Native Kontrol Standard (NKS) Hardware Partner Program from Native Instruments

This might be interesting depending on what Native Instruments is requiring to participate:

If they would release this as an open standard, that would be interesting. But this smells like “tech bros talk only to tech bros” to me.

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I don’t see any overlap in the ven diagram between zynthian and NKS. This announcement allows NKS to be used to control Native Instrument software from other manufacturers’ hardware and for some NI software (plugins?) to run on other hardware. I doubt this software would be able to run on zynthian and zynthian does not really have sufficent hardware control to provide a useful or meaningful remote control of other software.

I doubt NI are being magnanimous here. It looks like a quite closed mechanism for expanding their sales which of course is what a company should be doing - kinda.

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As an owner of a Korg Keystage and NI Komplete this could be good news for me depending on the implementation. It could be a good stop gap until Midi 2.0 is fully working in Windows
But I agree with Riban, I don’t see any benefit for Zynthian.

TBH not very enticed here, by these news amply percolated from Winter NAMM 25, about NI “opening” their NKS standard to third-party hw and sw developers.

From my standpoint:

1 - It’s been ages since they have released a truly relevant software synth in the Absynth - Massive - FM8 and Reaktor class (the latter, maybe the houses’s jewel, has a looong overdue mk 7 release practically postponed to the 22nd century).
2 - They know well the aforementioned facts, and are trying to colonise someone else’s development endeavours, taking advantage of their dominant position in the synth platforms area (Kontakt, NKS, Maschine) and trying to raise some good easy-earned money in the process (I know, others do just the same, and it is perfectly legitimate in a tech firm perspective).
3 - At least for me, their current product line is mostly uninteresting, since they have self-cornered themselves for years in the DJ Groovebox/tools-for-people-with-little-or-no-musical-knowledge market segment.
4 - There is practically very little common ground, if absolutely no common ground at all, with the overall Zynthian philosophy, framework and architecture, so I guess that all in all it’s not particularly relevant to this project.

This said, it is interesting to know anyway, as an item of update in contemporary Music Tech culture!

Regards :slight_smile:

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