HN Reader

I used to work for a competitor of NI that went out of business years ago. NI's polish, attention to detail, and focus on UX was always pretty extraordinary, I could just tell at the time they were going to crush us even when they were new. This is sad news :(

Any current or former NI people? Penny for your thoughts.

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.

How much of this is the consequence of piracy? So many musicians use NI VSTs, but because of the expense they're pirating. What if they'd targeted the hobby musician more?