Hi guys,
what is the basic difference between Native Instruments KOMPLETE and KONTAKT ??
are they both useful for sound designers ?? or they are for music creation ??

 

Komplete is a collection of most of Native Instruments current programs, including Kontakt 5, and sound design/synthesizers Reaktor 5, Massive, FM8, and Absynth.

Kontakt is a powerful sampler which modulates recorded audio files using the Kontakt engine and scripting features.

All of these programs can be used for music production and sound design, depending on what you want to do with them.

 

Last edited: Dec 7, 2015

Thanks Dark Harmony

 

Yup. Kontakt 5 is included in Komplete 10 and Komplete 10 Ultimate, so if you were to buy K10U, you'd be getting the whole cake. But Kontakt 5 is just one product. Therefore if you only want Kontakt, just buy Kontakt for $400-$500. If you want mostly all products, you'd buy Komplete 10 Ultimate for $1,100+. This excludes the free Kontakt Player.

Just for a fun but completely useless fact: Kontakt wasn't always called "Kontakt". NI had some products back in the day (1998-2000?) called "Kompakt", "Intakt" and whatnot. These were like the fetal-stage of the Kontakt saga's birth, and have been discontinued for over a decade. I'd personally get my hands on these just because I'm a history-hoarding, nostalgic nerd when it comes to music technology.

 

NI offers a free Kontakt Player, which is a stripped down version of full Kontakt ($400 regular price) with a limited library included. But, it's a good thing to try out , especially being free, because it will give you a great idea if you like the layout and functionality before paying a large chunk of change.

Now, the thing to keep in mind is, if you do end up deciding to go for the full version of Kontakt, it would be unwise to pay the $400 for it alone when you could pay and extra $100 and get the entire NI Komplete collection,which gives you a bunch of good synths and some other goodies. Kontakt is included in both Komplete and Ultimate. Ultimate's going price is $1,000 but unless you really want a bunch of extra strings, drums, guitars, and effects, it's not really worth the extra $500 at least in my opinion. $500 for Ultimate seems to be to be the best bang for the buck, since you get Kontakt, Traktor, Guitar Rig, all of their most popular synths, including Massive, Absynth & FM8, as well as a bunch of other goodies. To buy only Kontakt & Massive alone would cost $600, so the $500 for Komplete is a no-brainer. Below is a link that compares the versions.

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bundles/komplete-10-ultimate/compare/