Following on from an announcement earlier this week, Native Instruments reveal that they are rethinking their plan to end legacy product support.
On March 10th, Native Instruments announced that it was discontinuing a range of its own plugins and third-party legacy products. But, based on user response, Native Instruments is backtracking on this plan and planning a workaround.
Posting on the KVR forum yesterday, a NI representative stated that the company had been closely following the discussion there and on multiple other channels. “We sincerely appreciate everyone’s feedback on this and this is now driving some changes we made today,” said the NI representative.
In response, NI updated their end of life article with additional information and are now in the midst of internal discussions about their next move. NI plan to spend more time investigating the topic to address the end of life of their old activation mechanisms.
In the updated end of life article, NI explains that there was a clear urgency to discontinue legacy products over growing security concerns with how data is being transmitted. The company also noted that while they have kept older products operational and compatible with evolving operating systems, as well as with their own ecosystem, these efforts have made it more difficult to modernise.
“Major changes in operating systems like MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) have multiplied the issues for our activation processes,” NI notes. “It is not possible to update our listed products to work on modern operating systems within reasonable effort.
As per the update, NI noted that the continuation of legacy products would “not affect any update, upgrade or crossgrade paths.” All updates, upgrades, and crossgrades from these products will remain “intact”.
“We definitely heard the feedback and spent great time to note all the relevant points and use case so we can investigate what can be done with this topic,’ said the representative. “There is no question that we absolutely have to discontinue very old activation mechanisms but we will spend some time on workarounds.”