That’s yesterday’s status.
Check out where the trend is heading.
This platform with free sample packs from the FreeWare community is currently exploding. Of course, there’s a lot of junk out there, but if you try the sample packs rated 5 stars, you’ll see that many of them are great—and the Kontakt player no longer plays a prominent role.
Hmmm, as a professional composer, I can’t use this. Who owns these libraries?
I have to declare that the libraries I use are licensed for commercial use…
Sorry, what do you mean?
Sorry, something ended up in the post that didn’t belong there.
Look, in what style plugins, libraries, and loops are sold today.
There are only sales promotions, such as
spring sale,
summer sale,
fall sale,
winter sale,
birthday sale,
Black Friday,
New Year’s Eve sale,
Carnival sale,
everything must go sale,
everything for one euro sale,
ten plugins for the price of one sale,
please, please buy a plugin or kill me sale.
Everything is explained there. You can use everything freely.
The Native Instruments insolvency isn’t a surprise given the recent private equity trend. My guess is that profitable assets like Kontakt and Ozone will likely be sold to pay debt rather than eliminated. When private equity took over in 2021, I divested and replaced iZotope RX Advanced with SpectraLayers, which is better for my workflow anyway.
We’re lucky Steinberg is owned by Yamaha, a music company with a long-term horizon. This contrasts with the brutal impact private equity and certain conglomerates have had on music tech—from the end of Finale (music notation software owned by PE) to the stagnation at Avid (owned by PE firm STG), NI, and DPA mics etc etc. Wild world!
Dunno, it seems a little off to me. I wouldn’t be confident using these libraries for films with hefty agreements. Plus, the libraries are at best OK, but I can see the potential.
My only intention was to point out the reasons that contributed to NI’s insolvency.
I found half a dozen packs on Pianobook that I would have paid €100 for each without hesitation a year ago.
I hear you, but I think it’s primarily a supply-and-demand issue, and possibly mismanagement. Perhaps what you are referring to plays a role, but the sad truth for these companies is that there aren’t that many professional composers and sound engineers out there, and the same goes for the people who create music as a hobby.
There are only so many plugins & libraries for so many people…
That Pianobook site looked like kind of a mess to me, and only something I would use if I was looking for a very particular sound that I could not find anywhere else. When buying orchestral sample libraries, I go to the developers’ own site, like CineSamples, Audiobro, ProjectSam etc. I need full sections that go well together (both regarding their sound, programming and user interface) and are meant to blend together. Then I also visit developers like Soniccoutoure or small developers like Bolder Sounds when I want special sounds. All these libraries run on Kontakt and nothing else.
I’m not so sure those free libraries had much to do with NI insolvency. It was mismanagement combined with a shift in corporate philosophy, especially after 2017 when the first private equity firm moved in.
In the founder led era (before 2017)
After that (PE / portfolio led era): fewer radical new engines more emphasis on:
Did they really kill the Exponential Audio reverbs?? I didn’t know that. How could they - they were great! I used Nimbus on a lot of projects some years back, just before they were bought by iZotope.
This whole thing is so sad. I never knew much about how the company was run, or that there was a shift around 2017. Makes a lot more sense now. And even more sad.
Yes, they killed Exponential, some truly fantastic tools, Carnes’s last great reverbs. I couldn’t believe it. That’s about the time I moved away from Izotope / NI.
I can live without iZotope, but not without NI and especially Kontakt. Hope that some good can come out of this, maybe it will end up in better hands… Because Kontakt surely must survive in some way or other.
I agree and I’m pretty sure Kontakt will survive in one way or another. But it’s also a good time for Steinberg to make some moves with Halion, which I think is deeper and better than Kontakt. But as we all know, sooooo many libraries are available for Kontakt, and many are dependant on them
Interesting - is Halion really deeper and better? If so, it’s not very well known, I think? Can it do stuff Kontakt can’t? At least I don’t know of any big orchestral libraries for Halion that are known to rival something like Cinesamples, Audiobro, Orchestral Tools, Spitfire or any of those. I’d be happy to be wrong!
I had a feeling that more third party developers were making libraries for Halion when I started out around 2005, but Kontakt became an industry standard shortly after that. (I might be confusing Halion with something else like Gigastudio, we’re talking 20 years ago :D)
I used Gigastudio! Time flies. Yeah, Kontakt is the industry standard, and most libraries are for it. But I’ve made instruments in both Kontakt and Halion for my projects, and prefer working in Halion. I’m not sure if there’s a viable way for steinberg to break into Kontakt’s dominance…
From a comment on the NI forums:
I think that as a brand, NI is way too big to disappear like smaller companies. Ownership might change (or might have already changed), but their reach in the industry is massive. Honestly, it’s safe to say that in the last 15–20 years, at least one NI product has been used in pretty much every hit song.
Now, speaking as an ignorant bastard speculating on the internet, I think NI will most likely stay around under new leadership. Maybe they’ll lose Plugin Alliance or Brainworx, if anything, but NI and iZotope have enough brand recognition to keep creating new things.
If they don’t go under, they just need to double down on innovation. Their MIDI keyboard series is, in my opinion, the BEST of the best. Nothing else comes close. The NKS protocol is the result of decades of work, and its 3rd party DAW integration is the best you can get for a generic protocol. It’s not like Ableton developing Push only for Ableton. A brand like NI can’t just vanish, especially because there isn’t a real “second place” competitor in the same sphere.
NI’s talented programmers will now look around to see where they can earn the most money. Logically, that will be with NI’s competitors. This will finally seal NI’s fate.