Kore - The Past Generation Workstation

Native Instruments have announced the discontinuation of their Kore product line:

"Native Instruments has decided to discontinue the KORE product range, in order to utilize its development resources in the best interest of its wider userbase.

KORE 2 will be supported through further maintenance updates for the time being, with 64-bit plugin versions of KORE 2 for Windows and Mac OS X currently in development. Technical support for KORE will also continue to be available.

All owners of the full versions of KORE 1 or KORE 2 (excluding software-only versions) can purchase MASCHINE at a special crossgrade price of $449 / €399."


Thomas, the NI Forum Admin went into further detail on a thread in their forums:

"Hello everyone,

You might have already seen the formal announcement above outlining the fact that Kore is not a central part of the NI product roadmap anymore, and will not be developed beyond its current second generation.

On behalf of the Kore team, I would like to reassure you that this decision was not made lightly or on short notice. It is also based on the fact that the technical concept of Kore, with its integrated instrument engines, has always made it require an extraordinary amount of development resources just in order to keep it compatible with the rest of the NI instrument range, and this effort was increasingly hard to justify, especially compared to other NI products, their popularity and related feature requests.

As Maschine has developed into a host for NI instruments due to popular demand from its already very sizable userbase, the feature set and purpose of Maschine and Kore would be bound to overlap more and more in the future. In order not to create redundancy, but rather invest all resources into one single host system and expand it as efficiently as possible, the decision was ultimately been made to focus future development resources to Maschine.

Obviously we do not expect Kore fans to be happy about this announcement, but we hope that the upcoming maintenance updates, including the 64bit features, as well as the crossgrade offer to Maschine combined with its expanding instrument hosting features, will accommodate as many Kore users as much as possible.

I also want to reassure everyone that technical support for Kore continues to be available for an unlimited amount of time.

Keir and I will try to answer any questions and comments about the situation with Kore in as much detail as possible in this thread.

Regards, Thomas"

I've always thought Kore 2 looked like a pretty cool controller but could never justify the price tag. Now it becomes another NI Legacy product along side it's siblings: Intakt, Kompakt, Spektral Delay, Akoustik Piano, Bandstand, Vokator, Pro-53, Guitar Combos, Elektrik Piano and B4. R.I.P.