we all know...

[Jovas]

Hmmmmmm?

[ignatius]

no problems here. long time NI user. everything works great. no issues on OSX or Winblows.

totally satisfied.

[SNOTMONSTER]

For some reason Komplete5 makes Logic freeze aahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

[digital 1010]

Wicked software

buuuuuuuuut

Awful authentication and very slow bug fixes.

I own battery,fm8,absynth and massive they get pretty much loaded into any project.

The only 2 bugs i have at present is massive version 1.14 crashes cubase when changing preset which is known bug and still not fixed over a month or so later, and battery causes the glue compressor needle to stop working when closing and reopening a project in cubase 4.5.2

Ben

[Arcadia]

To the original poster... is there any particular reason you ask such questions? I've had Komplete on my system for years and just got K6 and everything has worked fine for me on both Logic and Live.

[inthere]

Originally Posted by briansmallroom

From my experience, NI has 3 major problems:

1) Their authentication scheme is a pain in the arse. The "NI Service Center" has serious problems. Most recently, when attempting to upgrade my copy of Traktor, the Service Center got stuck in a endless loop of upgrading. It was a real pain to get that squared. I can't even really tell you how I got it sorted, it was just a long process of uninstalling and reinstalling.

2) They're slow updating their products. It seems like bugs stick around for a long time.

3) Their customer support is pitiful. I've not had any first hand experience, but the internets are full of people complaining that it's been weeks since they sent a support request with no response.

That being said, I currently own and use Traktor and Komplete 5, and they are both fine products.

Slow to update their products? I bought the East West Gold symphonic orchestra pack a few months before the intel Macs came out a few years ago. They gave up and refused to support it. A few months later they offered me a supported version at only about $299 I think.

If I ever meet the guy in charge of customer service, I do believe I'd turn him into a racoon.

[Arcadia]

Originally Posted by inthere

Slow to update their products? I bought the East West Gold symphonic orchestra pack a few months before the intel Macs came out a few years ago. They gave up and refused to support it. A few months later they offered me a supported version at only about $299 I think.

If I ever meet the guy in charge of customer service, I do believe I'd turn him into a racoon.

Actually that was not an NI product. East/West simply licensed Kontakt Player for this and then decided they didn't want to continue paying royalties to NI and developed their own engine. If you're pissed you should be pissed at them. Of course, you could have always used your library in the full version of Kontakt if you had that.

[Yoozer]

Never had troubles with authorizing or updating products.

Problems I had:

- typing in the preset browser, solved by upgrading Ableton (which I was going to do anyway)
- scrollbars in the preset browser don't always react to the mousewheel
- Kontakt tended to crash pretty badly in Live
- many instances of Kontakt result in an error of no longer allowing me to create new MIDI tracks; solution: use a single instance multitimbrally; problem: you can't render separate tracks faster than realtime in that case.
- FM8: when importing a lot of DX7 sysex the browser gets slow, not good
- Absynth: lots of presets make the browser slow, but that was fixed with an update.

Rest of the stuff; no problems I can think of at the moment.

[cltd]

Own Komplete 5. The only problem I had it was failed Battery DVD and it took one month to get new one (it is known problem, see NI's forum).
Service Center works like a charm. NI synths like Massive, FM8, Absynth are top class, never crashed, no problems etc.
But... NI Kontakt 3 doesn't work in Mac Os 10.4. Runs with Leopard fine, but my second Mac has Tiger and there it crashes at startup.

[kilon]

Well if I exclude the crappy Kore 1 software , which crashed several of my VSTs . Overall I am very happy with NI.

There is no way a company that has made a software like Reaktor can be called a "bad" company.

[kasprouch]

Originally Posted by kilon

There is no way a company that has made a software like Reaktor can be called a "bad" company.

they bought it


really shitty launch cycle, with their new products almost guaranteed to not work until the .1 update release... anybody seen support for Snow Leopard??? damn things had its developers code released for a year now. half my NI stuff wont activate, and the other half self destructs on installation .

their products are cool, but their service is awful.

[kilon]

Originally Posted by kasprouch

they bought it

sorry but where you heard that Ni bought reaktor ? this is the first time I hear this.

[kasprouch]

they purchased the project of some Russian dude who developed Reaktor 5 for NI instead of finishing his own.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/23.html

thats my biggest gripe as well - no Reaktor 6 after 4 years?

[kilon]

Originally Posted by kasprouch

Pretty much... they bought the project of some Russian dude who developed Reaktor 5 for NI instead of finishing his own.

thats my biggest gripe with NI as well - no Reaktor 6 after 4 years?

still they made reaktor.... And Reaktor as it is is amazing.... the only thing missing is a vst export like synthmaker which is also amazing. Both modulars can be used to build even the circuity of the synths you want to make, insane stuff.

SynthMaker - Modular VST and DSP Visual Programming Environment

"Hey Sir I would like to order Unlimited free time with my Lamp , thank you "

[Beermaster]

Running NI Kontakt 1 on two Xenon PCs running Windows XP

Kontakt 2 and 3.5 on G5 mac and two Mac Pros

Never had a problem with any of them, which is more than I can say for East West's PLAY and Steinberg Halion all of which screw up fairly regularly.

[living sounds]

Mostly crappy sound.

[Yoozer]

Originally Posted by kilon

sorry but where you heard that Ni bought reaktor ? this is the first time I hear this.

Do you know they bought Absynth, too?