Come on Native Instruments! Think Linux!

Telecode if you fired someone for that in my neck of the woods, you'd be prosecuted/fined for unfair dismissal.

However gents, This is bordering on the hostile shitposting/flamewar territory now so I'm done. I came here to show support for Chis B's cause, instead got faced with whatever this is - i'm out.

 

Sorry . Not trying to turn it into a flame war. I am just making a point. It's one thing to buy into an ideology of FOSS. Its another to take on the risks associated with it. In my example. That employment scenario would be totally realistic. The Linux user base "should" be more tech savvy than the dumbie Windows & Mac user base. So the tickets that come in would be less and should be solvable by 1% of your client services team if the user base is supposedly 1 to 2 %. Now the fact that you might bitch and complain down the road how come all the Windows and Mac support guys are having so many coffee breaks because there are so many of them compared to you and you have to work every second to keep up with the tickets and that's unfair.. it going to be another discussion.

So it comes down to put your money and job at stake if you believe it is going to be a success . The issue with FOSS is everyone likes the ideology behind it but no one wants to take on the risks associated with it. It's a lot more fun to just tag along for the ride and let someone else take the risks.

I have no issue putting my job and pay cheque on the line in the idea of providing stable and reliable server based support services on FOSS technology. I do it and know it works.

But I would not want to put my job on the line and say yes, investing X amount on a version for the FOSS community will work and supporting that community will be no problem .

Organizations like the Apache foundation have it ingrained in their culture and mandate to promote and uphold FOSS. NI do not . They are a for profit COTS company that are in the business of selling consumer software and hardware. They have no vested interest it promoting FOSS because it does not make money for them and can only cause grief if the user base bitches and complains how badly the Linux based offerings are because it will spill over into the way the Windows and Mac offerings are percieved.

Why don't you just use Bigwig? They have a Linux offering and should be a much better solution than something like Rose garden.

FWIW.. It would be cool to have a Linux based alternative. But it would never make me move from OS X to a Linux flavor. There are too many other things I use in music that i need to work which do not warrant migrating over that easily.

 

fwiw, there is one okay alternative called Mixxx, but as much promise as it shows, it's not really what i'd call a drop-in replacement for Traktor. It does the job, and sure it's getting a lot better, but it's not quite there yet.

On the side, i'm helping the guy who develops openAV-Ctlra get support working for the MK3, but progress is kinda slow, and we're limited on what we can do beyond sniffing USB Traffic with wireshark to work out what the control signals are. (HINT: proving very difficult with motorised jogs)

 

if kontakt work in wine, there is a easy to do way with a little luck for kontaktg developers, using winelib and the winemaker(if it is for windows visual c++ projectfile) script and wine resource maker. this create makefiles and hopefully it compile without problems. steinberg have since some time their VST sdk add for linux.
https://wiki.winehq.org/Winelib_User's_Guide#What_is_Winelib.3F

 

If you want to persuade Native Instruments to provide a linux version, it is senseless to post arguments into this forum. Here, you may persuade users (or not) but that has no use. This thread is very old and still without any statement from any NI employee, therefore no good way to communicate this request with the right persons at NI.

Regarding the Komplete Audio 6, this is a USB-class-compliant audio interface like the most others too. There is no special "Komplete Audio 6" drivers. The generic USB audio driver is enough. Under Windows and Mac OS X, it should also usable with the drivers provided by the operating system.

 

here, here, i'm dreading the fact that i'll be forced to buy windows 10 by the new year!

 

I doubt NI will spend thousands of man hours porting their software to Linux just so a few users can save $800.

 

Mac, and PC sorry.

 

I support the idea of better Linux support for some of NI's software. At least they could provide an LV2 port of the Free Kontakt Player so we can use the existing NKS instruments with Linux + JACK. Although a community-based open source NKS player would be a possible future project as well...

 

This is not nearly as easy as you might think it is, since LV2 has some tricky implementation details so some things from VST don't translate well. Don't hold your breath.

 

Sure it isn't easy Maybe they could provide a proprietary, but documented library to read NKS instrument files so people could integrate it into existing sampling software for Linux, if needed. Or an NKS to SF2 converter or to any other FOSS supported sound font format.
Just figuring out options that don't "have them implement everything again but for Linux".

 

I really wouldn't hold my breath for any of that to happen

 

If you want to use all the NI stuff under Linux; it runs perfectly under WINE if you know how to install it. Therefore, it is not really important to have a native version running as long as you use a conventional PC.

The only big crap is that Native Access isn't able to perform software installations while it is still usable to register the serials. But after a failed software installation through Native Access, you will find all the installer executables in a temp folder which you can run as standalone installers afterwhile.

To facilitate a more comfortable installation procedure, that does not depend on Native Instruments. Community driven installation helpers may also be possible. Installation helpers are also availlable for hundreds of Windows games and the most important windows software (winetricks for example).

But yet, nobody coded installation helper scripts for the NI software.

 

I know this thread is old but then again...

Yah, I rated that funny because I think it is. You obviously have no idea how much money this is going to cost N.I. to set this all up, but where will that money be coming from? Not from any expanded new sales on Linux that's for sure. For the simple reason that this platform is plain out unreliable and unpredictable.

Fact remains that on this platform heavy changes can be made based on the whim of one (or more) developers who only care about one thing only: the OS itself. It's reliability and thus backwards compatibility is of no concern what so ever to them.

Meaning? I can run software build for the original BSD relatively easy on the latest FreeBSD. Heck, FreeBSD itself (the kernel) has plenty of compatibility protection right from the getgo:

Code:

options         GEOM_LABEL              # Provides labelization
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD32        # Compatible with i386 binaries
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD4         # Compatible with FreeBSD4
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD5         # Compatible with FreeBSD5
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD6         # Compatible with FreeBSD6
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD7         # Compatible with FreeBSD7
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD9         # Compatible with FreeBSD9
options         COMPAT_FREEBSD10        # Compatible with FreeBSD10
options         SCSI_DELAY=5000         # Delay (in ms) before probing SCSI
options         KTRACE                  # ktrace(1) support

Linux otoh not so much... There are countless of examples where software stopped working "because". So.. because some programmer had this great idea to improve the OS for example, obviously without any care for making sure things still kept running. After all: if you're dedicated to getting the "best" you'll have no problem re-adjusting all your stuff for the greater good.

That works great within an open source environment where most effort is build on non-profit and personal drive, but it's a sheer nightmare for any commercial business. Because all of that extra work will directly cut into their profit, and in the end it's all about making a profit for a company. So this isn't exactly a healthy nor reliable foundation to build on.

And that's not even addressing the obvious... how many people might get tempted to try this out for themselves, get stuck somewhere and then obviously rely on NI Support to help them out. Yah... support may seem like this friendly bunch of people who are always willing to help you out, but from a business pov those guys also eat away into overall profits. Customer support is an investment and something you don't want to have overused because of that. But if you go this way it's bound to happen.

SO yah, from a commercial pov it makes more sense to completely ignore this platform and instead focus your attention on those which can provide a decent amount of reliability (and have shown to do so as well!). Windows for example... I can easily run DOS programs from the last century on the latest version of Windows 10, you can't say the same (within context of course) for Linux. So: software based on kernel 2.0.18 which was once used by a RedHat release ("Picasso") will definitely have a huge share of issues running on the latest RedHat (Fedora I suppose, or maybe CentOS). Oh right, that's another issue.. Things come and go. The RedHat version I mentioned doesn't even exist anymore, it's now Enterprise only with only Fedora & CentOS being available for the regular users.

In this end this is a horrible idea from a commercial perspective and I really hope NI won't go down this route.

For the simple reason that all the money to invest into such a disaster will have to come from somewhere, and I for one am not really looking forward to seeing Komplete prices getting raised excessively because NI has to find a way to fund for all this nonsense.

 

Linux software isn't based on specific kernel versions. There is no reason why old software shouldn't run as long as all the dependencies are installed. Because commercial / closed source software is usually linked staticly, it does not depend on lots of libraries like the most FOSS stuff which has lots of (shared) dependencies to keep the programs smaller.

I am satisfactorily using parts of the Komplete software under Linux with WINE. As long as this is possible, native versions are not very important for me. Same performance, no crashes and even the integration into jack is no problem.

And even if there would be native Linux version, it may not be the case that the software would run better. In the case of many games, the ported versions for Linux (and also for macOS) run slow and not as stable like the Windows version.

 

I highly doubt you get exactly the same performance (CPU and latency-wise) under WINE vs a native Windows system.

 

I am also a Linux user. I buy instruments for Windows to use in Linux. Thus, I do not appear as a Linux user. What should we do about this?

I have created this thread. Please read and show that you exist (if you exist)...
https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=21302

I have also contacted Audio Imperia and Orchestral Tools.

 

Like someone quoted in your thread, you can use the Windows plugins from Native Instruments under Linux using linvstconvert. There is a thread about it:

https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/running-via-wine-on-linux-systems.373433/

On my setup with a Core i7-9700K, 32 GB RAM and a M.2 disk, everything works very well without any bugs and without any visible performance losses using Bitwig 3.1 for Linux as DAW.

The installation is a bit tricky but once installed, everything is perfect.

I finally said good bye to Mac OS and Logic and I am going to continue with Linux and Bitwig.

 

I use LinVst for Kontakt Anyway, I think we should show that we exist.

 

Old thread but adding my voice for NI to embrasse linux !

Using wine and LinVST / Yabridge does work but in my case is a real pain (wine updates regulary brake everything) and performances are far from what I can achieve on Windows...

Now that you are selling hardware running linux (Machine+) is there any news regarding linux support ?