Ableton Live killed Reaktor star

yeah, seems to me we are the most active community here, a community that actually has to know something and envision something to actually do anything with the product.


My question then is this although the NI seems to be MIA, do they give a darn?

Will the bewildered sense of being totally ignored and not inspired by NI products be answered when we see R6?

I not asking for a reveal, I just want to know if they are really there, I tried talking to a ghoast once and it was rather one-sided. I am honestly annoyed with just seeing more of the same from NI, the same thing they have been pumping and pushing...

As to the Battery Forum I cant believe they are not upset at Machine. I am a Battery user and I owner and I am annoyed and bewildered...

The point is I agree with the above.


**self edited so that no misunderstanding occurs**

 

I think the problem for the Reaktor crew comes down to profitability. I'm in the same boat as you, I couldn't care less about the new products NI anounced@NAMM, but I can believe that the new products will sell alot more copies than an R6 update would have.

NI is a software company, and software developers are expensive, they probably make atleast 100k US$ a year, times 20 of them is 2 million dollars before you start leasing office space and buying google ads. Then of course, you need 10 managers @$200k/year, 15 executive manangers@$500k/year, a 10 member board of directors@$1mil/year, and a CEO@$10mil/year to make decisions for these 20 software developers, as well as lawyers, auditors, and top secret corporate espionage people that NI will never admit exist, all costing amounts of money that may never be known. All told, that would require them to sell over 12 billion R6 updates just to break even, or every person in the entire world buying 2. In contrast, they could actually sell that many copies of a product if they sell products that target the mainstream crowds: DJs, HipHop Producers and Guitar players.

[/rant]

 

You forgot to mention the costs for the staff cleaning the office space...

 

The above mentioned concerns are certainly the reality which is why NI SHOULD be diverse in it's revenue generators, but NOT at the expense of the original base that helped build the company to this point of diversity. All this disgruntled talk right now is more to do with poor communications than anything else IMHO. Take your users/fans along for the ride, don't leave them at home bored and changing channels.

Release all the Maddona albums you want as long as it keeps the occasional King Crimson album green lit

 

AFAIK, doesn't the property manager usually include them with the office lease?

@NI: can we get official confirmation of this? Your response will profoundly affect your Q1 customer loyalty metrics.

 

I think the important part here is that Ableton have understod the importance of the user library and copied that idea. We will most likely see a large and growing MAX devices in the Ableton share database. Only a few will need to learn MAX - and I think that Ableton has at least the double customer base than Reaktor...

I don't think that NI ever understood the potential of the UL and the community.

 

Max has much better tutorials - Max is easier to learn than Reaktor and has taken over Reaktor glory position.....perhaps that's why NI are taking so long over R6

 

Or the server time and maintenance so we can all bitch at them on their dime!

 

Somebody will have to clear something up for me here. So max and Ableton now work really really well together...(having whatched the promo video, they do)

But is it basically that people can build stuff inside of ableton with Max. how does this differ from using reaktor to build instruments in a DAW of your choosing?

(regardless of whether you think max or reaktor is the best...or is that the point here?)

 

At least in that smaller sense what I was trying to express here:

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum_us/showthread.php?t=76792&page=6

 

just read that, very nicely put across too

Max and ableton together look good work wise, but not enough for me to move from reaktors environment. I get everything i want from Logic and Reaktor.

I still look forward to purchasing the next edition of Reaktor.

On another note...based on every laptop performer i have met, all of which use Ableton, it's nice to be the reaktor user amongst them, childish i know.

 

Ah... are there any pitchforks left? Onwards to castle Nativestein...!

NI @ NAMM was pretty disappointing. Ableton Live 8, on the other hand, has a cornucopia of features I'm very excited about. Even their Akai APC 40 control surface has more universal appeal than maschine ... bleh.

yes. pretty awful. But as someone pointed out, they're following the market and what else can be said.

Just give me Reaktor 6, and the ability to export VST plugins like those Cycling 74 folks do with Max/Pluggo (?). I'll be happy.

Reaktor is amazing, and even though I will labor to invest in just about everything Ableton (Max... maybe too, one day?), I'm very much into pursuing the wizardry behind Reaktor.

 

I hadn't even thought of MAX to any serious degree until I saw what they were doing with the Ableton team.

I shan't be dropping Reaktor, however, it looks like FM8, Massive, Battery and some others may be getting sold off.

 

I was dreaming of an hardware machine with built-in 24 bit 96 hz dsp soundcard with 16 audio in audio out , running all native instruments software with a mutlitouch lemur like interface and an integrated DAW .
a kind of komplete but hardware and coming with reaktor 6

but yes I can dream !

 

?

i don't know why you say that. FM8, Massive, and Battery are widely used (in their own right) and are an integral part of Komplete and Kore2.

sowari

 

No doubt to me this is what is the biggest blow to reaktor. Max has simply not been that accessible to someone who doesn't want to program. The reality is there probly is not much this max/live duo can do that you couldn't do with reaktor/live, but the number of users that will have the combo will mean you will see alot of max users making devices for people to use in live. There is a huge "audience" for such things now.
As far as this board, I mean it wouldn't be totally out of line to expect NI to have someone that occasionally answers technical questions on here..That seems pretty standard with every other software I own...not only do we not have that but no one from NI will even take 2 minutes to give an update on R6...its absurd.

 

OK, now I'm back home and I want to elaborate a bit more about Ableton and Cycling collaboration and Reaktor's user perspective on it:

1) Access from Max to all Live parameters via live.xxx objects in Max. Examples: launching Live clips from Max patch; manipulating Live envelopes or parameters of other VST plugins, etc. And vice versa: Live clip can be a "snapshot" (to use Reaktor's terminology), which can set all parameters of the Max device with one click. This is like having Live within Reaktor and being able to control from Reaktor what Live is doing. Honestly, I feel like this feature is so much beyond limits of my own creativity, that I'm really excited to see how people will use this feature. Theoretically, you could to the same with Reaktor running in parallel with Live and wiring both via MIDI Yoke, but translation of any communication between a "synth" and "sequencer" to clumsy MIDI CC protocol is painful.

2) Max for Live can run within Live as a device and send signals (audio or control) OUTSIDE of the device to other devices or VST plugins. Let's say you have a patch, which is generating randomized beat - now you can send it (let's say) to Battery, or record the beat in MIDI clip etc. I don't think it's possible with Reaktor running as VST plugin in Live. Again, you have to run both applications in parallel and use stupid MIDI CC tricks.

3) All this will work in one integrated environment. Right now, to achieve similar results, I have really weird setup, Reaktor runs in parallel to Live, sends audio to a different output, both app communicate via MIDI Yoke, which needs to be installed in the OS, etc. This is all crazy, my projects are not portable anymore, I have to setup the PC properly first to make it work. Max will run in Live and both will talk to each other - I don't need any OS level tools like virtual audio outputs or MIDI routing.

4) Ableton will launch user library. Reaktor's user library is as important to Reaktor's success as the product itself, now Live, which I guess has much larger user base will develop the same. This will take time, but I'm really excited to see how the "academic" Max user group and "DJ" Live group start to work together. Expect unexpected.

5) You can create Max patch while playing audio in Live, playing the patch itself. I can still remember one of my very first lessons as Reaktor user on this forum - I asked "why Reaktor is clicking, when I create a connection and audio is playing". The answer was: "you can't change strings on a guitar while playing it, that's the way it is". Guess what: you can create Max patch in Live and play smooth, continuous audio. Why is this important: let's say you improvise in Reaktor, and you want to add an FX, which is not loaded as instrument yet. Try to load and wire the FX without stopping audio or clicking. Not possible. Max in Live will be able to do it. It will work as real instrument - just connect a cable to mixer and pump up the volume. Beautiful.

Etc, etc... I could go on for hours. The bottom line is that Ableton and Cycling 74 changed things, which were annoyance in music production into something exciting. I'm spending too much time trying to make two separate environments work together: the "sequencer" and the "synth", moving bits and pieces of music between them to create a piece of music. And when I'm done, I can't really play it live anymore, I can hit only "play" in the "sequencer". You have a piece in the "sequencer" which is closed to changes, which can't be altered live, which doesn't allow you to improvise anymore. I really hope Live and Max integration will make it possible to setup an environment, which will allow me to design sound, build randomized beat generators, build a composition out of these elements, finish it, but also open it up when I want to tweak with it or make it fun to play live.

 

That's serious. I only use Ableton for DJing, but that would kick the crap out of my Reaktor ensembles I'm currently using for faders, EQ, FX, etc... Whether that will actually compels me to buy/learn Max or buy the new version of Ableton is another story...

 

There are some videos on synthsite...its completely nuts.
This is basically what I always pictured a reaktor backed NI DAW to be like...Max is basically now the SDK for Live...You can also basically reprogram what that akai controller does with max.
I dont see how anyone can compete with this.

 

I could not agree with this more. As a Max programmer, my
greatest frustration has been that there was no seq/timeline
I could use that allowed me to truly utilize the things that
I built in Max. I compose music in what could be considered a
meta language, that consists of concepts and processes.
The notes are actually the end of the process.
Max allows me to implement these meta level concepts, but in
order to compose with them I had to shoehorn things into the
traditional MIDI sequencer paradigm. This severely limited my
freedom to compose my musical thoughts and also slowed the
whole composition process down.

The improv end of things will benefit just as much. Live and Max
already did both very well. Now it is twice the goodness!

I am very excited to start using it. I think this will really change
the way people look at how music is made with sequencers.
Not only should NI be sweating, but a lot of other people too.