which soft sampler would work better in a host audioapp (DP, or logic both mac)? the added benifits of the maelstrom and the drumbox sound nice, but is the nn19 just as hefty as kontakt? i do have a akai S5000, but it's mainly just used for strings and a drum machine. would either reason2 or kontakt free me of the hardware?
what benifits as far as lfo's, envelopes, and effects does kontakt or the nn19 have over one another?
i would appreciate any insight as well as studio examples..

ez, selekta

the NN-XT available in Reason 2 is NN-19's big brother, and it sports a much expanded feature set.

if you use reason in a host sequencer environment, it *may* be able to replace your hardware. i believe it depends pretty much on your working method, i.e. do you need real sampling or sample playback of commercial sounds in the first place.

you can't sample within reason (both 1 and 2), but you could still do sampling and basic sample editing (aka hd recording) outside and create your own nifty sample programs with NN-19 or NN-XT - the latter for complex tasks.

i do use reason this way and i'm very happy with it, but as said, it probably is a matter of your preferred method.

nn19 wont work on its own in any other host application than Reason. Reason can run 'in parallel' with another host using ReWire, but thats not quite the same thing (and IMHO is a bit of a kludge). I'm not sure how well Logic or DP support ReWire.

As always, its probably very worthwhile checking out the demo versions...

If you use Logic on Mac, EXS24mkII works the best with it.

i would use it with either DP or logic under OSX. im 'anticipating' that the new midi/audio architecture under OSX is more robust than OS9, which im sure it is.
having to 'use' reason in conjuction is not a bother at all. the added gain of the redrum is pretty fair.
on the other hand, being able to use my own samples is nice for kontakt.

what is really boils down to, is that, i already have a hardware sampler, and i own version 1 of reason. the update to reason 2 is a few hundred dollars less than buying kontakt. however, if within using kontakt, i could sell my hardware sampler, then, great...
it's sorta of dollars versus funtion...

ez, selekta

ive got reason (1) and kontakt and i think kontakt is the daddy of all samplers. It cant be beat but then again reason is better value as youre obviously getting much more than just a sampler...especially now theres a better sampler in reason 2 (which i havent got but it looks pretty sexy). If you do mainly sampling based stuff kontakt is probably the best bet but I dont think it would replace all your hardware (unless al your hardware = a sampler) whereas maybe reason would? I love redrum with a passion, subtractor is good too...infact i thought id stop using it when i got a more powerful pc (so i could run more processor hungry vstis) but i still use it about the same as b4....plus maelstron looks great...and propellerheads for their xmas gift gave all their reason customers a 100mb account at primesounds.com.

Did they ever get Rewire working with Logic? I had nothing but problems with it and gave up a while ago. I'm not sure if they ever fixed it.
Kontakt is simply awesome. My vote is on Kontakt.

selekta wrote:

i do have a akai S5000, but it's mainly just used for strings and a drum machine. would either reason2 or kontakt free me of the hardware?

I have an Akai S5000 as well, and it has sat almost unused since I became a Kontakt user. I found that Kontakt sounds better, is MUCH more reliable in responding to MIDI, is much easier to use, does not crash nearly as often, and has a set of filters that are very musical and very powerful. Kontakt was an easy replacement for me.

The only reasons I haven't yet parted with the S5000 is that Kontakt cannot (yet) read S5000 files (AKM, AKP), and used S5000s are going extremely cheap (wouldn't get much for it anyways).

-sfr