Absynth, B4, Battery, FM8, Intakt, Kompakt, Pro-53, Vokator… Which one will be the next one?

I wouldn’t be able to count all the brilliant products I’ve bought from them, which for a few years represented a major investment in terms of brainpower, of work and of extension purchases, and whose bugs sometimes went uncorrected for ten or twenty years… only to see these products suddenly disappear without even the slightest warning early enough to allow the user to rework his files so as not to lose everything.

NI: never more!

Yes, you’re right. There’s no doubt about that.

It’s a shame because it was an incredible start point for something which could have been awesome if it had been capitalized to take it to a much higher level. But NI is really an incomprehensible business. They make awesome products, and they almost never support it and involve for a long time.

At NI, apart from Kontakt and Maschine (and to a lesser extent Guitar Rig) they are unable to keep up with their products. A phenomenal financial (and sentimental) loss for the users who trusted them in the early years.

The result is that I would strongly advise any beginner not to trust NI with their equipment, because for the majority of products there will be no updates for ten or twenty years and suddenly the company will decide without the slightest warning to discontinue the product. Everything you’ve invested in time and passion (and money if you buy soundsets) with the product will be lost. It’s better to turn to more reliable companies that really stand by their products. Even at 10 euros, it’s better to turn to discount offers from more reliable companies. In the case of FM8, it’s likely that this $/€ 10 offer (which they’ve been repeating several times over the last year or two) only serves to make the product profitable one last time by encouraging people to buy NI… before discontinuing the product in the next year or two, as new buyers now have an account with NI.

FM8 is abandonware at this point

There are bugs which have never been fixed and will never be. And some are really annoying bugs. The last true update for fixing bugs was more than 10 years ago. There will never be, the product is quite dead. And in the meanwhile there are several true (FM8 is not) emulations of Yamaha DX-series which have been produced by other developers, and some being even free with a great quality and, to crown it off, several of these true emulations are with direct import (and sometimes export) of the sysex files! On FM8, the import of sysex files is not a true importation, it is a conversion.

Even for $10 today I would not take it.