Native Instruments Is Bought Out | Hacker News Reader

Native Instruments Is Bought Out

the-berliner.com

33 pointsmrzool9 comments

Private equity firm Francisco Partners did a leveraged buyout to gain majority control in 2021 and then quickly loaded the company up with even more debt by acquiring other smaller music companies. So, five years to reach insolvency is right about on time.

Very sad because 25 years ago NI were innovators in real-time audio DSP running on general purpose CPUs and their more recent Kontrol series of MIDI keyboards are quite good. For anyone who wants more details I found this blog post from an industry insider with some analysis and financial history: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-think-native-instrument...

Hopefully this is good news...NI has been pretty moribund as a creative DSP force after the original owners sold...yes there are Massive X and Abysynth 6 but they've all but pulled the plug on Reaktor (modular audio DSP platform which founders used to prototype almost all their products).

TBH if InMusic can't share a clear roadmap for cutting 2+ decades of tech debt and tiny aliased fonts all over the place I don't hold much hope. I've had good luck with lower-end Akai and Numark gear. Recently Reason Studios (originally created by Propellerheads) is on the upswing since being bought by LANDR a few months ago so I am hopeful that iconic music brands can get into the right hands.

NI has been a husk for a long time, hardly surprising. It really sucks so many great sample libraries used the Kontakt format instead of something standard and open.

Their hardware was also fine but not ground breaking, in a sea of actually great options. They just didn't keep up.

The in-music-ing of so many brands is not going unnoticed among anyone with "I'll buy a moog" money, so while I expect all the brands in music is hoovering up to be profitable, I don't see any of them as huge loss to innovation.

Kontakt has no competitors really. There are no standard and open competitors, the closest is maybe something like HISE but it's not even close from a marketshare perspective.

Soundpaint, Sampletank, LABS, Best Service Engine, UVI Falcon, SINEfactory, Decent Sampler just to name a few

None of those are standard and open except for Decent and UVI which does have third party developers albiet not many. Anecdotally the only dev I know on UVI is acoustic samples? Since Virharmonic moved off of UVI onto their own powered by gorilla

The rest you listed, Soundpaint, Engine, etc. are company specific proprietary samplers. Their only market share is the market share of their own company

A lot of these aren't even samplers?

SINEfactory is just OT's free collection of instruments. Labs is not even a free collection either anymore, Spitfire has done some strange subscription or monetization wrapper around it (and fyi labs used to be on Kontakt).

Decent Sampler is what I had in mind, and I think is slowly seeing more and more adoption. I do have some hope for it.

Their hardware evolved well and their K series keybeds are really solid. Once you install the Komplete software with all the synths and samples it is a lot of fun, if not only by the sheer amount and diversity. Although when you have access to software like Garage Band for free you kinda wonder. I wish they were a bit more open though, we’ll see what happens now.

Shoot, I'm just now realizing that iZotope has also been a dead-company-walking for a couple years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com