NI Insolvency

[Phelan Kane]

Been chatting to current and ex NI employee mates about the state of them for years. Since the CI and the racist marketing scandal its been a bit toxic. A few years ago a mate working for them on the stand at Superbooth here in Berlin said the CEO was fired after not making enough shareholder dividends. Think he only been there for a short time. The CI thing kinda fucked it. Has been a sinking ship for a few years. Same thing kinda happened to Digidesign / Avid years ago. At least Yamaha didnt screw Steinberg that badly. Ableton had loads of problems recently. There was a corporate restructure of the entire business due to liquidity issues post pandemic. A lot of the senior team at Ableton fled shortly after, many to L'Acosutics. Mind you Dirk Ulrich from Plug-in Alliance and Brainworkz seems to do well out of the NI CI thing. He recently brought Manley Labs. However clunky Kontakt is / was the engine was still well engineered. Timur Doumler played a large pat in that I believe, then he left to join the JUCE team at ROLI.

DE insolvency law is complicated. One of the DE audio colleges I freelanced at for years went down two years ago. If there is asset sell off its controlled by the government appointment lawyers. The NI board dont get much say. I guess the 3rd party lib devs will pull their IP out. Absynth 6 is fairly new so I guess as it was a dev partnership with Brian Clevinger may he can salvage his IP.

Not good news for audio industry the week of NAMM but I guess we might expect an upsurge in devs flipping to HISE.

P

[Felix W]

With the development of AI music, simple needs will no longer require music producers, leading to a significant number of music producers leaving the field. This indirectly reduces demand in the audio development sector, making it even more difficult for the already low-demand audio hardware and software industry to survive.

[dannytaurus]

I bet NI's servers are blowing up right now, with everybody downloading installers for every product they've ever bought.

[Lindon]

@dannytaurus said in NI Insolvency:

I bet NI's servers are blowing up right now, with everybody downloading installers for every product they've ever bought.

The problem with this approach is Native Access - which validates and installs their products - requires access to the NI Servers, so people may get the apps they require but they cant (re)install them if NI just "goes away" - which frankly is very very unlikely...

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon Agreed that NI is very unlikely to just suddenly disappear. There's too much valuable IP for that to happen. But there will probably be a mass exodus of staff.

But those servers are getting hammered right now, that's for sure!

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon I know this is a big ask, but if anyone here is deeply familiar with Kontakt or Reaktor it would be really cool if they could cobble together a "HISE for Kontakt/Reaktor developers" guide.

Just terminology and concept translations really.

That would surely help a lot of the new folks to acclimatise to HISE.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in NI Insolvency:

"HISE for Kontakt/Reaktor developers" guide.

People keep asking me for this. I'm just not sure how it would work, the two are so different.

I'll have a think and see if I can come up with a structure that makes sense.

[Lindon]

@dannytaurus yeah Dave your man for this - if it can be done at all he would be the one to be able to do it, that he would even want to is a different question....

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey said in NI Insolvency:

I'm just not sure how it would work, the two are so different

That's kinda the point!

I'd help if I could, but I only built a couple of basic things in a very old version of Reaktor, and I never got on with Kontakt at all.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus I've received another two requests for this so I'm working on it now :) Might get a video out today or tomorrow...

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey I don't think you need to rush it. Plus, maybe an accompanying document would be good because it can be updated without republishing the video?