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Category:  Products / music software / software instruments

Product:  Native Instruments - Reaktor 3
Name: not-real-name
Email: Email supplied but hidden
notreal.com
Activity: part-timer
Date: 07-Feb-03

I'm using Reaktor version 3.0.5, in the standalone version, without external MIDI software, using Windows 98. I’d summarize it as buggy, slow, frustrating and badly documented … and I regret buying it. Hopefully, version 4, which should be released in a few months, will be a MAJOR improvement.

I was really psyched when I bought Reaktor, but after several months of owning it, my opinion has soured. Although you can theoretically do many things in Reaktor, it’s just not worth the effort. I have not used Reaktor since last month, because I have too many bad memories. Reaktor has turned my synthesis hobby into work.

Reaktor uses a dongle, and I SWEAR I will never use a program with a dongle again. The dongle wreaks havoc with my file system; making it hard to tell when a file is actually saved so that I know I can continue using my computer. It's really irritating to have to wait for 5 to 30 seconds for the dongle to do it's thing every time I want to save an ensemble.

Reaktor frequently soft-crashes (about once every 30 minutes), and often requires that I re-enter my MIDI ports and MIDI filename after a crash. Reaktor occasionally hard-crashes (about once every 2 hours), requiring a complete computer reboot. Since Reaktor crashes frequently, I defensively save my ensembles frequently, but everytime I give the ensemble a new name (for example, I was working on MyEnsemble2 but saved the updated ensemble as MyEnsemble3), Reaktor requires me to re-enter the name of the MIDI file that I want to continue to use. For some inexplicable reason, Reaktor assumes that you’ll always use a MIDI file that’s the same name as the ensemble; you know what they say about assumptions.

Reaktor is so badly documented that I'm frequently stymied. I even bought the Wizoo book, which was helpful, but frankly this software is just not ready for prime time. There is no online documentation, which is unthinkable in this day and age, so you have to (try to) find info in the paper manual. I like to work in a darkened studio, with the only light coming from the computer monitor, so I have to go into another room to read the paper manual. In modern software, when you move your cursor over an toolbar icon, a hint appears that tells what the icon does. Not in Reaktor.

I understand that music software is something of a cottage industry, with small profit margins, and I certainly don't advocate pirating music software. But I'm peeved that Native Instruments seems to have the attitude that they will go to extreme lengths to prevent software piracy. First there is the dongle, which screws up my file system's performance ... and supposedly there is a cracked Reaktor version floating around the internet, so the dongle just irritates real paying customers like myself. Second, the paper documentation is minimal, and there is no online documentation AT ALL. NI’s attitude seems to be that only the real customers will have the paper documentation ... in other words, let's inconvienence our real customers so we can make our product less valuable to software pirates. Heads up to NI: I recently saw a html version of your paper documentation on the internet, apparently it had been OCR’d. This is further proof that your copy protection irritates your real customers but is only a speed bump for software pirates. I respectfully suggest that the best way to sell more copies of Reaktor is to make Reaktor worth the price.

I mastered Reaktor's basics, after wasting many hours learning to work around it's flaws and crashes, and I even created an ensemble from the ground up. But the experience has made me shy away from ever using Reaktor again.

I would not buy this software again. The only people that should buy this software are extreme synth tweakers with huge amounts of spare time. People who need results quickly or have a day job should use other software.

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