WARNING !!! If you use old NI product they might stop working on May 31!
Sorry for wildly off topic post and the drama but this is the most trafficked … umm …damned auto censor!
… most t r a f f i c k e d forum with users with the most plugins installed so it’s mostly a matter of effective damage control.
A fair warning from me and maybe people can share the news as they see fit?
After having bought a new hard drive earlier this year I reinstalled my NI stuff including Komplete 10 and also 5 finally.
It’s not really up to date since I don’t use it too much these days but I love the B4 II, Pro53 and Battery 3 and would hate to see them go down the drain.
Basically NI think they need to phase out old stuff so if you want to keep using your old favorites you may need to read this and create a cunning plan …
It doesn’t look like Battery 3 will “go down the drain.” But I won’t be surprised if that day comes in the not too distant future. Battery 4 simply doesn’t have the great features Battery 3 has…however with NI marketing, I guess most won’t even notice. With all the NI lay-offs, department restructuring, and up-coming subscription plan, this rarely ends well for the user.
But opening Battery 4 was easily hands down the most disappointing thing I’ve ever have experienced in the context of updated software.
It was like NI got a new team of programmers and started over completely with new code and they have one person who had worked on Battery before.
They gave him two days to try to remember and give the new team some kind of kick in the butt in the right direction then he was fired as well.
IT’S A NEW PROGRAM WITH THE SAME NAME !!!
That’s all it is. It’s so shallow, empty and inferior to B3 it’s not an upgrade, it’s a downgrade.
Not only that, the content is completely blip-blop and useless.
There is some blip-blop in B3 and I guess that’s not bad per se but it also has lots of actually useful stuff including MIDI files to get you stylistically in the ball park with some of the weird percussion stuff.
And that is of course also gone …
I took a look at it a handful of times then forgot all about it. Completely useless.
And I’m slowly migrating over to Groove Agent as my percussion tool of choice, on top of Superior Drummer for real drums. Man that’s sick!
But Groove Agent is much better for other percussion and it’s connected at the DNA level with Cubase so that’s worth something too!
So Battery isn’t that important anymore even thought it’s still stuck in some projects as the rhythm module until I change it.
But B4II and Pro53 are still payed for and I haven’t seen anything significantly better sounding so they’re still part of the workflow for hammond and prophet 5 noises since I know them pretty well!
Well I have some random plugins on Windows from the 90s still working fine in Cubase with jBridge so I don’t see why they will just stop working. Mac… well, that’s another story. Apple seems to care more about security than keeping older software working. You don’t have to update your OS though.
It’s specifically Native Instruments’ older stuff that you can’t REINSTALL your OS and then the NI stuff and you also can’t install the old NI stuff on a new computer. After this next Monday. You can’t use the NI Service Center program because they will abandon it in favor of the newer Native Access. It’s the activation app that is no more. You can’t fix that with jBridge.
Server dependent authorisations are a real risk. UA pulled the plug from their UAD1 servers. I can still use the plugins I have since it is card based reg file but not buy new plugins (and I would have). But UAD1 still works under win10 64, so they abandoned for no reason other then to push UAD2.
For NI you could use a less official version, in this case warranted imho cause you own the plugins.
I see. Yes that sounds like a problem. It probably wasn’t the smartest choice of them to have multiple versions of Kontakt if they want to eventually abandon the old ones given that older projects will rely on looking for the old version and that newer versions had backwards compatibility anyway.
I guess if you have old projects from 2005 or earlier using NI products that you want to preserve, it would be best to batch export all the audio.
I had some NI stuff a decade or so ago and had hassles with their online challenge / response authorization they were using at the time. After a hard drive failure and adventures trying to reinstall I got it working but it spooked me away from NI and I haven’t bought any of their stuff since. I was actually considering Kontakt recently, but if they’re moving to a subscription mentality then I’m glad I’ve avoided their ecosystem.
Dropping support for old products is fine by me. Any legacy stuff should still work, though.
I also echo the NI support response related to Battery3 line stuff, it’s shocking that they shamelessly point you to another product if you specifically ask for something on a ‘outdated’ plugin.
The vibe I read is that there will be a choice, and not mandatory subscription as I think that could backfire. If you see Evil Dragon in the forums ask him or look at this topic in other larger forums.
My thought is the alternative to subscription may be a non-competitive price for perpetual, nudging users to to subscription. Ultimately for myself, NI is going to have to up their innovation game. There are many vendors now “doing it as good or better” and they can’t hang on to the Kontakt legacy forever. It’s not like 10 or 15 years ago when NI seemed to rule with leading and exciting innovative products.
Yeah! I found the other day the receipt I got from my Komplete 10 from 5 upgrade and it wasn’t even $100 !!! A spectacular offer I just couldn’t refuse.
Now I looked at, is it Kontakt 12, the latest offering and it’s just too much hahaha! Some of it I have from K10 and the rest is just more of the same it looks like.
And still there are only 24 hours in a day and … there would not be time to dig into any of all that. We need to sleep, eat and fart as well!
How could you possibly get any good at use the whole package and why get the whole package just because you can.
So I haven’t even checked the hard drive foot print it would take. I just say no right now hehe. Never thought I’d be in this weird situation
I was active on the Adobe forums when they first started making noise about their subscription offerings. I was pretty vocal about not losing the perpetual license, and Adobe employees assured me that the option would never go away. Not long after that, the only choice was to pay the Adobe Tax for the rest of your life or have your software deactivated. Consequently, I no longer use Adobe products.
When I hear the word “subscription,” I start looking for the exit sign.
haha that was I was trying to give users of the old NI stuff a fair warning about so they could avoid, right?
Too little too late now since the deadline was two weeks ago … or too much too late rather.
For those who don’t have some kind of substitute it will cost both money and hours to replace.
HALion is spectacular and a total MONSTER but won’t replace a Prophet 5 type of plugin?
the alternative to a subscription may be a non-competitive price for perpetual, nudging users to subscription. Ultimately for myself, NI is going to have to up their innovation game. There are many vendors now “doing it as good or better” and they can’t hang on to the Kontakt legacy forever. It’s not like 10 or 15 years ago when NI seemed to rule with leading and exciting innovative products.
…damned auto censor! 
