Simon Cross, Chief Product Officer at Native Instruments, chats to Sam Inglis ahead of NAMM 2025, going into detail on the company history, philosophy and offering hints of future product releases at Native Instruments.

Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:18 - The History Of NI
01:41 - Grouping Of Brands
03:11 - Supporting Other Manufacturers
05:04 - The Kontakt Sound Libraries
06:16 - Choosing Which Sound Libraries To Include
07:07 - Musical Differences Across Territories
08:48 - Collaborating Across Different Timezones
09:51 - The Company Structure
10:45 - Subscription and Perpetual Options
13:40 - Incorporating AI Technology To Manage Sounds
17:05 - Kontakt 8 / Offering Synthesis And Sampling
18:55 - Utilising User And Developer Feedback For Kontakt
20:44 - Partnerships With Other Developers
23:52 - Native Kontrol Standard (NKS)
26:44 - Extending The MIDI Spec
28:25 - The Intergration Of Hardware And Software
29:22 - The Future Of NI And The Industry In General

Native Instruments Biog
Native Instruments was founded in Berlin in 1996 and for over 25 years they have been at the forefront of musical innovation, creating software and hardware products for music producers, audio engineers and DJs. Their portfolio contains industry leading products such as Komplete, Kontakt, Maschine and Traktor.

In June 2023, iZotope, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance became part of the Native Instruments family, providing them with increased engineering capabilities across integrated software and hardware, AI and machine learning, cloud and more. Today, Native Instruments have offices in Berlin, Langenfeld, London, Paris, Boston, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Shenzhen.

https://www.native-instruments.com

Sam Inglis Biog
Editor In Chief Sam Inglis has been with Sound On Sound for more than 20 years. He is a recording engineer, producer, songwriter and folk musician who studies the traditional songs of England and Scotland, and the author of Neil Young's Harvest (Bloomsbury, 2003) and Teach Yourself Songwriting (Hodder, 2006).

Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts