Until now, many non-player libraries have just had all their patches listed in one big list. In some cases for me, there's over a thousand of them. These are typically arranged on disk into subfolders with perhaps different mic positions, streaming options etc, and contain patches with identical or near-identical file names. K7 ignored the file structure completely.
This made browsing them essentially impossible until 7.5 which now has a browse by sub-bank. It's a slightly clumsy hierarchy menu structure that you have to navigate, but now you can at least browse only a single subfolder. That's the difference between an imperfect-but-useable browser and a totally unusable one.
They've also added a select by band as a tab at the top. This isn't so useful right now though, as it can only read player libraries as far as I can tell. Until they integrate a proper batch tag editor, a lot of its functionality is restricted. They have now dipped a toe in this water but for user patches only and it's only Sound Type and Character that can be edited - so it's only about 1% as useful as it should be.
There's lots of other 7.5 changes including new effects etc. However one big negative is that it's now MacOS 11 upwards only. Here's the changelog:
7.5.0 - 2023-07-10
Lua API, new effects, browser improvements, builder features, bug fixes.
• CHANGED Minimum supported macOS version is now 11.0
KONTAKT ENGINE IMPROVEMENTS
• ADDED Seven new effects: Bite, Dirt, Freak, Raum, Twin Delay, Vibrato/Chorus, Wow/Flutter
• IMPROVED Context menus now follow zoom scaling settings
• IMPROVED Rendering quality of raster images in Native UI based instruments
• IMPROVED MIDI files dragged out of Kontakt don’t have the copyright message anymore
• IMPROVED NKG files are now visible in Files browser and also loadable or importable via double-click or drag and drop
• IMPROVED Maximum number of host automation slots increased to 2048
• FIXED Legato button did not work in any Tone/Time Machine mode except TMPro
• FIXED Clicking on virtual keyboard when Kontakt was in Single view did not respect the MIDI channel setting of multiple loaded instruments
BROWSER IMPROVEMENTS
• ADDED A button for loading the first preset directly from the instrument tile
• ADDED Filtering by brand
• ADDED Filtering by sub-bank
• ADDED User-authored presets can now have sound and character type metadata edited in bulk via multi-selection
• ADDED Warning dialog with a list of files that failed to import
• FIXED Scroll position is set to zero when the result list is resized
• FIXED Resizing the window no longer resets the result list selection
• FIXED Folders beginning with “-” can now be imported
• FIXED Content type does not update with the focused module slot
INSTRUMENT BUILDING AND SCRIPTING IMPROVEMENTS
• ADDED Kontakt Lua API, enabled through the new Developer panel in Options dialog
• ADDED Various options for showing or hiding incoming, script generated and ignored events in Mapping Editor
• ADDED Source module’s playback mode can now be retrieved with $ENGINE_PAR_SOURCE_MODE getter
• ADDED Option to copy sample end setting to all selected zones in Wave Editor
• ADDED continue statement is now available in KSP
• ADDED Real arrays can now be stored to and loaded from NKA files
• ADDED Selection state of a zone can now be queried with $ZONE_PAR_SELECTED zone parameter, and a list of all currently selected zones can be retrieved with get_sel_zones_idx() command
• ADDED set_map_editor_event_color() KSP command, which allows changing color of script-generated events in Mapping Editor, individually per script slot
• IMPROVED Snap to value or zero crossing options in Wave Editor are now retained per instrument, rather than per zone
• IMPROVED Internal modulator and modulation target KSP information is now always shown if Developer Options checkbox is enabled
• IMPROVED TMPro polyphony can now be set to 0 via KSP, in order to match the range of the related parameters in Instrument Options->Voice Handling dialog
• IMPROVED Snapshot files (.NKSN) can now be loaded from the File->Load… dialog
• IMPROVED Reorganized Mapping and Group Editor context menus
• IMPROVED Reorganized effect selection context menu
• FIXED Boolean not operator would not correctly invert a boolean expression that consisted of only literals or constants
• FIXED Function call stack would collapse entirely if exit statement was used at the beginning of user defined functions, rather than only exiting the currently called function
