KODA Sampler - coming KONTAKT alternative?

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Yeah, I think that's right. I think it boils down to: if you want them to play in Kontakt Player or use NI's licensing/activation system, you've gotta pay.

I'm glad the Koda developer seems to be avoiding all that stuff. No subscription right? I just want to buy once, and/or pay to upgrade. No subs.

But seriously, I'm excited for this.

[Jim Roseberry]

All of that matters but the most important thing overall is performance. Which is still where Kontakt is about the best. I've spoken with Koda main developer and Koda doesn't support multicore processing as it stands, so heavily polyphonic and multi-mic libraries will definitely be more CPU intensive in Koda, until they decide to grapple with that problem.

That's extremely disappointing.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Wouldn’t the short-term worst case just be: instead of running a bunch of multitimbral parts inside one instance, you run one KODA instance per track and let the DAW spread the load across cores? It’s not ideal, especially for big orchestral templates, but it’s a brand-new codebase, and a modern plugin made by people who understand the gaps in the marketplace, so I’d assume multicore support is already on the developer’s radar.

I’d be surprised if multi-core support didn’t show up post-1.0. In the meantime, multiple instances is annoying, but potentially workable if CPU becomes an issue. If the dev were claiming “you don’t need it,” that’d be more concerning. This looks like a huge project with a small team, so they may just be keeping scope tight for 1.0 to ship a solid product.

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now and staying optimistic.

[EvilDragon]

Yes I bet they will look into it, but it's not the most important priority right now. And I can understand that.

Steven was not dismissive about it at all.

[Amberience]

I think there's probably going to be one or two more Kontakt alternatives coming over the next few years.

[Echoes in the Attic]

I believe that's just if you want to use their official library stuff/licensing system.

Any one of us could create a free Kontakt library and distribute it. I'm 95% sure that's not violating any licensing agreement and would fall under fair use. But if you want it to show up in Native Access, yeah, makes sense you'd need to pay.

Maybe the only catch there is that free instruments can't be used in Kontakt Player, requiring the full version of Kontakt to be able to use the instruments.

How I'm understanding it the developer of Koda wants to avoid all the player/full version mess, and I guess we'll see how that goes.

So if Koda doesn’t do any kind of Licensing then I guess it’s exactly the same as if a developer makes a kontakt instrument and doesn’t license the player version. Anyone who buys your instrument needs to buy Koda as well as they would have to with kontakt if they didn’t make it available with the free player. Which is fine bet then people’s instruments have a smaller potential market if Koda owners. Unless they allow some kind of locked uneditable free version for people to share or sell only versions with custom GUIs?

[audiojunkie]

Yeah, I think that's right. I think it boils down to: if you want them to play in Kontakt Player or use NI's licensing/activation system, you've gotta pay.

I'm glad the Koda developer seems to be avoiding all that stuff. No subscription right? I just want to buy once, and/or pay to upgrade. No subs.

But seriously, I'm excited for this.

I just hope they will support Linux as well. Everyone wins when Linux users are paying for samples instruments too.

[mabian]

Anybody mentioned AudioModern Soundbox already? It was recently updated with official Linux support, and it's not bad at all imo...

- Mario

[sellyoursoul]

So if Koda doesn’t do any kind of Licensing then I guess it’s exactly the same as if a developer makes a kontakt instrument and doesn’t license the player version. Anyone who buys your instrument needs to buy Koda as well as they would have to with kontakt if they didn’t make it available with the free player. Which is fine bet then people’s instruments have a smaller potential market if Koda owners. Unless they allow some kind of locked uneditable free version for people to share or sell only versions with custom GUIs?

I think it could go something like: All libraries include an ID registered with Koda that gives authorization to the player, where the player is downloaded from a Koda server. If the library is free, there is no cost to the developer. If the library is commercial, player cost is according to cost of the library, or some reasonably accountable cost/profit formula, billed to the developer on the fly or upon some time interval, e.g., monthly. Everyone gets access to all instruments with no upfront cost to developers and no confusion. And everyone has the option of paying for a Koda editor license for full access to tweaking libraries and creating libraries. The Koda editor would give access to all libraries by default. And I would name them something along that line of Koda Player and Koda Editor, to make it perfectly clear what is going on.

Any library copy protection is a separate issue.

The Koda team may already have something else in mind, though.

[bermudagold]

Anybody mentioned AudioModern Soundbox already? It was recently updated with official Linux support, and it's not bad at all imo...

- Mario

its definitely come along way...but its missing a lot of important features and power for instrument design...

[Instatetragrammaton]

I think there's probably going to be one or two more Kontakt alternatives coming over the next few years.

While competition is good, building a sample library is already a lot of effort as-is for a single platform. Translating from one simple (zones + velocities) format to another is one thing, handling the interpretation of a complete scripting language and translating it to another is probably a rather challenging task. I'm not expecting vibe coding to solve that entirely (but I do imagine that sample authoring companies will heavily use that for the boring work).

Building the alternative is not the hard part, getting the momentum probably is. Eventually each manufacturer who wanted to wean themselves off Kontakt tried to roll out their own thing. Unless you have a crystal clear promise that there are not going to be any additional rules/costs for things like "also works in Koda Player" I can't really blame them; you're dependent on someone else's work and quality.

At a certain point Akai S1000/S3000 were the de facto standard - even E-mu samplers supported those. You pick the popular lowest common denominator and make it compatible for that.

However, with scripting added to the equation, this gets a lot more challenging.

[Tj Shredder]

Isn’t the main problem for small library developers eventually the copy protection they might want on their products? There is strong competition already for Kontakt for free libraries without copy protection. Anybody can publish on Halion or Hise without extra hurdles for the users. Free players are around. I never understood why so many creators used Kontakt for their libraries.
Maybe the shift for NI happened slowly and many bigger players got their own players. To develop those was cheaper than paying permanently NI… Their cash cow got weak…

[EvilDragon]

I never understood why so many creators used Kontakt for their libraries.

It has the widest userbase.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Prior to Kontakt, you had Akai formats, which were incredibly basic, and Gigasampler, which might have been the first to incorporate DFD, opening up doors to larger and larger libraries. Kontakt had the right feature set (eventually including scriptable UI's, copy protection, etc.) at the right time and maintained something like 20 years of continued support, even if that meant tech debt. That's how it became dominant. For what it does, it's still the benchmark even today. Makes total sense that it's completely dominant in terms of user base and where so many creators flock to.

[martinjuenke]

KODA is currently only a hyped thing for NI haters.