East-West Intakt, Best Service Kompakt
are these specfic product clones of Intakt and Kompakt?

as a new and stupid owner of Komplete 2, the NI site seems to know I own Komplete 2 but wants a product registration to get hold of these updates.

what exactly are these products?

Have a look at the East-West and Best Services websites then; they're basically romplers tied to bundled versions of Kompakt and Intakt...

These are the customised versions of the plugins supplied with products like StormDrum. They are tied to the libraries that they are supplied with.

Generally NI seem to update the core product - i.e. Kompakt or Intakt, then update the separate customised versions.

so there are no editions of these samples that aren't sold separately without a customized Intakt/Kompakt module?

implying the samples are similarly customized for specific Intakt implementations (?). say one already had Intakt or even another of these East-West products, there doesn't appear to be any separation between sample and instrument and so no way to load samples from one into another. you're basically buying a dedicated version of Intakt/Kompakt with dedicated samples (maybe to have an upgrade set of samples sometime or not)?

If you have Kontakt you can find many sample sets that will load into it. Intakt will load Acid loops.
Some of these new Konpakt/Inpakt instruments were previouslly sample sets in Akai or some other format. Others were loops or reason refills. The Kompakt and Impakt players have given sample makers a way to copyprotect their samples. The nice thing about the process is that some of these collections are cheaper within a player that provides copy protection than they were in sample only content. I am sure GPO would not be as cheap without some type of copy protection.

I like the Kompakt instruments but don't care for Impakt instruments. I much prefer the ability to drag a loop directly into Sonar 3. I don't like the "one loops per channel" restriction of loop players.


Robert

It doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me, although I can see if you're rabid (no pun intended) about your sampler of choice, you wouldn't like these. They get to keep costs down by providing a player with their samples (as oppposed to creating lots of sample formats) and also get to protect said samples.

Note that these samples will play in their own player, but will also play in Kontakt (or Kompakt or Intakt, depending on the type of content.) So you're not necessarily tied to the included player.

If you have Komplete, then you can see these as just being sample content.

thanks pough that answers most of my last question.

so then you're buying samples and the customized version of Intakt/Kompakt is just thrown in extra,
but if the cost is actually less than the samples alone would have been prior to this package, you'd still be ahead.

One thing to note, though you can use the samples within the full versions of Kontakt they are still protected by registration. The samples will not play unless the sample library and included player is registered with NI.

Robert

I'm pretty sure that not *all* romplers using the Kompakt engine allow you to load their samples into Kontakt. Can't remember the specific products right now, but I have seen this mentioned several times on various boards.