I think it has to do with AI and this poor AI-generated music.
Read link below
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“red flags financially came far earlier than today, and were related to the company’s debt following acquisitions, not the health of the products or market.”
They gobbled up more companies than they could eat.
This is pretty fkd up TBH
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i guess i’ll never get the intel mac + apple silicon version of Battery 1
that’s the only thing i want from NI.
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These days you don’t need any of these samples, instruments and apps to make a music.
You don’t need spend lots on money on them.
All you need is subscription on Suno and 5 minutes work.
We live in a crapy days or maybe I am too old now 
I will still use Renoise anyway
Too bad, I need to subscribe more AI models to fill another 5 minutes for other hobbies, and now I have too much time for nothing, help! Perhaps scrolling TikTok is the only way to go. 
Back to the topic, the insolvency is sudden but not too surprising because of many sample library companies moving away from Kontakt in the recent years, along with the sudden Absynth 6 release they meant to be discontinued. Before that, there have been complains about management in glass door.
If Kontakt is gone, I will miss Cinematic Studio Strings and Storm Choir Ultimate, and that will bring many other sample libraries down to drain. Let’s hope the future of these plugins are safe, or it could be a disaster for music industries.
OMG! Kontakt is dead!
You’re allowed to call me fortune-teller. Luckily I’ve always refused to use any stuff by NI, nevertheless I don’t like to see companies that are creating stuff for making music go. Here’s why they are struggling. I think y’all are right, but it’s a combination of what you’ve said. A crappy player is required in order to use their stuff, they took over too many companies in a short period of time, economy and politics generally suck (especially in Germany), sample based music is obsolete in most cases and on top of that seemingly many people think they are “creators” by prompting a few words into AI (even in this forum there are people who claim that using AI is like using a plugin). I’m not surprised that they’re insovent. I assume it also didn’t help having Mate Galic as president. 
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Out of curiosity I’ve installed some of their free stuff through the native access app. Some of the effects might be cool, but 480 mb for the Ozone EQ? I don’t care much for cool graphics, no idea why an eq would otherwise have to be this bloated? I see the guitar rig 7 player is 584 mb, looks excessive for distortion? (Also after installing the Kontakt 8 player, I tried to install the free factory content, but it says it can’t find any kontakt version wtf). I hope someone will pick up Reaktor, the rest I don’t care much about.
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Please don’t remind me of Kontakt like to crash the daws when there is a missing sample error lol.
Trackers are also “sample” based in a traditional sense, but what makes using trackers different is that there are creativity involved with the samples like slicing and reorganising the fragments into something interesting, or designing an instrument with sample that synths can’t do. On the other hand, there are people just dragging some random synth patches onto a their daw with some midi loop files and call it a song, this is as lazy as sample based music if I am not misunderstanding your definition. Thus, I guess the key is the effort.
The AI users, huh… I don’t want to start the arguments again which AI users really see arts in a hugely wrong way. If anyone have seen my take to AI art in the other threads, you already know what I want to say.
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Yes, samples were essential at the beginning of trackers, but today you don’t need to use any due to VSTs and hardware, not to mention the way more powerful computer systems. Essentially you only need samples if you want to create beats by slicing loops, if you need “natural sounds” (like rain or whatever) or if you want to use “real instruments” (such as guitar, violin etc.) without being able to play those instruments. Those who are creating samples from scratch (using single cycle waveforms etc.) like @slujr could easily create them on synths too, it’s the same process. Unless they insist of creating instruments respectively samples within their native Renoise environment, which is understandable, but not really necessary.
Regarding NI: I guess someone could buy parts of the company, like Izotope. Theoretically it should be possible to see future releases from those who were taken over by NI a couple of years ago, right? We’ll see what will happen.
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I hope that the Kontrol device series will survive… I guess those firmwares and drivers will be never released to public. Would be quite a shame, if they will let these die.
I say good to no more NI… They were quite good decades ago but many dumped them back in 2020 when they dropped support for legacy products, Yup you were screwed & even before that when a customer wanted re-authorization they would ‘bug’ them with questions… “Why do you want to keep using this old soft?”… “Because I PAID for it just do your job!” or “I don’t wanna buy your new bloated crapola” or “The legacy products sound just fine!” or “It’s on an old OS”…
NI really has it coming they changed to big turds over the years-
Their midi keyboards are quite good, maybe a bit large, but nice to play and not too expensive. Would be sad if this turns into a brick with the next fancy Apple system update. New rumors or facts say that they have 300 mio. debt… How is that even possible?