Native Instruments Software: Crash prone on Mac OSX?

[awepittance]

For the past 3 years i've been mostly Macintosh, i made the switch fully at this point where i rarely use windows. I tried doing my first live Traktor set in quite a while on my mac laptop. About 50% of the time when i would try to load my entire playlist inside the program would crash. I notice too when i use Kontakt and Reaktor on the mac the situation is similar, each program seems to be very sensitive to loading files.

 

because of this problem i decided on a whim to borrow a friend's Windows 7 pc laptop and give it a go on that, i had the same version of traktor, loaded the same songs and it worked perfectly fine. After this happened i tried other native instruments software like Reaktor 5 on the same PC and noticed a substantial stability boost.

 

I'm just wondering if there are any current mac users out there who remember Native Instruments software working better for them on PC. Maybe i'm just unlucky, but it seems like Reaktor & Traktor run far better on the PC, especially for a live show scenario

[BCM]

yep, traktor is shit.

[Guest maus]

i don't use traktor much beyond some limited use as a production tool, but even i've had a few crashes happen here and there. then again i'm doing pretty wierd stuff with it.

 

i'm pretty sure NI develops on windows and then ports over to mac... at least that's how it was, but i'm not sure if it's still that way.

 

i'd agree that rushing things out is an epidemic across the board with software these days. perhaps it's not so much that as the myriad complexities of combinations of hardware, software, RAM, processor types, etc... even with extensive beta testing you can't be sure it's going to work everywhere out of the box.

 

that doesn't excuse not responding and fixing things immediately, though.

 

NI went from having a pretty cool techy / geeky cache to being literally one of the largest MI companies in the world - outselling even roland and yamaha these days, if you can believe it. and with that comes a reorientation of goals, i suppose.

[ryancolecreate]

ya I've always found NI stuff to be:

 

1. horrible from a usability perspective. Super unintuitive.

2. Way way too big on resources

3. crashy like fuck

 

I really would love to delete all the NI stuff I have. Some one needs to make a sampler that can challenge kontakt. I've been using Guru lately and it's SOO much better. Kontakt should not even be considered a sampler IMO. It's only good for playing giant cheesy sample libraries.

[vamos scorcho]

Kontakt : overrated. really, really overrated. still, I use it. it's just a bit too clunky and slow.

 

but, like I said, i use it a lot.

 

 

 

Battery: W/e

 

 

FM8: 9/10 - really good. really good. easy, go to. some sounds are crap but it's pretty good and covers a lot of ground.

 

Massive: the sound of this synth has really worn out for me over time. it still has its uses but it's kind of crap at this point. still 7/10 for the amount i've used it.

 

Absynth: 8/10. probably the best, even though i'm rating it under FM8 because i use it less

 

Reaktor: 10/10. it's really good. nothing else to say, it covers a shitload of ground and it's a true classic.

 

 

 

 

I need a new soft synth, badly. I think I got sick of using those pieces of shit and never really tried anything else. Because really, once you've played around with them a bit, the sound never gets better. It's stale. I wouldn't really recommend NI sounds to anyone unless they were focused on a specific, Windows 95 style of music.

[Guest maus]

wow... i would really disagree with you guys on kontakt... any stability issues you might have aside, it's by FAR the most powerful sampler out there. the scripting language alone is really phenomenal. plus the tone and time machines.

 

get yourself an analogue synth, a copy of redmatica keymap pro, and create massive sample libraries in minutes.

 

i suppose it depends what you're doing with sampling, but for extreme granular stuff and bizarre scripting, i don't see what could be better.

[Guest analogue wings]

It's usually the oher way round. My MOTU interface works like butter on my friend's Macbook but is a crashy glitchy POS on any version of Windows because of the terrible drivers

[TechDiff]

new to Mac things. since getting my new mbp I did the bootcamp stuff. Got all my production stuff on the XP side, Reaktor, Absynth, Massive etc etc, and just my live shit on the mac side. Just Reaktor...

 

Haven't had a single crash with either OS so far.

 

I noticed a couple small issues with the new Reaktor update on both OS, some dodgy behaviour with syncing certain clock signals. some projects I had been working on with the old Version needed considerable adjustment to modulation automation after updating to the new update.

 

I also found that that one thing that really bugs me in Reaktor did not get addressed in the newest update, fooking terrible interpolation issues with the sample lookup modules when dealing with large files. something to do with clock resolution I imagine. Had really hoped it'd get a fix but no.....

 

Oh, and the change of spacebar behaviour in the newest update pisses me off.

 

massive gets a bad rap IMHO, I think it's a pretty spectacular synth, incredibly versatile, intuitive and powerful. I've heard a lot of people droning on about how bored of it's sound they are, but I think much of that comes down to the limited use it gets through current musical trends. it's been more than established that with an LFO modulating the modern talking wave shape you can sound like skrillex... But I think the synth really shows it's colours for rich pads and string sounds, it can and bloody marvellous and very non massive.. (dubsteppy wubz)

 

I have pretty limited experience with Traktor, have never really got into it. it does look like a pretty cool program, and it gets used pretty much everywhere, so many people use it. Just that should be motivation enough for NI to keep trying to eland and improve upon it. Seams like every update has some more new features or clever integration ideas. However it does seem like updates get rushed and not properly tested.

 

it all seems something of a dilemma tbh, rush to get the product out to meet customer demands and stay at the top of the game, but risking possible bugs. or intensive testing and reassessing to make 100% sure there are no issues and leave your clients waiting and bored, and your competitors gaining

 

 

[Guest ryanmcallister]

i love how techdiff comes into every thread and just lays the hammer down. man knows his stuff.

[acid1]

For what its worth, I use Komplete daily on both Snow Leopard and Lion with no crashes. I also paid for my copy, with the latest updates.

 

If I do crash its usually cuz I try doing something silly in Reaktor.