[techblueberry]

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.

[pier25]

> 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.

[IndySun]

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.

[mycall]

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