Native Instruments

It's amazing but quite buggy since ever.

Like many other NI products, I find the presets' selection is not much efficient.

Is Kontakt the best sampling platform I can imagine? Not even close. Worse yet, the version 6 pitfalls have been among the worst since early version 4 (about 10 years ago). Have they added features? Sure. And gigantic bloat.

Unfortunately, the bloat is not only in the size of the engine. The screen real estate it fills with useless graphics is even worse.

All that negativity aside, Kontakt is the standard of the industry for sampling that sits in your DAW. If you don't license it, you will be missing a significant chunk of available sound libraries and virtual instruments. And that's the cool part: if you want more sounds, get Kontakt for endless possibilities.

At this point, in 2021, Kontakt is very much a necessary evil. If you want to use many of the best sample libraries out there, you need to pay up the cash for the full version of Kontakt. But you probably won't be happy about it.

There are competing products out there that offer (at least) most of the same functionality, for a lot less money, and without using anywhere near the ridiculous processing overhead that Kontakt uses.

Oh, and those competing products have re-sizable GUIs as well. Still not figured that out in Kontakt, Native Instruments, despite what you charge for it?

It's become a bit of a joke how little regard NI has for its customers concerning this and other core products. They keep pumping out new expensive products and focus on drawing in new customers, whilst completely ignoring the problems with Kontakt that existing customers have been complaining about for years (yes, YEARS).

Sadly, it has gotten to the point where I will actively avoid buying Native Instruments products unless there's absolutely no alternative. Their market segment is ripe for disruption and frankly the day can't come soon enough...

The worst piece of drek this side of Pro Tools. Overpriced, the ridiculously cramped screen with tons of real estate wasted, you can't resize or even simply maximize that cramped screen, the ridiculous cobweb of file extensions, the lame and inconsistent file navigation, the weak customer service, the short shelf life (it's not long before simply having Kontakt is enough, you need a newer version for newer plugins, and can only get the free upgrade for minor upgrades), I could go on. And really this plugin within a plugin thing is stupid in the first place. It's a shame that so many plugins were written just to appease this archaic software sewage, which is the ONLY reason to get it. Fortunately I there are a ton of great plugins which don't require it, and few if any sample libraries do anymore, so I'll never waste money on it (I'm only familiar with due to a friend having it and quickly realized how happy I was that I never bought it).

This is a bad product.

Maybe it was a good (and better than all of it's competition) sometimes in the past, but not now. If you are about to purchase it, here's what to expect.

1. It's kind of heavy on resources. Some libraries can make my 2018 Hexacore Core i5 chug to the point of complete impossibility to work (and that's for 1 instance).

2. Expect locate samples manually all the time, because at least for 5th of libraries paths to samples won't work for some reason.

3. Expect to pay $100 on average per library.

4. Expect buyer's remorse. It's a bad value for the 50% Sale price, and terrible value for the fill price.

5. Expect to not being able to write your instrument as a markup file, and fiddling with the UI instead.

6. Expect to receive samples packed in a proprietary encrypted .ncw pseudo-format often with inability to unpack anything.

Kontakt is bad. And it's status quo is to blame.

Kontakt by itself is a five-star sampling application and the literal heart and centerpiece of all my music production. Kontakt as an MPE software ranges from 3.5 stars to 4.5 stars depending on a billion factors, like:

• If you can find a Kontakt Library that's MPE-compatible that fits your project or use-purpose.
• If you have to do any finnicky fiddling / routing to get your desired effect.
• If you'll buy an MPE-enabled synth or plugin instead of even trying anymore.

So if you need Kontakt for its core functionality (loading up and playing your virtual instruments beyond the Kontakt Player functionality) and also found at least one MPE-enabled Kontakt library, then grab it for sure.

But if you think Kontakt is (as of 2020) a playground of enldess MPE-controlled fun, dig much deeper before pressing the buy button.

Modular Icons which is part of the Native Instruments Play Series does sound modular. I Love the sounds and feel of this library. Built-in sequencer is really easy to use and you can apply it to pitch, velocity and the macros.

The play series is mostly about blending two layers and create some very useful sounds with minimalistic user interface. The sound browser is easy to use and the extra options are very useful. For example you can map the layers to different ranges on the key board and so layer A can be triggered by the lower part of the key board while layer B is triggered by the upper part of the keyboard and they can overlap as well.

Here is a video review I made to cover this library.
https://youtu.be/5wuKLOdziG4

Check my channel for more Play Series reviews:

https://www.youtube.com/c/udiaudio

imho Battery is great... i own komplete 12...

great quality samples
you can load your own samples
you can make custom Kits
the gui is fine, it's working, it's str8 forward...you see everything you need at once,
there's no need to learn tonz of stuff to use it.

only con i see on it is the 16 stereo outputs... when it comes to big kits with more than 15-16 samples unfortunately i have to run 2 instances of it just for routing them all to different mixer channels.. on every else perspective it's awesome :)