NI charge to those who sells Kontakt libraries with a GUI?!

No, not those with a GUI. Just those who wish to have their libraries compatible with the FREE Kontakt Player without having to require their users own the full Kontakt.

They charge to license the player.

Brent

oh ok, it's more reasonnable that way.

I'm holding you assholes at least partially responsible for my temporary insanity!

Good thing I'm off all week next week!

Yes - that should give you just enough time to install all those DVDs!

I almost bit the bullet and bought Komplete a few weeks ago. I received a nice bonus from my employer and I was in a position where I could financially justify the expense. Then I did my taxes. So much for being able to afford Komplete. What the employer giveth, the government taketh away. It was really sad.

JoeCat:

I've been using Kontakt for a while - gone through several revisions. What's interesting is that I've bought older versions of softs that have included a relatively ancient version of the Kontakt Sample Player that *still* runs just fine in an UTD WinOS environment (7, Vista).

And Kontakt Full reads my legacy monolithic Kontakt Player files transparently; this gives me confidence that backwards compatibility remains at the heart/soul of the product.

My guess is that the dirty little secret behind Kontakt is that whilst the feature set has seen some pretty-darn-cool improvements/enhancements, the core code of Kontakt has remained in large part reasonably the same-sure: modules have been added to improve/enhance low-level necessities like disk access; recompiling(s) introduced supporting 64 bit, etc. but the fact that a 5-7 year-old (conservative guess) relatively complex product like Kontakt Player still runs fine says volumes, at least to me.

Further: NI's stated policy basically reads that if NI decide to nix support of a product (ex: Pro-53) that the licensee will always be able to Authorize (use) it - I do have Pro-53, it functions on several machines with no problems. Any soft unsupported will eventually die a natural death due to the steamroller of advancing technology, but apparently NI assumes a passive role in it's demise-NI will continue to authorize it, but that's all.

FWIW...

I've only just recently purchased NI's Komplete 8 a few weeks ago and I must say in my own humble opinion, I'm blown away by the whole thing!
Kontakt is one of those samplers that I have lusted for for so many years and with everything being sold and tagged with Kontakt library in mind, I finally feel part of a group.
I also own Yellow Tools Independence Pro, which in fairness has a great library and is also a good sampler but with Yellow Tools downfall and Magix's stagnant take over, it left high and dry. Shame as this also could of been a good head to head with NI's Kontakt.

3 hours! If you include the time it took to install an additional hard drive and shift files around...half the day! Then when I went to activate off-line...FF in Linux didn't go past the first stage...
Windows 7 laptop got almost to the end and Explorer crashed over and over...
Finally I did it on the Mac Mini in FF...Thank fuk I'm OS agnostic...

I would say yes. It seems to me that Kontakt is the way to go right now. Everyone is producing for it and I for one feel its quite user friendly. Seems as though they thought of everything.

Kontakt is the tired burger joint or mcdonalds of the industry,everyones on it,so yes to standard, NO to best sampler features and workflow. I prefer better food thus (mach five 3)is the steak of samplers industry,easily

For the average person who is not planning on creating extensive highly scripted libraries that takes months (years?) to create, the market is ripe for a SFZ specific sampler or a decent sample mapper application.

Next to Kontakt (which IS the reigning standard), SFZ is probably the most used format available (and open too). Wusikstation has a built-in SFZ sample mapper that can be had for cheap, and many, many plugins support and play well this open format (SFZ). LinuxSampler is a free sample player that does a VERY good job with reading the SFZ format.

I truly believe that the person/company that comes out with a well designed multisample mapper that easily makes use of all SFZ functionality, and doesn't cost as much as constructor, will have a very marketable product.

--Sean





P.S. I know you guys didn't expect I'd stay away from a Sampler format thread.