Peter Kirn over at the always-wonderful CreateDigitalMusic has a different perspective (not to mention a better writeup) on the new NI hardware. In his message boards, Peter rightfully (but tactfully and indirectly, mind you) puts my hyperbolic equation of new NI hardware with the reason we don’t have Universal Binary versions of their software into perspective, and brings up a number of other points in this forum post that I totally agree with. In the meantime, I’m going to repost my missive from that thread into my blog because… well, I can. Here goes:
It looks like it’s a nice little audio interface, in a sea of nice little audio interfaces. In fact, it’s probably well within the realm of hyperbole to say that NI’s infatuation with hardware is taking away from their software development. NI’s development strategies have often left Mac users on the back burner, so the long wait for UB isn’t exactly a surprise, right?
I do think that you have to question the current strategy/philosophy at NI right now - what does it say to users of their products that they’re more interested in releasing (what are IMO) unremarkable products rather than updates to their core product line to bring them to the state of the art? Okay, I’l give them the fact that Kontakt and Reaktor both had version bumps in the past 12 months or so, but… I know KORE has made a lot of people pretty happy, but revolutionary? That’s hyperbole for ya.
People have been talking about NI stretching themselves too thin for a while now, but I think it’s official. I mean, the majority of the software announcements they’ve made recently have been related to repackaging their Kontakt engine around various concepts (cough*Bandstand*cough). There’s nothing wrong with this, in and of tiself - like you said, we’re talking marketing rather than engineering here, and their sampling line is easy, low-development-overhead, come-up-with-a-catchy-name money in a bucket.
I think the disappointment comes for us long-time users that this is the company of Generator! Reaktor! Battery! Absynth (although it was cool even before NI was involved)! Now we get told that “high-end, professional sound quality, versatile connections, advanced controller functions and a compact and sturdy design”=”innovative”.
You know, I remember when everyone wished that NI would make a piece of hardware to off-load Reaktor ensembles to an external device, allowing us to free up our poor CPU’s for running our host programs. NI pretty much said “Never going to happen - our name is NATIVE Instruments, which means our devices run NATIVELY on the host computer!” Oh, those were the days. Unfortunately for NI, they could make a dedicated Reaktor control surface/audio interface/Ensemble host and they would probably price themselves out of the market, because we don’t need that device like we used to.
Or at least, I won’t, if they ever release UB versions of their software.
(Side note - It’s true that Adobe still hasn’t released a UB version of CS2, and has made it a point that they won’t, waiting for CS3 to go native on the Intel side. Now, somewhere on Adobe’s site there’s an excellent blog post from one of the developers explaining this decision, but that’s beside the point. CS2 will run using Rosetta - NI software won’t. At All. The only people complaining about CS2 performance on Intel Macs are designers who are also dual G5 owners, who are sticking with their G5s until they get CS3 in their hands. Those of us working back on the G4 platform are still seeing performance increases under Rosetta… Or at least, I am.)
