I have no idea to be honest, only know Sforzando personally and that hasn't really been convincing. Heard good things of DecentSampler but don't know anything about it either. Who knows, maybe Sine or Spitfire Player will be open for third party developers at some point?

 

Shortcircuit XT is probably the closest to a open-source Kontakt alternative you can find (if it will ever get released, that is)!

 

TW16Wx by CWITEC is ridiculously full-featured for a free sampler (not open source though), there are no libraries for it really, but it does import SF2/SFZ/EXS24/REX so there's plenty of those.

Fantastic for fucking about with your own samples really.

 

now we just need some hacker gods to post a kontakt - to - SF2/SFZ/EXS24/REX - converter

 

Well, the best free open-source sampler I know is Hise Sampler: http://hise.audio/
But I wouldn't count on a free project taking the lead or even competing with big companies.

By the way, with Meldaproduction's MSoundFactory you can do almost everything including big sample libraries. It's just insane the features it has.

 

we need a OPUS/ENGINE/KONTAKT etc to FALCON converter
hi, R2R :D

 

still prefer the hardware :D

 

Just rewrite Kontakt in JUCE. That will make it HiDPI compatible + Linux compatible + resizable + Kontakt can load plugins in itself + whatever the fuck JUCE has in its bag. Call it version 7. I just gave you a business strategy NI.

 

I totally forgot about HISE! It's definitely closer to Kontakt than Shortcircuit, and more importantly; it's in working condition!

 

Last edited: Jan 23, 2022

Yep. I haven't used it myself, but it's been developed since several years ago. And it's powerful: javascript-like scripting, direct from disk loading and all the usual features of a modern sampler: layers, groups, etc...

And like you said, I've seen some videos of people using it and seems pretty stable. The developer is a very hard worker.