Alternative to NI Kontakt?

[Alatar]

Hello,

Can someone recommend a good(free) alternative to Native Instruments Kontakt(full version)?

I would like to make my own instrument plugin (e.g. recordings from a Xylophone) and share it with my friends.

NI Kontakt is very good for this purpose. BUT: it costs a lot, if I want to distribute my instrument to someone else. Either the other person needs the full version of Kontakt(expensive) or I need to give Native Instruments a lot of money in order to make my instrument work with the freely avaiable Kontakt Player.

So the problem for me is the sharing part.
Any suggestions?

[stanlea]

Obvsiously, you have to choose another format. Actually most of the libraries comes in nki because it's a closed copyrighted format and you can't even edit the samples. On the other hand, Kontakt is a really powerful sampler with a lot of possibilities.
I'd suggest you'd move to the sfz format, recognized by Shortcircuit for instance and make your banks with it.
sfz banks can be read by Alchemy, LinuxSampler, Shortcircuit, and the free sfz player for RGCAudio.
A sfz bank is dead simple to edit : it's a text file and a folder of samples.

[bpblog]

go for SFZ, it's a great format and easy to learn. as stanlea said, it can be loaded in many freeware samplers.

[Tubeman]

I'm using SFZ too with Aria Player that came with GPO4 it plays any SFZs.

[Bronto Scorpio]

+1 for SFZ

However, these are some good free samplers:
Highlife
TX16Wx
Shortcircuit

Cheers
Dennis

[Alatar]

Thanks for the recommendations. Will check out these.
Do any of those offer multilayer support and maybe even scripting?

[EvilDragon]

Scripting is only offered by Kontakt and MachFive 3. Everything else falls short.