This Native Instruments, Izotope, Plugin Alliance collaboration is really turning into a mess.

[RABid]

Let me first say I like the products form these companies. Been using Native Instruments since before Komplete existed. Recently updates my Izotope package. And just finished a year of my Plugin Alliance subscription. But, things are now, well, not what they used to be. Updated Komplete to 14 Collectors Edition. It came with some Izotope plugins that I already own, and a voucher for a batch of Plugin Alliance VST's of which I already own half of. Tried to register the code NI supplied with K14 but Plugin Alliance says it is not valid. NI thinks it is a PA issue. PA thinks it is a NI issue. Both are using the same horrible automated support system and neither offers phone or chat support. I filed a ticket a week ago with both and got no where. NI used to be really good about getting back to the customer next day. 

 

When customer service is this bad I really don't want to buy anything.

[Stokely]

Hmm, I'm not at home this week but I'll have to check out whether I have any issues with Ozone.  That's pretty much the only thing I'm getting in Ultimate from PA or Izotope that I want and didn't already have.  I *think* I selected it for download in Native access but I haven't tried to use it yet.   

[RABid]

I really don't know what is worse, going a week with no response from NI or Plugin Alliance, or dealing with DJI customer support online chat over an account issue. I've had three chats with DJI, each one lasting from 30 minutes to over an hour, just trying to get the email address on my account changed. 

 

1st contact: Explain why I cannot verify my old email because I no longer have access to my email. Send screen shots of me in my account. Tell them what address I want on the account. Be told that this is an issue for higher level support, my case would be forwarded and I would hear back within 2 days.

 

2nd contact, three days later: Spend 45 minutes proving who I am by again sending screen shots of me in my account on various pages. Show them the account page with the email address and point out that they left off the first letter of the new email address. Be told that customer service did try to contact me. Point out that they were sending correspondence to a non-existing email account because they left a letter off. Be told that this again would be forwarded to a higher level support and I would hear back within 2 days.

 

3rd contact, 2 days later. Contact customer service because nothing was resolved. Was told that high level customer service said they already fixed it. Explain again that what they did was enter my new address in the system without the first letter. Sent screen shots of me in the account. This time they wanted the SN off of a drone I bought 5 years ago. Dug through the garage, found the drone, told him there is not serial number on the drone. He kept insisting that I send him the serial number so I took a picture of the drone showing the model number and several other numbers, but no serial number and sent it to him. After looking at he agreed to forward everything to higher level customer support and confirmed the address I want on the account. The address he recited back was the version missing the first letter. I finally sent old address: xxxxx, current but wrong address: xxxxxx, new address, xxxxxx. He finally understood that and said I would hear back within two days.

 

I've never dealt with a customer service department this inept before. 

[o0Ampy0o]

8 hours ago, RABid said:

...NI thinks it is a PA issue. PA thinks it is a NI issue. Both are using the same horrible automated support system and neither offers phone or chat support. I filed a ticket a week ago with both and got no where. NI used to be really good about getting back to the customer next day. 

 

When customer service is this bad I really don't want to buy anything.

 

By "...got no where" do you mean NI did not have anything useful to offer or you did not get a living & breathing Support person responding? I recently had trouble with Native Access. I created a Support ticket. They responded in a day or so and I was able to engage the person in an email exchange which eventually lead to a solution.

[bill5]

4 hours ago, RABid said:

I've never dealt with a customer service department this inept before. 

So you've never had to call a cable company, I take it. Or AT&T  

 

I am not a fan of "alliances" of any kind with companies like this tbh

[RABid]

DJI issue fixed. They sent me an email and repeatedly thanked me for being patient and polite.

 

Nothing from NI or Plugin Alliance and this is day 4.

[RABid]

It took a week but I finally got a reply from NI...

 

"Thank you for contacting Native Instruments.
 
 
Please check the following article, it will guide you step by step in finding a solution to your problem:"

 

The link was to the page that tells you where to go to enter your SN for the Plugin Alliance package. A link that I had already followed and where I had already tried to enter the SN. If they had read my support request they would have known that. I replied that I had already been to that page and it is where I am getting the "Invalid Serial Number" message. I really wish they still had a phone number.

[nursers]

It feels like NI have gotten way too big way too fast. I use the sounds.com sample site they own for some work I do, and NI announced a couple of weeks back that it's closing on June 30th and there's no replacement. Essentially their guidance was to use their plugins to create your own. Which is fine, but there's a whole lot of stuff on sounds.com that you can't recreate with plugins (street sounds etc etc).

 

 

[bill5]

What happened as I understand it is that a lot of the people who made NI great in the first place left the company and what's left are yahoos who either don't know or care about such things and are just milking past success and rep for whatever they can get. 

 

In fairness, the time or two I contacted them about something they did get back to me promptly, so I can't personally kick about that, but I have heard of frustrations like rabid has had to deal with. 

[CHarrell]

I'm surprised they actually went and finally updated at least the majority of their plugins to VST3...only took them like a decade.

[bill5]

Maybe it's because it doesn't buy 99.9% of the music makers out there anything 99.9% of the time...or because some VST3 plugins don't work in Kontakt that VST2s do. So for my money that's a move that was wise to hold off of and it's a shame they couldn't do it longer. 

[CHarrell]

I'll be honest, I didn't care about it much til DAWs like Cubase announced they'd cut off VST2 support. On one level it's frustrating because of all the awesome VSTs out there that have been abandoned for years (still feeling the burn when practically every DAW dropped 32bit support), but on the other hand, VST3 has been out for almost 20 years at this point, so I can kinda get industry flagships trying to nudge technology forward by capping off an older format.

[RABid]

Well, finally got my issue resolved today. My missing plugins now show up in my list as owned. The inclusion of 7 Plugin Alliance plugins in the K14 CE addition illustrates a long term problem with the Komplete system. The upgrade to 14 CE gave me 7 plugins from Plugin Alliance. I already owned 4 of them. So now I have to decide if I want to continue my PA subscription which gives me a chance to choose 6 plugins each year to claim as mine. I already stopped buying NI expansion packs and instruments because they all end up in K Complete.

 

As for VST3, some very reputable developers that I trust came out saying the spec was a mess and Cubase should never have released it before fixing some problems. Some even thought that Cubase should give up control of the VST spec after such a disastrous release. It may have taken NI 10 years to update everything, but it also took Cubase a while to iron out problems in the spec.

[CHarrell]

12 minutes ago, RABid said:

As for VST3, some very reputable developers that I trust came out saying the spec was a mess and Cubase should never have released it before fixing some problems. Some even thought that Cubase should give up control of the VST spec after such a disastrous release. It may have taken NI 10 years to update everything, but it also took Cubase a while to iron out problems in the spec.

 

Thanks for the added insight on this. Glad you got everything resolved!

[Mark Schmieder]

Perhaps things will improve after today's announcement of consolidation under the Native Instruments brand name and Native Access as the installer and account manager for all of the sub-brands -- though the rollout will be phased and will take over half a year.

[Stokely]

That's a pretty big move for NI or at least it seems so.  PA and Izotope are pretty big prescences plugin-wise, I have a number of good PA plugins.  I got annoyed with Izotope when they kind of dropped support for R4 and other Exponential audio plugins for a long while, then finally updated them for Mac OS Monterey...but by then I'd bought replacements as the writing seemed to be on the wall.   If you aren't going to support something, stop selling it.   I've messed with Ozone essentials to do some pseudo-mastering (I wouldn't really call what I do on the master bus "mastering" by any stretch) and liked the results, but I'm always leery of "magic tools" where I don't really know what its doing!   Teote is another tool where I like what it does but don't really understand it...Anyway, less installers and updaters is good, we'll see if one owner for all these plugins is good in the long run.  Best case, they take some of the PA stuff and keep improving it, as Apple did with Alchemy.  I'm not really expecting that though.   I just hope NI doesn't go subscription....

[Doerfler]

NI already does subscription as an option for those who can't afford the lump sum

[johnchop]

This thread encouraged me to check how my PA-licensed copy of Gig Performer was affected. I don’t think I got the memo on the fact that Deskew is handling that license directly now, and the upgrade path is through them (with a trivial admin fee for anyone who paid full price, or with additional charge for folks like me who got it for a discount through PA).  

 

Not sure if there’s a grace period for this, but I’ll eat that cross-grade cost for the next significant update.

 

Didn’t mean to derail, but yeah, hardware… software… buy it and use it for what it is now, because these consolidations are going to mean the end of <insert your favorite plugin here>.

[Mark Schmieder]

I got the email a few weeks ago and was able to transfer my license from Plugin Alliance subscription to perpetual license, but I think I did that via PA vs. Deskew. I don't remember and am not sure if it is supported beyond the re-download. As it isn't a plug-in I've used yet, I wasn't motivated to put time into it.

 

On the other hand, I just upgraded two licenses to perpetual as a safety precaution, using vouchers for a small expenditure altogether, and was surprised they still say subscription after reinstall, re-auth and reboot, but my support ticket got a very clear answer, which is that subscriptions take precedence until they expire, after which any purchased perpetual licenses show up in the plug-in license status bar.