Native Instruments GmbH is in preliminary insolvency.

@pitermach Bloody hell.

@pkirn Um... What the?

@jscholes Yeah. Too early to tell what this will mean for users but it doesn't sound good.

@pitermach @jscholes News to me. Will see what I can find out...

@pkirn as alluded to in the article, there's also uncertainty for iZotope as well now. Pretty grim.

@fabio @pkirn they were bought out by an American private equity firm about five years ago. There's a pretty established narrative among firms like that of buying companies, overburdening them with debt from the sale, and basically stripping them for parts and cashing out.

Not saying I know for a fact that's what happened here but one can make assumptions.

@pkirn

@pkirn

It would be a really nice move if #NativeInstruments just open sourced their software for community forks.

@FreakyFwoof @pitermach @jscholes In the meantime, don your best bullshit-proof vest, the opinion ratio on accessibility groups is inevitably gonna be set to stun.

@Scott @pitermach @jscholes Panic-buy toilet roll starting now.

@FreakyFwoof I'm not wiping my bottom with controllers. Maybe I'm using them wrong? @pitermach @jscholes

@Scott @pitermach @jscholes They do have a soft underside.

@Scott In related news, you see my video on MK3 accessibility? Instead of NI's poxy 14 minutes, mine was 48. Covered a lot more in a lot more detail.

@antiquedigital @fabio Right, but if you're trying to do *that*, this is specifically what you *don't* want to happen -- because then you lose control of breaking up the company.

I'm the last person to be a fan of private equity, but this is actually worse -- and the role of private equity is typically to avoid this case. So this has a lot of people really shocked.

@FreakyFwoof Bookbarked it and sent it to some folks but I haven't watched yet. Slightly concerned it might tip me over the edge of spending money on a thing that I shouldn't spend money on right now.

@bntn Unfortunately, all assets are out of your hands in the insolvency proceedings, so you would not be able to open-source anything, no.

@Scott I'd be more worried if they didn't just release Absynth, if their store wasn't still online etc. I'm not head in sanding about it or anything, but what's gonna happen is gonna happen, you know? Some people would love to see them go under but that's just churlish.
That would take down iZoTope too, same parent company, and it's just shit for the industry in general to be honest.

@FreakyFwoof I can't see them going under man. The product catalogue is still wicked valuable and the brand is super well known, even if its rep isn't all shiny all of the time. At most I'd expect chopping of some comparatively dead wood.

@pkirn@mastodon.social I've not exactly been following this, but I have heard a few things here and there over the last few years, and this isn't coming as a surprise.

For me, since shifting to Linux and open source a few years ago now, I haven't done any music production, or tried to set anything up yet, since I need a new machine really. I had tried to do some research in finding a Kontakt alternative that could either load up Kontak Instruments, or remap them to a another format - as after 20 years, Kontakt was the only NI product I used in the end - but used very heavily. And I have a ton of unfinished tracks I would like to finish, even if just for myself.

So, if anyone reading this more familiar with Linux audio knows of such a way, please let me know. It has been previously recommended to me to try using Carla, and hacking Kontakt VST to work in Linux, but I was already reluctant to go that way. I would rather find a native sampler that can somehow use Kontakt instruments, and then import the midi regions from older tracks that I've made. Thanks.

@pkirn @fabio Fair, and I certainly don't take it as an endorsement of PE. It's just frustrating all around to see a good company that has a sizable user base, which by all outside observations seemed to be doing middling to well, suddenly keel over like this.