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Change of Leadership at NI - Full Version of Kontakt required?


Sander Verstraten

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6 hours ago, Sander Verstraten said:

From the sounds of it, this will also have some real world implications for the customers.

We'll probably see once Komplete 13 drops later this year.

https://www.musicradar.com/news/native-instruments-co-founder-and-president-step-down-to-make-way-for-a-new-generation-of-leadership

Already in effect.  Check the Sennheiser Drum program, new installs as of May require full version to use. After 7 years of being actually free.  LAME.

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You can't really predict much from corporate mumbo jumbo.  There was a rumble that NI may build upon Maschine to make it DAW like and am I def sure they have a new Guitar Rig in the project map.  I was part of beta survey. Not sure about other stuff.

What might be in K13?

- noire

- straylight

- modular icons and or some of their lame play series.

not really enough to entire upgrade IMO.

the rest of the stuff is just too new. but who knows. anything is possible.

 

 

 

 

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19 minutes ago, Magic Russ said:

More likely that Sennheiser paid for a set number of authorizations and finally hit that number. 

Senn offers and continues to offer the package for free.   It is NI that is blocking the ability to do so, paid or not.  

Unfortuntly , it would have been nice if Senn just did a stand alone app in the first place.  NI doens't exactly bring that much value to the table from an end user perspective.

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46 minutes ago, telecode 101 said:

 

What might be in K13?

- noire

- straylight

- modular icons and or some of their lame play series.

not really enough to entire upgrade IMO.

the rest of the stuff is just too new. but who knows. anything is possible.

picked acoustic ? (which is excellent BTW) 

not a huge amount to chose from if they are going to do their normal upgrade prices ?

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6 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

It is NI that is blocking the ability to do so, paid or not.

Are you sure? (I've heard) Player licenses are expensive - maybe they're cutting costs? Or could it be related to the 'legacy' copy protection systems NI are phasing out?

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1 hour ago, antler said:

Are you sure? (I've heard) Player licenses are expensive - maybe they're cutting costs? Or could it be related to the 'legacy' copy protection systems NI are phasing out?

You mean the licences NI requires a developer to pay to be allowed to use the "player" version?  Uh..that is the point....NI has decided it doesn't want to allow Sennheiser to truly make the instrument Free on their platform.....this is on NI.  

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I have no insight into NI but the "supervisory board" and "management board" structure is not uncommon; the supervisory board is longer-term focused. I might be very wrong about this but the dual-board structure might be common in German companies, perhaps even required if they ever went public?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_board

For any random company, the headline "company cofounder and 20-year-technical veteran stepping down, head of marketing becomes CEO" would be scary, but it looks like the new CEO (Constantin) has been with the company a while, handled a lot of their press interactions, and has a music history, so it seems much better than a profit-focused external MBA hire.

Interesting times, and wishing them the best since they're very important in multiple markets (Kontakt, DJing...).

Still hoping all that "platform" hubbub from a few years ago isn't a subscription push. 

 

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9 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

You can't really predict much from corporate mumbo jumbo.  There was a rumble that NI may build upon Maschine to make it DAW like and am I def sure they have a new Guitar Rig in the project map.  I was part of beta survey. Not sure about other stuff.

What might be in K13?

- noire

- straylight

- modular icons and or some of their lame play series.

not really enough to entire upgrade IMO.

the rest of the stuff is just too new. but who knows. anything is possible.

Curious about GR6. GR5 looks to be 9 years old. It sounds ok but there have arguably been a couple major jumps in amp sims since then, so it would benefit from a core update.

My understanding is Komplete includes everything that's been released in the line up until that day, some of it limited to Ultimate. They also sometimes bring previously-ultimate stuff down into the regular version I think?

If that trend holds, the stuff included at this point would be (via https://www.native-instruments.com/en/catalog/😞

Arkhis (for underscore composition)

Stradivari Violin (it's a violin, suprise!)

Pharlight (vocal sample thing, synthy)

Mysteria (vocal sample thing, but this one is spooky)

Session Guitarist Electric Sunburst Deluxe (extended version of Electric Sunbrurst, Les Paul electric guitar)

Straylight as you mention (granular cinematic thing)

Picked Acoustic as Simon mentions (acoustic guitar)

Noire as you mention (piano, supposedly very nice)

Raum (reverb plugin)

a handful of things in the play series

 

So there's some value, but looks most attractive for people composing scores.

The current lack of any flagship product updates - Kontakt, Reactor, or even something like Massive or Guitar Rig, does seem to make it incomplete (inkomplete?).

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Sorry to triple-post :( but at least they're separate sub topics...

For Sennheiser Drummic'a, based on their product page:

https://en-us.sennheiser.com/drummica

it seems that they're indeed moving from a free Kontakt Player product to a free Kontakt library. Though I don't get what the move from Service Center to Native Access has to do with it? Maybe they had a special deal with NI and weren't part of the standard licensing process? IMO it's possible an evaluation was made and it didn't make business sense to keep losing money on it.

Assuming the following page is still valid, I'd been surprised how upfront NI is with the player licensing costs. Many platforms are more of a black box and keep things secret. For free products, likely a $1000 setup fee plus ten cents a license. It sounds like updates cost additional but aren't documented.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/specials/komplete/this-is-nks/pricing/

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My belief would be that they are trying to get rid of the ability to crossgrade for free. They've known for a long time that people were doing that and I believe it was intentional for a while but the time has come that they likely want to end it. Especially as more high profile companies are bailing from their Kontakt engine and more samplers are coming out as competition for Kontakt which could cause a shift. They had no real competition for a long time, now we have UVI Workstation and Falcon, SINE, Whatever Spitfire is calling theirs these days, Engine 3 is right around the corner with a massive overhaul, I also have my suspicions we're going to hear about a new sampler by Spectrasonics soon... They are going to want to capitalise as much as possible at this point.

It looks like Embertone Arcane is still free but who knows how long that will last for.

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1 hour ago, mister_tea said:

My understanding is Komplete includes everything that's been released in the line up until that day, some of it limited to Ultimate. They also sometimes bring previously-ultimate stuff down into the regular version I think?

If that trend holds, the stuff included at this point would be (via https://www.native-instruments.com/en/catalog/😞

Stradivari Violin (it's a violin, suprise!)

Session Guitarist Electric Sunburst Deluxe (extended version of Electric Sunbrurst, Les Paul electric guitar)

Picked Acoustic as Simon mentions (acoustic guitar)

Noire as you mention (piano, supposedly very nice)

I forget which version of Komplete I'm on, but I've wanted Noire for a while and am pretty keen to pick up Stradivari at some point. I'm eager for K13 to come out, and more eager for upgrades to be half price!

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9 hours ago, Batwaffel said:

My belief would be that they are trying to get rid of the ability to crossgrade for free. They've known for a long time that people were doing that and I believe it was intentional for a while but the time has come that they likely want to end it. Especially as more high profile companies are bailing from their Kontakt engine and more samplers are coming out as competition for Kontakt which could cause a shift. They had no real competition for a long time, now we have UVI Workstation and Falcon, SINE, Whatever Spitfire is calling theirs these days, Engine 3 is right around the corner with a massive overhaul, I also have my suspicions we're going to hear about a new sampler by Spectrasonics soon... They are going to want to capitalise as much as possible at this point.

It looks like Embertone Arcane is still free but who knows how long that will last for.

But that will turn people off from sales.

If they want to stay competitive, they should be sweetening the deal for customers, not souring it. If the problem is that people are getting crossgrade pricing for free, the solution would be to keep the libraries Kontakt Player compatible, but also make it so that free Player libraries don't qualify for crossgrade pricing, and make the de-facto price for a full license of Kontakt $249, with crossgrade pricing reduced to $149.

The $399 price tag has been a point of contention and complaint for everyone I have known who makes music for a living, and it's what had been turning people off from NI on the whole, and pushing them to look for alternatives. If they want to win customers back, they should make their flagship products more affordable. Especially in this day and age when affording things is more difficult thanks to COVID shutting income down for a lot of people.

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16 hours ago, Brian Walton said:

You mean the licences NI requires a developer to pay to be allowed to use the "player" version?  Uh..that is the point....NI has decided it doesn't want to allow Sennheiser to truly make the instrument Free on their platform.....this is on NI.  

I don't think the recent change in leadership had anything to do with a fee suddenly being charged for a Player license (which in turn caused Sennheiser to stop offering the Player version of their drumkit) - the Player license has been there for a long time (otherwise, there wouldn't have been so many free-but-requires-full-kontakt libraries in the past).

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3 minutes ago, antler said:

I don't think the recent change in leadership had anything to do with a fee suddenly being charged for a Player license (which in turn caused Sennheiser to stop offering the Player version of their drumkit) - the Player license has been there for a long time (otherwise, there wouldn't have been so many free-but-requires-full-kontakt libraries in the past).

i tried to test the sennheinser drum kit. it only downloads a zip file with bunch of data folders. i tried adding it to Kontakt library and rescanning and no go. anyone know how to get it to load in Kontakt? i tried mapping /users/shared/drummic and well as /users/shared/drummic/data . no luck so far.

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