Native Instruments Reaktor

I'll give this a 10 for ease of use with a few thoughts in mind. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of free ready-to-go instruments that can be easily downloaded. Just click on your favorite synthesizer, sampler, effects unit etc. and you are in business. Most instruments have a ton of menues to tweak the sound. So in this way it is very easy to use. If you are programming an instrument, I would rate the system something like Max, about a 5. There are much harder music programming languages to learn, like Smalltalk.

With all the instruments that are already available the sky is the limit on this software. It can be programmed to do just about anything that comes to mind.

It will respond to any MIDI command and can be very expressive.

Rarely locks up on my OS X Mac. Usually because an instrument is badly programmed in some way.

I never had to email or call but I use the Forums and they are very helpful.

This is the most powerful synth, sampler, effects etc.software on the market.

Hmmmm. Ease of use is not a characteristic that applies to Reactor. I'm using version 4.x, and it is a piece of software that requires profound knowledge of sound-engineering. And a lot of time. Reactor is the ultimate software if you like experimenting. It is not a preset-synth. The manual is outstanding. It covers every aspect of the system. The manual is the most important reason for buying a legal copy of this software...

Polyphony depends on your CPU. You need a modern (1Ghz+) processor to operate this thing. But then you have a system that has no competition, apart perhaps from the Pulsar. You can do literally anything with your sounds. From classical subtractive synthesis tot physical modelling, from pitch-shifting (with formant-correction) to sequencing. As long as your CPU can handle it, you can do it with Reactor.

Listen to the fabulous Absynth module or the Vocator, both spin-offs of the Reactor system and you know what you can achieve with Reactor. There are no limits! NativeInstruments managed to create a system that is versatile but you can recognize the sound: warm, lively and deep.

Reliability depends on the OS. I've had no disasters so far.. (using WindowsXP and Pulsar board).

If it were lost, i'd probably get me a illegal copy (sorry!). They are abundant on the Internet and i have the manual...
But the Reactor system is one of the basic components in my setup, and i would really miss it if it were gone.

absolutely amazing piece of software - i have used all manner of modular and hardware gear and this is the next evolutionary step.Ease of use ?easy if you know how . . .

to many to list - its fully modular

Well this is where its amazing - my nord modular does amazing sounds but reaktor with some of the user groupm ensembles blows it out of the water at times - it can be cold and digital - i never got huge amounts of warmth out of the sounds but the ability to craete and do wotally outthere stuff is unique . . .it has to be experienced to understand what i am trying to say

seems fine.....stable.....

A must have if you make forward thinking music.....i recommend these also . . .i bought very soon after getting reaktor and gave me a totally mean electronica sound.....also amazing ambient tones...

http://www.studiosound.btinternet.co.uk/reaktor.htm

a must have in my opinion if you own or use reakt0r

I'm using version 3.0.5, waiting for news of the perpetually postponed version 3.3 or 4.0. It's been almost a year since the last update.

I was really psyched when I bought Reaktor, but after two months of owning Reaktor, my opinion has soured. Although you can theoretically do many things in Reaktor, the reality is that Reaktor is a buggy, slow and badly documented program. I have not touched this software since last month, because I have too many bad memories.

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; it's hard to tell when a file is actually saved so that I know I can continue using my computer. It's really irritating to wait for 5 - 10 seconds for the dongle to do it's thing every time I want to save an ensemble. I really don't understand why Native Instruments would punish its real customers with a dongle.

Reaktor frequently crashes, requiring that I re-enter my MIDI ports and MIDI file name after every crash. Fun.

Since Reaktor crashes frequently, I frequently save my ensembles, 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 select a MIDI file for that ensemble. Reaktor assumes that you'll use a MIDI file with the same name as the ensemble ... you know what they same about assumptions. :)

I've got two computer science degrees and a music degree, and I've been a computer programmer for the last decade so you can infer that I'm not an intellectual loser ... yet 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 manual. I like to work in a darkened studio, with the only light coming from the computer monitor ... yet I have to go into another room to read the manual.

In modern software (at least Windows software, don't know about Mac), when you move your cursor over an toolbar icon, a hint appears that tells what the icon does. Not in Reaktor. No, it's much more fun to have to dig out the manual.

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 avoid 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 documentation is minimal, and there is no online documentation. NI seems to be saying 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.

To be fair, despite Reaktor's flaws, it's probably the best modular software available.

I mastered Reaktor's basics, learned 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.

Probably the most versatile soft synth available, but buggy, slow and badly documented

good sonic quality, which is marred by frequent software crashes and a cumbersome UI.

frequent software crashes

a few months ago I sent a question to their online help ... and i'm still awaiting a response. frankly, i wonder if Reaktor is a NI priority.

i would not buy this software again. the only people that should buy this software are extreme synthesizer tweakers with huge amounts of spare time ... not for someone who needs results quickly, or has a day job.

I use the version 3.0.
Well, whatever the version is, you will HAVE to own a manual to start out. Otherwise you'll get stuck with simple Game Boy sounds that will get ya nowhere. Reaktor offers so much more. That is maybe it's biggest problem. There is so much you can do with it, it can hardly stay accessible for a beginning user. Before you get your habds on this. Make sure that you are into synthesizer vocabulary. You just have to have an idea what LFO's and such are. what a modular synthesis IS..Once you have an idea of how a sound is constructed it's easier to get the result you need. Maybe it's an idea for future releases to split reakor in diffren't pieces to make everything more clear to the user?

Well, as for sound modelling, there's everything you could have imagine. Of course you can steer the wheel by your external gear really easy. There's everything from samplers, to sequencers,etc,etc...

The sound of reaktor family is not that great in my opinion. It's pretty empty and noizy. And that is not a fault of my soundcard! It reacts really good to aftertouch in my opnion. The onboard efects are countless, but then again, not all of them are of cd quality. Sometimes I have to resample a lot of my recording before it can hit the listener's ear without some samples sounding too loud or noizzy.
Still in my opnion, reaktor is only really suitable for Deep Ambient/ Drone type of music ...

mmm...REad also other reviews.. The tricky point here. But a problem that ALL software has, when synced real time. Just to help you out of your dream... Real time recording and sequencing with other programs (like Rebirth for example) is almost impossible. Due to the fuck ups that will occur during the recording process (like cracking and reloading shit)..so pepole, this is why hardware will always survive all software...Get a real synth of pre program patches when you go out and preform live. (and it's not my soundcard that sucks!)

Never dealt with them

A great tool to lear about Modular synthesis..You can do a lot with it,concerning sound modelling and sequencing, but the heaviness of the programm is too much for a LOT of soundcards. Wich doesn't say it makes Reaktor useless, but afterall makes you get a hardware synth anyway...

I use version 2.3.

The presets (as with everything else in this program) sound amazing. It's *almost* like having a whole studio of real analog gear, plus a bunch of stuff that never existed before, plus the ability to create even more stuff that never existed before.

For those who understand synthesis, this is a dream come true. "Patch editing" (if you can call it that, it's actually building the inside of a synthesizer) is pretty easy if you know the basics (subtractive synthesis and all the filters, envelopes, etc. associated with it, additive, granular, sample-based, etc). It's got all the features you'd pay thousands for in hardware gear, all right there in front of you. And, compared with a hardware unit with similar specs (which doesn't even exist, by the way), it's cheap.

For those who don't understand synthesis, it can be confusing, and the learning curve can seem pretty steep. Particularly when you start trying to put together your own ensembles (as others before me have said). For those who plan on just sticking with presets, go get Generator instead. It's cheaper and does basically the same thing as Reaktor, except with less editing capability.

This thing sat unused in my studio for a few months after I installed it (save a day or two's worth of tweaking in bewildered awe right at the beginning). As much of a sin as that was, I did have a good excuse. It was a real pain in the you-know-what to drag the little sliders around on screen, using the mouse. And assigning midi faders to them didn't work too well, either, because then they weren't labelled, and I'd forget that MIDI fader 29 was in charge of filter cutoff.

I finally solved this problem, though...you're gonna love this one...I bought a touch screen monitor. It was only $250 on eBay, and it made the Reaktor control surfaces basically "hardware" in that you can actually tweak the sliders by dragging them around. Woo!

Ever since, it's been an absolute dream to use, hence the rating of 10.

Okay...it's got BIG plusses and BIG minuses.

My biggest gripe is the CPU load. I run an AMD Athlon 1.5 Ghz (overclocked), and although it's probably running insanely fast, I'm still not getting the kind of polyphony I'd like to be getting. Plus there's that damn 4-instance limit in Cubase...you can only run 4 different Reaktor parts at once. Blah.

The big plus is its versatility. It beats the hell out of my Nord Modular KB (a $1200 synth), in terms of the range of sounds it can make. 'Nuff said.

Well, this is what you buy it for. Its list of synthesis methods reads almost as long as Kyma's, and although it doesn't compare, power-wise, to Kyma (even on my superfast chip), it still sounds REALLY good. This thing runs circles around everything else in my studio, sound-wise, except my Nord Modular. And I own a good number of hardware synths.

Crystal clear sounds, and the recreations of vintage gear are some of the best I've heard. To use the old cliche, "searing leads and booming basses." Kudos to NI. I'd use it as my main synth with a few more parts and better poly.

On a scale from one to ten, this thing's sounds are at least a sixteen.

Here's where Reaktor's only problem lies. Like a parasite (I've been reading too many bio textbooks), it is reliant on its host. And in the case of windoze 98, the host ain't exactly reliable.

It's not just a matter of crashes, which happen once in awhile....it's also a matter of being dependent on the computer chip for its processing needs, and also being dependent on the soundcard for A/D/A conversion.

That's right....the latency on your soundcard, folks, is going to equal the latency on your synth, and if you want to run this thing in realtime, you better have a *really* nice soundcard. I'm talking Creamware Luna II or RME Hammerfall kind of nice. You might squeak by with an M-Audio or Event Echo card if you were lucky.

Also, to those of you with lesser chips (*evil cackle*) you have to take chip speed into account. Stutters and cracking are pretty common on my system, and although I'm confident these are more because of my soundcard than my chip, they do still happen. I should probably go and invest in a nice soundcard.

On a slightly more positive note, Reaktor itself is very stable. And since I'm not reviewing windows here (boy, would that be a firey review...), I'll give this a pretty decent rating.

Never had to deal with them. I guess that means they built a good product in the first place. Hmmm....other manufacturers, take note...the size of your tech support division is inversely proportional to the size of your R+D division. And nobody likes tech support guys.

I'd definitely buy this again if it somehow were lost or stolen. I'd probably get version 3.0, though. And I'd heckle NI for not giving it more voices in v3.

I love pretty much everything about it, except the latency...it is, in my opinion, anyway, the best software synth out there. Period, end of story.

Since the "suggested questions" include one about how long I've been playing and what else I own, I guess I'll tell you. Prepare to be bored. I started 2 years ago (more or less), although I had about 14 years of classical violin training under my belt at that point. I've been madly accumulating synth equipment ever since. I currently own a Nord Modular, a Kawai XD-5 drum module, a Kawai K5000R, an Emu Morpheus, and a Yamaha RM1x sequencer, as well as various MIDI control doodads. I've seen a lot more gear than I currently own...because I buy and re-sell stuff on eBay to support my hobby, and because a good bit of my free time (what I don't spend composing) is spent at Guitar Center.

My favorite techno bands are Juno Reactor (no pun intended!) and Raver's Nature, and it is their styles that I seek to emulate...basically ambient and ambient trance. Some people also say "psy-trance."

Okay, I'm done rambling now.

Very Easy to Use

With the clones found at www.dash-site.com Reaktor now has sounds from KorgWaveStation/DW8000 - RolandAlphaJuno2/D50/Jupiter8

Im using version 4.2.1. The sounds are incredible. I have heard a couple of other software synths that sounded like garbage, but not this one. I prefer the sound of this to that $800 virtual analog I bought a few months back. It can produce some incredible leads that
remind me of the old theme song for Doctor Who. It does all the old analog sounds really well. The filters are great and it's great for sound effects. Basic operation is really simple. The only difficult thing would be constructing an "ensemble" from scratch. An ensemble is basically a virtual synth made up of different parts available.
It gives you tons of oscilators, filters, etc. to patch together and make any kind of synth available.

Midi control is a snap with Reaktor. It has a "midi learn" function.
Simply check the knob or slider on the screen, check midi-learn and tweak the knob, slider whatever on your controller and it's set. This way you have the feel of playing a real synth. It beats moving controls with your mouse. Reaktor is more versatile than any harware synth. It is an analog synth, a sampler, an FM syth, granular, etc.
I believe it can be used as a vocoder too.

This thing is every synth you've ever wanted sound wise. It cant do a
grand piano, but this is a synthesizer, it can play samples, but that not its main purpose. What it can do is sound like anything from a vintage Oberheim, to a DX-7, to a JP 8000. I'm using it more and more,
and my MS2000 is becoming less of a synth, and more of a midi controller for Reaktor. It comes with an assortmant of ensembles and patches, and more can be downloaded from the site. It really surprised me with it's sound.

Hmmm reliabilty? It is software and it can only be as reliable as the hardware and operating system that support it. It has crashed a few times for me, but I suspect it could have something to do with my crappy consumer grade sound card's midi drivers.

Ive never dealt with customer support so I'm unsure. I like to fix things myself.

The range and quality of sounds and synthesis types available in Reaktor make it a pretty good deal. Most people will be happy playing the factory supplied ensembles, and really wont delve into making their own ensembles. These people need to check out Generator by Native Instruments. It comes with 20 something ensembles and is a great deal cheaper than Reaktor, but has the same basic sound engine.

I'm using version 2.3.2. Reaktor is basically a synth construction kit but the latest version comes with an excellent library of prebuilt synths called the premium library. Editing patches is done straight on the screen and is as easy as it gets. The manual is pretty good. Building your own synths will require a few nights of messing around with the program. It's not particularly hard to do.

I have a 500Mhz P3 with a MOTU 2048 and I can get very good latency with the new ASIO drivers. The best thing for me is that it can be used as a VST soft synth. It comes with a heap of effects blocks, sequencers and other goodies. It really is quite a bargin given all the things you can do with it.

Many of the presets are oriented towards the wierd sounds but there are plenty of excellent emulations of the old classic analog synths which I think are pretty close to the originals.

It's a software synth but works very well. I've had few problems with lockups and the like.

The developers frequent the email list and are eager to support the users. This is exceptional.

Although I'm a bit head, I was reluctant to get seriously in to soft synths. Reaktor changed my mind. I would buy it again in a heatbeat.

I am using 2.0 (the most current). Reaktor is easy enough to edit, but the user is also responsible for the architecture of the instrument. There are literally over a 100 modules you can use, but I only know what a quarter of them do. Even though it came with a refence book, it's mostly tech talk and usually offers no practical explanation. The user guide however, has some good examples, but if you are brand new to synthesis, it probably still won't make much scence. I would say it is as complicated as you make it. I've been using it for two months now (Generator for about a year)

Most of Reaktor's features rely on what kind of computer you have. The more powerful your computer, the more Reaktor can do. You can have several instruments playing at the same time and asign each one its own midi channel. As many samplers and synths as you computer can handle. It's very easy to route to your software sequencer and all parameters are midi controlable! I use it with Emagic Micrologic AV and it does well.

Like generator, it sounds terrific. Any sound I want, I can get with some work. I've built a few of my own synths and samplers and they sound great. The ready made instruments sound great. How it sounds is up to you. If you are a true synthesist, and like to experiment, I think you will love it. Reaktor does come up with bizarre results sometime, especially when it comes to it's sampling capabilities. I rarely get what I expect, but usually something more twisted and bent. Try the demo and see what I mean. The Plasma sampler, for instance, which I like, turns my wave files into bizarre, unpredictable soundscapes. It is great for inspiration. It uses granular synthesis, which I don't know much about.

Can you depend on your computer? If your computer crashes so does Reaktor. I keep Reaktor open all the time along with my sequencer and my sample editor (Cool Edit '96). Since this is pretty much what I use my computer for (pentiumIII450mhz) it doesn't crash much but it has crashed. All you can do is restart and try again. I would have to say the program itself is fairly stable, but Windows '98 isn't.

Native Instruments have been very good to me. Calling Germany(their main HQ) and having a detailed response for me the next day, even though I wasn't then a customer, goes beyond my expectations. Part of what sold me on this product was their commitment to their customers. They have done a lot for me.

If someone deleted it off my hard drive and stole my installation disk, I would get another one as soon as I could. It is worth to me more than I payed . It is the most flexible instrument I have ever played (hardware or software). Sounds unbelievable too. It can produce or playback any sound imaginable. It's sometimes difficult to put all the pieces together, but it is always worth it. I'm sick of settling for weak sounding, short featured, compromising budget instruments. This is a dream come true. I used to want a huge studio with 25 synths and 6 pro samplers, racks full of effects, etc. ... , but thanks to Reaktor, not anymore. All I need is my computer.