Is Kontakt 5 worth it?

[Foxedge]

Hey, I just noticed that I am eligble for a crossgrade on Kontakt 5 since I own heavyocity's ensemble drums.

Is Kontakt 5 alone worth 250 bucks, for its content? I know there are some libraries that require kontakt 5 but I did well avoiding them since the market has a lot of alternatives

Two more questions:
Do they have crossgrade-discounts every winter? Because then I would only have to wait a few months until it's 125 bucks or something.

And can I crossgrade to Komplete from Kontakt 5? Also for a crossgrade price if such a discount-sale happens?
On the NI website at the moment it looks like there is no crossgrade for K11 anymore.

[blaubär]

I think its worth it. Kontakt is my most used instrument. However i rarely use kontaks own lib. But there are so many great libraries out there. I think NI might have sales on the crossgrades, but i am not sure. You will have to wait. Also there is an upgrade from kontakt 1-5 to K11 which is 399 or 999 to K11u. I guess there might be a sale later ( i think most people on this forum do expect a K11 sale next summer, but not earlier). But its just a guess....

[Foxedge]

250 kontakt 5 + 399 crossgrade would result in 650 which is 50 more than K11 would cost now.
But if they do a christmas/winter crossgrade discount of 50% (do they? I can't remember exactly but I think there was last year) then I could go 125 + 200.

[RichieWitch]

Can't remember exactly when it happens, but yeah, I waited for the sale and picked up the Kontakt cross-grade for $125. The included libraries are just okay, imo, and I've been gradually replacing them with third-party libraries as I need them.

[lolilol1975]

My personal answer is, no, Kontakt on its own is definitely not worth the asking price.
But it's necessary for the universe of great sample libraries that require it.
THEN, it's worth it.
The cheapest way to get it is to download the free Sennheiser Drummic'a (unfortunately, the site is in German, no translation), and then buy the crossgrade at NI website.

[Romantique Tp]

Yeah, the stock Kontakt content is for the most part underwhelming. I would only get Kontakt if you're actually planning to buy a library that doesn't support Kontakt Player.

For 250 bucks you could get Halion Sonic 2 which has a better collection of bread and butter sounds out of the box IMO. If that's what you're looking for I would buy HS2 instead.

[OreoSplitter]

I've been wondering the same thing. I don't want to pay 400 dollars for 43 gigs of sounds that no one really uses. I look at youtube videos and almost everyone is using 3rd party vs factory. I found this thread questioning if those sounds alone are worth 400 dollars because I am not fond of paying 400 just to get past the gate keeper. Wish they had a cheaper full version minus the sounds.

[K-Bee]

I like Kontakt a lot but I got it alongside the rest of K10 ultimate which ultimately makes kontakt cheaper. The factory library has some good patches but a lot of filler that won't be used much by me, if at all. The rest of the NI libraries varies from excellent and very useful to esoteric or even pointless. Add to that the wealth of third party libraries and a long line of freebies. It's an essential piece of software for me because of all the libraries you can get. But obviously you'll have add a lot of money to the $250 in order to get those.

[dzilizzi]

I also bought Kontakt as part of Komplete 9 ultimate. The factory library is quite usable, depending on what kind of music you make. The big thing about Kontakt are all the free/low cost libraries you can get that run on it that won't run on the player. Some of them are amazing. I also found that a lot of the better libraries require the full version of Kontakt. I use it in pretty much every mix. Though not usually the same instruments.

But I would wait until they have a sale.

[OreoSplitter]

guess i already posted in this thread.