Yeah, if those are the sounds you want and you have the time to do all that. I'd rather just use an nki. Plus I hate 90's sounds.

 

How hard is it to just go into the file explorer and open a damn NKI? It's not rocket science.

 

We use Kontakt because it is basically a software recreation of an akai sampler. as for the nicht nki...use the explorer as so many have stated and open presets there. complaining that not every sample pack has some colorful background in the gui is such a piddle thing. who cares? dont u obtain the sample packs to make music? or just to stare at the kontakt artwork?

 

There are, as mentioned, SFZ etc.... I think where this gets difficult for many tzzsmk, is that over time, Kontakt has certainly evolved beyond a "sampler/rompler playback library into something else in addition which is hard to get the egg out of a cake kinda thing..

I was a hardware guy as well, then SampleCell and SampleCell 2, and I had Motu's MachV, and Samplitude, Halion/BestService/G whatever/Hell, Reasons sampler and whatnot all down the pike....

And coming from my origins with hardware samplers and whatnot, the jump to something like SampleCell was great, as I could take any audio in my StudioVision project or SDII file etc and send it over right to Sample Cell without having to do the transfer over midi slog, or SCSI and later Zip disks/sony128 optical drives etc.... so I could approach SampleCell like I could my Akai S1000's and whatnot, but far more elegantly, and take my own samples and easily make key groups/route (albeit limited) modulation etc etc, AND I could use my later Sample Cell cards with TDM! deep_facepalm: that often didn't work very well)...

so sorry for the long tl/dr on the lead up, when Kontakt entered the fray, it was similar to the others, and I'll admit I have never really gotten along well with NI's interfaces and their inscrutably small fonts and menus and whatnot... and key mapping and whatnot on it certainly wasn't as friendly as SampleCell, and Motu's Mach5 same etc.... and both were clumsy to me... but Kontakt, from it's origin, and from there on out, seemed to spend a lot of money and time developing their libraries, and working with other devs to bring in to their system, and integrating other aspects of their other IP from all their DSP to scripting and whatnot that kinda morphed Kontakt into more of what I consider a vessel for "instruments"... meaning that, sure, Gigastudio (at the time) and whatnot had similar "French Horn" libraries and whatnot.... but over different rev's (the biggest jump iirc was from V4 to V5 but could be wrong), their scripting and hosting of these different vessels just became a thing onto it's own in way, and perhaps it was just my tastes, .. interesting or better... say the OUTPUT REV and their other products... or the Heavyocity Damage/Spitfire/ and the way devs could use Kontakt as simply a front end for their "instruments", like the different "Polymoog" versions out there or "Solina's"and whatnot... that, hey, like GForce, I guess they could have made their own standalone plugs, but Kontakt scripting seemed to become more of a thing... and as their IP grew over their product line, they could bring in different filters and whatnot they had designed for Maschine SP1200 emulation or whatnot, or things from GuitarRig, or Reaktor, and down the line....

So it gave them a little leg up with their large bucket to pull from, and while conglomeration of companies and monopolies are things I am not a fan of in music or anything else, it definitely help push the Kontakt engine that could further and further, and leave a lot of competitors behind in that kinda thing... (and also, having dev's get shaken down for the "privilege" of nicnt access and protected through their system was also another thing... hell, usually, outside of the Factory Libs or the NI stuff in my Komplete packages or whatever, well, those were the only things in the sidebar...

I have hundreds if not thousands of great libraries from Sounddust (and what a great dev Pendleton is, and he is someone who has learned very well how to get great sounds out of the Kontakt engine and scripts and other modules that he couldn't do on another product ((well, I'm sure Falcon would have a word with that, but you know what I mean... )......

TL/DR: I just see Kontakt more now as an "instrument", as much as a rompler, and probably less as something I personally would use in my regular self made "sampling" needs. For that I generally go with the samplers in different DAWs, from Ableton's Sampler/Simpler, Logic, whatnot, as just easier for me to get to what I used to use hardware samplers for, and I still have all my old hard earned sample libraries from the late 80's until now, from crate digging to walking around with a dat machine and a PZM Crown head shaped mic lol, to taking off VHS tapes
to sampling every drum machine I could get my hands on etc.... and for that, I'm not pulling that into Kontakt usually, as I'm not very educated on Kontakt scripting myself other then moving keyranges or changing a few modules or whatnot....


I get imagine anything that can do 1:1 Kontakt library transfers (at least like the products I am talking about) to any other, as there are too many dependancies on things other people don’t have. I guess you could obviously spend your time finding equivalents in Falcon or whatnot, but that’s not a task I would want on anyone….


So I guess I see Kontakt more as a multifaceted “instrument” or “platform” now then I see as a sampler/rompler …. And it is what it is, and probably not going away… (although I always welcome competition!)

 

See if you dont like it, then dont use it.

Simples

 

You think Kontakt sucks. This is YOUR opinion based on your experiences.
But you have to accept other opinions.

 

Kontakt (1) started out as more of a sampler than a platform. It was a reasonable attempt to nail what folks at the time needed/wished for in a sampler. Over time it evolved into a platform.

Now of course it attempts to be many things to many people. But under the hood all the things you ever needed to do with it are still there. That's likely why it's a bit of a fatty and a tad cryptic to those who want something more skewed to any given fettish.

 

The sfz standard mandates 4 fx slots... but doesn't prescribe what they should be used for. So no instrument developer uses fx with sfz.

decentSampler doesn't even support compressed samples. But at least you get reverb, delay, phaser, chorus and waveshapers as fx.

HISE isn't free for commercial instruments and requires actual programming knowledge.

Maybe HALion and Falcon are valid alternatives, but they cost more than twice as much as Kontakt.

So we're kinda stuck with Kontakt?

 

kontakt is one of my
favorite

 

It's a big ugly mess. Falcon is worse. I used to like the UVI Workstation, but you couldn't do much on your own. It was like a rompler. I sampled extensively in the old days . . . so much better. TAL is pretty cool, but is a different beast . . . no designed for clarity with big sound libraries. There are many drum alternatives, tho.

 

Wow how retarded answers this thread got. And of course none of you answered the question why we need third party tools to manage that piece of crap if it so great as you claim

Looks like the answers just rotate around this retarded idea that we would have nothing if we did not have kontakt. Its a year 2024 with AI soon replacing most of you and all you do is talk how you used to have akai sampler with a floppy disk and that we would be there without Kontakt and how grateful we should all be.

This is the dimension of stupid that cant comprehend ideas like what if we had something better

"I like kontakt so much all my libraries are there blabla"

This is missing the point and is just plain stupid

 

99% of the computer problems sit in the front of the computer.

 

Exactly, that's what I was trying to explain in my rather long and ham fisted treatise on how Kontakt developed over time..

and THEN it became a platform, and it can be anything from a rompler, to a synth, to heavily scripted libraries and with a ton of tools...

And yeah, obviously you can still do a simple setup and keymap 20 samples you made yourself and apply whatever... just not (for me) as quick as I would do with a stock daw sampler or whatnot.. but yup, I agree with all you said, and have had it since V1 on release...

 

Actually, if one can read, one would understand why Kontakt is what it is now and how it evolved and why it is a rather cumbersome beast that there is no way to take, say, and OUTPUT sample library or whatnot and have a piece of software to translate it 1:1 for another platform.

It's a piece of software with a lot of dependancies and IP that others don't have or don't have in the same way etc.

If you own it legit, and all your libraries legit, there aren't many problems outside of the occasional bug, or PEBKEC.

But if you are one who is just downloading waReZZ and libraries without knowing what's going on, yeah, with this stuff there are certain reliances on different tools and paying attention and doing things right in order to do so.

Seems most here have been able to get it done.

At what point do you realize the problem might be you? I would just recommend doing your research here, as the rest of us do, and asking the right questions to the right people if you are jammed up at some point, rather then just proclaiming "it sucks and is retarded" because you haven't done that, and don't get it.

I personally never said Kontakt was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I actually have said multiple times that I have some issues with it and with Native Instruments in general. And I would love a more robust competition to the product.

But your knuckledragging and being a snowflake ingrate isn't getting you anywhere closer to solving your problem if you won't listen to the solutions.

And imho, no one here has missed the point or is having strokes about this, or is stupid in getting it should they want to, ... is you.

 

I doubt many people think Kontakt is great. It's simply better than the alternatives. The title of your thread (Kontakt is the worst thing) makes no sense. You're accusing people of missing the point when they disprove what you yourself wrote into the title.

If using the file browser in Kontakt is too difficult for you, then most other technical things will be too. Consider the possibility that your lack of basic computer knowledge is the problem.

 

Learn to code? If the world does not present you with what you want - build it yourself. If only .0001% of the people who complain about everything being awful were to actually work toward the solution - we would live in a utopia.

 

Can you develop a bit? What do you mean by Kontakt engine, precisely?
I've never had a deep dive into Kontakt, I'm only vaguely familiar with its engine

 

I can peck and noodle and guess as a coder (I'm no good, my brother is world class), but what I mean in regards to their engine, is, as @Audioguydaz and I were saying, Kontakt started out as a pretty straight-line sampler, with a library and one could (I believe at the point, or could be confusing it with Logic's EX24) could import different libraries from SampleCell or Akai in some cases iirc... (it's been a long time).. and there were other ones out there in the same mold... but NI, with the the other resources at their disposal with their larger company also developing things like GuitarRig and synths like Absynth and Pro52 and Intakt and all of that, toss in their Reaktor genius's, and then Maschine's and their different filters and eft development, and their appropriation of other tech.... were able to fold a lot of that in to Kontakt itself as computers got more powerful etc....

It would be hard obviously to have serious dsp going on on a fairly pedestrian, say, multisampled cello patch... but when you could access different filter types they had already done or bought the r&d on, or distortions, delays, different failed or stopped evolutionary products (like Spektral and whatnot)... they kinda had more to 'work' with as a package to bring in, which was nice at first as just, "hey, cool, I can put a dotted 8th note delay on this and maybe some distortion or a decent software modeled 24db filter" and whatnot... but over different iterations, their scripting and ability grew and was developed, so you started seeing more things like articulations and sequenced key mapping or even oscillators built in (other samplers had that too but), ... so Kontakt 2, 3, and then around 4 or 5(2009-2012-13 ish), they kinda expanded with more articulated scripting for phrases and brought on some other artist based products from Alicia Keys to Abbey Road, with their drums (and drum patterns as well)... and spent I imagine a fair amount of money... then some 3rd parties started making some real interesting stuff (OUTPUT being one of my favorite examples... or Spitfire for the more orchestral or organically (generally)minded, and it's fuzzy as this all happened over time, but it became more then just a sampler, but a platform... in which could be used many different ways...

And I know I am simplifying it greatly here... but Kontakt became a monolith, and again, while there was competition, some came and went, Samplitude, and the others mentioned... I think the UVI stuff has probably become the closest, with like the Falcon and whatnot and ancillary/brother products, they just probably didn't have the same "in house" r&d or weaponry ip wise to accomplish as much as Kontakt could or can... and again, that's a simplification, and in now way am I doubting what Falcon can do or anything, I just haven't really used it myself.

By engine, I mean the totality of their coding, and their proprietary dsp across their different products, their research into different things applied, and their partners from zplane to whatever, and hell, now even Izotope etc.... they provide a formidable product.

Now do I think it's great that they are kinda mainly the kinda gold standard for that without a lot of competition?

no. And am I an NI fanboy? no.

I have NI Ultimate or Komplete or whatnot, and Maschine and most or all of their options.... but put it this way, I'm putting together a new system right now, and I'm pretty much just installing Kontakt from them, maybe a few others... but not the whole bag, as I don't use a lot of their stuff outside of Kontakt and a few other things like Reaktor or whatnot...

 

What kind of answer are you looking for?
I can get behind the idea of it would be better if we had something better. You make a good point there.

 

Thanks for clarifying.

I guess my definition of the term DSP is limited. I didn't think of stuff like articulation and sequenced key mapping as DSP. I thought only applied to stuff like oscillators filters effects etc.

Of course I'm talking about music making software only, I know it's a much larger domain.