Just a heads-up: Native Instruments GmbH in Berlin seems to be within (preliminary) insolvency proceedings.
This does not mean that NI plugins will stop working; especially Kontakt, Traktor, Maschine seem to be assets of significant value, so that an insolvency manager will do their best to protect their value by continuing operations, and to find a new home for them.
But at the moment, I wouldn’t invest in any new Kontakt libraries - or build complex Cantabile setups based on Kontakt, TBH…
Just a quick addition: this may not only affect NI products, but also Izotope. PluginAlliance and Brainworx, which are all part of the NI corporate structure…
Plus all the Komplete Kontrol integration (NKS) of numerous plugins.
But the biggest impact will certainly be on all the third-party sample library developers relying on Kontakt to drive their libraries - I really hope that someone can be found to keep Kontakt alive!
I bought plugins from all vendors named above but stopped using them years ago.
Especially for live use I don’t like Internet based copy protections. In most cases it isn’t transparent under which conditions home phoning occurs and if you like to install the plugins on a new machine the amount of activations may be limited or the company is gone .
Instead I try to replace sampled Instruments. There are alternatives for most cases.
My original VST rig was a Muse Receptor. Everything in that was NI. I don’t know how many of youse ever touched one of those, but any time you wanted to add a vst, you had to dig around through their proprietary mess of … anyway. I am SO glad I stubbled upon Cantabile in my search to move away from that system. And now I’m glad I have been moving away from NI.
I want to personally take a moment to address the recent news about Native Instruments.
Please rest assured that business continues as usual at Native Instruments, iZotope, Plugin Alliance and Brainworx. Our hardware and software products remain on sale and available for download and activation. Our passionate and dedicated teams are here and supporting customers as normal. In product and engineering, we are continuing to develop and launch new products and features. Our NKS Partnerships team continues to process Kontakt Player licences and NKS Partner submissions.
We are working diligently and responsibly to secure a healthy, financially sustainable future for Native Instruments. As you may have seen, Native Instruments GmbH has entered a restructuring process in Germany, as have 3 of our German non-operating holding companies. In legal terms, we have filed applications to open pre-insolvency proceedings for those companies.
We are focused on providing continuity for creators, customers, and partners. We’ll continue to share updates as we have them.
I’m a lifelong musician myself, and have been a passionate fan of Native Instruments for 25 years. Our mission to inspire and enable creators to express themselves through sound continues.
I had breakfast today with a local sample library developer and this came up as well.
We both think that some company (hopefully not Gibson or Fender, who have horrible track records with software acquisitions) will either provide funding or buy NI at some point because they DO have assets that are valuable. Many of their libraries are licensed from others, but Kontakt and Traktion and some of the other “apps” are theirs alone. We may see some of them go away, but I would think that someone will pick up Kontakt as it’s a standard.
We saw this a couple years ago with Finale as well.
It’s also not unusual that this type of information surfaces after NAMM (and before Music Messe) as those are good book ends to start conversations with other firms - I’ve been part of those in a past life.
A bit of conjecture on my part:
I think NI, and Arturia to a different extent, are in a similar place to Microsoft from a software standpoint. I haven’t “needed” a new feature in Microsoft Office in a long, long time. Microsoft understood that AND moved to a subscription model to help provide value (you get new features - even ones you don’t think you’ll use, but you also get maintenance) once Office became “mature”.
It’s been years since I felt the need to buy into NI during Black Friday . Not because I don’t like their stuff, but because (with the exception fo Kontakt) most of the “new” things offered were libraries I didn’t really have a use for. Arturia is slightly different for me as I’m on a 2-3 year cycle with them because they add new “models” over time that I feel I want to mess with - especially since I really wouldn’t want to pay for the hardware (and if I did buy a Jupiter and CS80 and an OBXa the wife would kick me out and they’ve have to fit into a tiny apartment ).
It’s one fo the reasons that I like Brad’s yearly subscription model - I get the fixes, and the features, without having to pay a lot for things I don’t want.
I agree with your conjecture, but would also posit that maybe one of the reasons NI got into difficulty is it went on an acquisition spree - probably as it saw it as a route to further growth. But that approach can dilute attention from what you do well.
If NI folded tomorrow, so long as Kontakt carried on working, it would not affect me. I am not actually a fan of Kontakt. I find the UI awful and crammed (especially for these aging eyes on hi res monitors), but a lot of libraries only targeted it.
I also have a pretty heavy investment in Izotope for mixing/mastering, but again, so long as licenses carry on working for the current offerings, all would be good.
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