Native Instruments GmbH is in preliminary insolvency | Hacker News Reader

Native Instruments GmbH is in preliminary insolvency

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26 pointsTonyTrapp13 comments

I used to work for a competitor of NI that went out of business years ago. NI's polish, attention to detail, and focus on UX was always pretty extraordinary, I could just tell at the time they were going to crush us even when they were new. This is sad news :(

Any current or former NI people? Penny for your thoughts.

Honestly, internally everyone has seen this coming. The company has gone to shit ever since private equity has been involved.

Surprise, surprise, if you replace most of the c level executives with people that have no clue of the unique space that Native Instruments and its brands operate in, things start to go downhill.

There are still a bunch of very skilled and passionate people working there, but NI really needs to shed all of the weight and refocus on what it has been built on.

So, basically a disrespect of company culture from the new management? Had that too in another company I've worked for and this was part of the reasons why it went downhill. Employees are not willing to do innovation anymore and for whom?

audixdude got flagged for some reason

How much of this is the consequence of piracy? So many musicians use NI VSTs, but because of the expense they're pirating. What if they'd targeted the hobby musician more?

I'm sure piracy has an impact, but they are already targeting hobby musicians with all the soundpacks that can run on Kontakt Player or Reaktor Player and lite versions of Traktor.

I think it's more due to things like - the brilliant founders are no longer there...folks like Stephan Schmitt used Reaktor (node-based audio DSP environment) to prototype so many products over the years, hard to find a bigger product evangelist than founder/COO/CTO types who eat their own dogfood.

When they released Massive X it was way too early, clearly a cash grab and IDK if they ever added back basic UI features like "navigate menus with arrow keys" that worked in all previous versions. Then there are clearly decades of technical debt that still need to be addressed - I stopped using Reaktor and Kontakt several years ago because the tiny anti-aliased fonts still used in various key places are literally too painful to look at.

NI has a strong ARR of $80-100M. The issue is most likely the debt to buy Izotope etc after the acquisition by Francisco Partners.

Almost nothing i assume. NI really lost the plot several years ago when the original founders left the company. Crappy after-sales support, lack of product vision and corresponding crappy execution, and a ton of technical debt all over their product-range. Plus competitors made better/right moves, came alongside, and then moved faster and better, leaving NI in the dust. It's sad to see a company that once was leading in several categories now in this state.

The changing economics of soft synths seems to have made NI this weird case of like reverse enshittification that is still enshittification.

There products are probably better than ever. But like from their marketing material:

"Komplete 15 Standard includes over 95 premium instruments and effects, over 50 Expansions, and more than 50,000 sounds. Get to know some of the highlights below."

10 years ago their complete had like 8 synths and you knew what you're getting. Now you're still getting that and 50,000 sounds, and so it feels like before, you were paying $1-2k for 8 instruments you used all of. Now you're paying similar for all this stuff and you're only using 5% of it, and it just got to the point where I really wanted to simplify my workflow and just use a couple of synths. I still use Kontakt, but I don't think I use anything else, and even Kontakt is crazy since it makes up for a big chunk of that 50k samples.

> There products are probably better than ever.

I would say only Kontakt and Guitar Rig are in good shape.

Reaktor is abandonware at this point. Massive X is still lacking basic features. Absynth 6 is basically a new GUI over the old engine from 2009. Etc.

There were recent rumours of a Reaktor update. Reaktor still sounds out of this world. I use a fair amount still, it never ceases to amaze.

Some corp will likely buy. And all the NI sounds will get absorbed into music generation via AI, alas and hooray.

I dream of a day when some Reaktor/Max LLM can start producing all kinds of random instruments and patches.

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