Anyone else hate Native Instruments

[molarofrancesco]

The quality of their products is fine from time to time, but it's the problem all big manufacturers have. Most of their first party products are awesome (mostly those which were created for using their own software like Machine). But third party soft sometimes can be a piece of crap with a very high price... as for Kontakt... sometimes it feels like piece of unoptimized crap, but what choice do we have???

[Mr.Mxyzptlk]

I came here just to rant on NI. I hate Kontakt with a vengeance and will never for the life of me understand why Spitfire Audio use Kontakt for some of their libraries when their own Spitfire plugins are 100x better?

Everything is so crammed into that poxy interface, it just gives ne a headache. Unless I'm missing something, I don't know why anyone would go full Native?

[Northfield.Lenox]

Maybe use Komplete Kontrol instead of the Kontact interface?

[mixyguy2]

Update I must say in fairness that recently I've had contact with their tech support and it has been a positive experience overall.

Kontakt however still sucks ass. The ONLY reason to buy that POS is because there are so many worthwhile libraries that require it. But get it on sale! It is nowhere near worth the full price which is absurd.

[Rogar]

LOL... I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate them, but I like this thread. I'm back in a reluctant but functional "strategic alliance" with Kontakt now that I've got it working again and using a lot of Orange Tree libraries that depend on Kontakt, but I just ranted quite a bit about problems with NI/Kontakt recently too...

"Mixed feelings" pretty much says it all, I guess.
I got Komplete 5 back in something like 2013.
I think some of their VSTs are really beautiful: I absolutely LOVE their beautiful orchestral harp and their nylon guitar, and have got a huge amount of mileage out of them (and some of their other instruments) for over 10 years.
(Though I now have even better guitars thanks to Patrick Payne on this forum recommending Music Labs to me, and their VSTs stand alone without depending on Kontakt, which rocks!)
I also like Kontakt 5's French Horns (though they didn't do the greatest job sampling some of the softer notes and left in a bunch of hiss and fizz noise for some of them), and some of their synths and bass guitars are nice too.

But as software... I mean, Kontakt could technically be worse, but I've never personally had any other music software that gave me so much trouble:
Kontakt pissed me off so many times wasting hours of my time hanging up the DAW for long periods of time, crashing, and pulling other high-maintenance prima-donna behavior that I actually spent hours sampling every note of my favorite Kontakt 5 instruments back around 2017, and re-assembling them all as hand-made VSTs via a defunct but still fully usable free VST sampler called "shortcircuit." I still use those for every Kontakt instrument so that I do not have to load Kontakt itself... with the big exception of Orange Tree libraries.

That laborious manual sampling process is something I could never do with OTS stuff, because the playability in their VSTs is just insanely good, and they (unfortunately) license Kontakt. I wish they'd go standalone, but they've invested their libraries in Kontakt so long, I'm pretty sure Kontakt is here to stay if you want to use their stuff.

So the key reason why I use Kontakt regularly still is that some of the best VSTs I've ever used license Kontakt: Orange Tree Samples, in particular. (I'm in heaven lately going wild on Orange Tree Evolution Infinity, Passion Flute, and Angelic Harp and Zither, which all -- unfortunately -- require Kontakt, but damn, they are great VSTs!!)

[Rogar]

Yes Native Instruments are terrible. Awful company to deal with full of assholes and arrogant idiots. To top it off their UI is clunky and outdated with a ton of bugs then when you actually have to attempt to deal with the punks via EMAIL only (for a premium product) because they cut down their team 90% two years ago, it takes Forever and then they end up ignoring you completely.

They are scum bags with crappy tech. They spent all their money on marketing and developing plastic crap.

LOL, you guys are hilarious!
Since Kontakt is so often such an f-ing lemon as piece of software, I never even bothered reaching out to NI's support when their Native Access app made it totally unusable, but I can't say I'm surprised to hear that was your experience!

Kontakt already sucked as a piece of software back when I got it back in 2013-ish, but now that we're in the whole "cloud" phase where they force auto-updates on us, it's gotten even worse: NI just had me locked out of my own Native Access account for over a week (might've coincided with that "Crowdstrike" fiasco that caused global outages, but still..), and the only reason I was able to get back in was that Greg S at Orange Tree (who doesn't even work for Kontakt, but develops his libraries licensing Kontakt) recommended some obscure C++ library that fixed the problem.

Someone else gets it, thank you. Really there's almost nothing about this company and their products that doesn't suck IMO.
...
They can and do literally get away with being incompetent, apathetic, and arrogant. I just hope I live long enough to see them regret it, much like IBM did back in the early PC days.

Update I must say in fairness that recently I've had contact with their tech support and it has been a positive experience overall.

I'm shocked!

Kontakt however still sucks ass. The ONLY reason to buy that POS is because there are so many worthwhile libraries that require it. But get it on sale! It is nowhere near worth the full price which is absurd.

Well spoken, sir!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB4K1di8M6g

[mixyguy2]

NI put out some good stuff back when. But as far as I can tell, most of the people who were good left the company and it's been downhill ever since.

I have Kontakt 6.X and have no interest in upgrading ever. I have all I need that works with that version or less