Native Instruments in preliminary insolvency

Well, the title says it all. Google it to find out more! Hopefully Kontakt survives.

I saw that. Very sad news. I have a ton invested in Kontakt and NI… hopefully somebody buys it up.

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Should that be insolvency?

Proofreaders rule! OQ!

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Corrected

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One of the major players with hundreds of employees - sad news.

I would have thought there’s enough in the business and a significant user base to attract the attention of others.

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Yes, I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t buy Kontakt and all the licensed libraries, unless there’s some hidden problem.

Interesting that Orchestral Tools moved away from Kontakt in the last few years.

What are the other ā€˜general purpose’ players (i.e. not locked to a particular products)?

HALion (if you buy the full app, you can make your own sample instruments); Sforzando/ARIA
… any more?

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Yes, UVI Falcon, the player version is UVI Workstation.

I don’t think Kontakt is in danger. Too many libraries need it and sales are strong, someone will want to keep it going.

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I have always wondered why library creators latched on to Kontakt when they could have simply gone the extra 100 meters and created their own VST. There are and have been tools that make creation and maintenance fairly routine.

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Probably because creating and maintaining your own VST takes more time, effort and money than just paying the fee to have Kontakt host it.

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:slight_smile: I was careful not to say ā€œeasyā€ as I’m a developer myself (or at least was for a long time).

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Here’s a link to a new story about it.

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Thanks Ben - that’s reasonably positive.

I’d be interested in the back story of how the debt was built up. I’m sure it’ll come out at some stage.

According to the addendum, it was debt from numerous acquisitions. Apparently revenue couldn’t keep up in servicing the debt.

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This is concerning. I have Spitfire SSO 2024, Discover SSO, Spitfire Solo Violin, Kontakt library and other useful libraries all dependent on Kontakt (as many others here do). I assume that the full player and libraries we already own will still remain functional.

I think they will, but the issue is going to be OS updates.

A video from someone who used to be a part of the team.

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A couple of years ago, the owner of another famous VST developer, with famous clients like Hans Zimmer, told me, that they just can work half-time because the bigger studios (at least in Germany / Europe) doesn’t / can’t invest anymore in new audio software. The situation before ā€œCOVID 19ā€ was really bad and after that it was worse. A lot of big and famouse recording studios in Germany had to close. And the biggest section of clients the VST developers have are the small / private clients / non-professional clients. And they don’t have enough money as well. At least in Germany because our economy is going down since years. Now we have the worst economical situation since the fall of the wall. All (!!) German TV stations had to dismiss hundreds to thousends of employees each because if nothing is going to be produced anymore no company can do advertising anymore. And if they can’t do advertising anymore, the TV stations can’t earn money anymore. And advertising companies too. And the less media productions, the less audio- / music-production. The economy in Germany is too expencive. It’s a homemade problem of the German (worse) politics and a lot of bad decisions of different industries in Germany in the past. Therefore the house of cards of the German economy is crashing down.