NI has been a husk for a long time, hardly surprising. It really sucks so many great sample libraries used the Kontakt format instead of something standard and open.

Their hardware was also fine but not ground breaking, in a sea of actually great options. They just didn't keep up.

The in-music-ing of so many brands is not going unnoticed among anyone with "I'll buy a moog" money, so while I expect all the brands in music is hoovering up to be profitable, I don't see any of them as huge loss to innovation.

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meric_ 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Kontakt has no competitors really. There are no standard and open competitors, the closest is maybe something like HISE but it's not even close from a marketshare perspective.

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httpsterio 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Soundpaint, Sampletank, LABS, Best Service Engine, UVI Falcon, SINEfactory, Decent Sampler just to name a few

	▲	meric_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		None of those are standard and open except for Decent and UVI which does have third party developers albiet not many. Anecdotally the only dev I know on UVI is acoustic samples? Since Virharmonic moved off of UVI onto their own powered by gorilla The rest you listed, Soundpaint, Engine, etc. are company specific proprietary samplers. Their only market share is the market share of their own company A lot of these aren't even samplers? SINEfactory is just OT's free collection of instruments. Labs is not even a free collection either anymore, Spitfire has done some strange subscription or monetization wrapper around it (and fyi labs used to be on Kontakt).