Komplete Kontrol keyboards integration

I’ve seen a post dated Jan 2020 talking about that. Are there some “2 years later news” on this front?

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I still have a dream of having Scaler be completely compatible with KK including scaler triggering its lights! Would be a game changer for me. Had other priorities but we will get there. Hope for Q3 2022.

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You know…few are so lucky to have the chance to fulfill their dreams…you should really work on it :wink:
And…you collaborating with Native Instruments could lead to them allowing the use of midi processors inside Maschine (without workarounds). And for this a huge part of their customers would be really grateful to you

I bought a pretty keyboard specifically to work on this a while back. NI is doing some amazing hardware but apart from a few “nice to have” features we couldn’t really make our own useful thing in there.

What we make best are composition tools. It’s hard to dedicate time for those shiny features and staying good at what we do. For this one in particular… the modulation panels and suggestions features won…

As @davide said, a lot more things will be possible in the future when it comes to hardware integration.

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Since you are clearly good in what you do, I’ll trust you on your priorities decisions :wink:

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And you are the masters in this.

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I will throw in the odd thought from spending 37 years trying to build my pension from vertical market software development. @Ed1 's words encapsulate in one sentence every lesson I ever learnt from trying to do that.

Vertical products live within a sort of ecosystem surrounded by other products in some given application domain. As the primary market moves to saturation, there is a drive towards contemplating expansion / diversification, which is surely the most risky activity for an SME to undertake.

The cost of failure is dilution of scarce resource without commensurate return, and (more critically) changing from being a pre-eminent player in the chosen field to offering a far weaker version of certain functions already offered by competitors in the surrounding ecosystem. It’s a route to take with great caution, IMHO

My simple minded take is that the Scaler team and the product have some really distinctive characteristics. They use what they build (rare in software); they have demonstrable competences in their niche; there is no comparable direct competition that I have seen; there is huge scope to further develop in the chosen niche, which increases yet again the entry barrier to competition; and it’s hard to think of a more responsive support capability.

I’m with @ed1 100% here!.

BTW, if you look at the large scale companies offering broad based solutions in some given market, they may have started off small in some niche area and expanded; but in almost every case they did this by acquisition, not by development. This points to what in my view is another key aspect for niche players in their ecosystem, which is to have a focus on integration with the surrounding niche functions - as seamless as possible, so that workflow with various tools is transparent. This removes the pressure to add things which are businesswise out of scope…

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On the hardware integration topic itself, Spectrasonics have undertaken a huge project which now has integration with over 65 ‘real’ synths. It’s interesting to look at their web site and see what sort of things can be done.

Scaler is of course a completely different animal, so their are limited parallels, but I can see a couple of pointers. It’s all about living with the rest of the sharks in your tank, as per my post above.

I’m sure that the scaler folks are familiar with all this. I don’t use it, and indeed I’m disappointed that Eric Persing (CEO of the company) who wrote the factory patches fort the Roland JD800, has not included that in their list. [I suspect that this is because (a) the synth was a flop, and so there are not many around and (b) everything is done by Sysex :-)]

There are plenty of videos on the site.

Very interesting reading, and I can agree with almost all your points…but…I was only asking to integrate some functions of a keyboard into their software here (some lights, some knobs…)….not asking them to convert their business to build airplanes instead of composition tools :joy:. So…summing up, a very interesting post…maybe a little bit over the top :joy:

Actually, I essentially agreed with your post . My diatribe (born of experience with scars to prove it) was more targeted towards the frequent requests to embed other vertical product function, rather than the integration issue per se.

Indeed, I did say in my conclusion that integration with other functions was vital (“another key aspect for niche players in their ecosystem, which is to have a focus on integration with the surrounding niche functions - as seamless as possible”)

Guilty as charged, I’m afraid, I have a regrettable tendency to “gild the lily”, I’m afraid, in writing posts :blush: However, my basic point was about the merits of ‘sticking to your knitting’ as an old English saying goes, and I do hold this view.

PS: not sure what @claudio will make of ‘lily gilding’ or ‘knitting’ :slight_smile:

Always better an over the top comment but interesting to read than a simple “I agree”, “+1” :wink: