Private equity firm Francisco Partners did a leveraged buyout to gain majority control in 2021 and then quickly loaded the company up with even more debt by acquiring other smaller music companies. So, five years to reach insolvency is right about on time.

Very sad because 25 years ago NI were innovators in real-time audio DSP running on general purpose CPUs and their more recent Kontrol series of MIDI keyboards are quite good. For anyone who wants more details I found this blog post from an industry insider with some analysis and financial history: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-think-native-instrument...

Hopefully this is good news...NI has been pretty moribund as a creative DSP force after the original owners sold...yes there are Massive X and Abysynth 6 but they've all but pulled the plug on Reaktor (modular audio DSP platform which founders used to prototype almost all their products).

TBH if InMusic can't share a clear roadmap for cutting 2+ decades of tech debt and tiny aliased fonts all over the place I don't hold much hope. I've had good luck with lower-end Akai and Numark gear. Recently Reason Studios (originally created by Propellerheads) is on the upswing since being bought by LANDR a few months ago so I am hopeful that iconic music brands can get into the right hands.

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.

Their hardware evolved well and their K series keybeds are really solid. Once you install the Komplete software with all the synths and samples it is a lot of fun, if not only by the sheer amount and diversity. Although when you have access to software like Garage Band for free you kinda wonder. I wish they were a bit more open though, we’ll see what happens now.

Shoot, I'm just now realizing that iZotope has also been a dead-company-walking for a couple years.